Yesterday I did a spoons track for "Blo-hole Acres."  I thought is sounded pretty good.  I could even rake a couple of times when I wanted to rake.  I had to use the computer's microphone, but it sounded fine.

Now all I have left is the guitar solo.  That is coming along slowly.  It's been frustrating.  I try to not practice too much, because the soreness in my index fingertip indicates that I'm practicing plenty enough.  It will just take some patience.  

The second pass through the book's illustration phase is coming along alright enough.  I had hoped to get a lot done this weekend, but at least I have been diligent.  I am about halfway through the second pass with the pencils.

Well, that's about all for me this week.

All I have to do is record the solo for "Blo-hole Acres."  I might try and add spoons as well.  If the spoons are not up to snuff, I will try to keep at it for tracks on future albums.  I will try to have the solo finished by Labor Day.  I told myself that I could spend all Summer recording Self Portrait of Me, and things are right on schedule for me to finish.  I might have the solo finished by next weekend.  Then I will take it to Cris for mastering.

Things are also right on schedule for the first installment of Richy Vegas Comics; "The Legend of Richy Vegas," as well.  I have completed one pass through the book with pencils.  I am now at the first few pages of the second pass.  The second pass is where the illustrations really take shape.  I hope to have that finished in two and a half weeks.  I should have a new book by December or January.

I will start trying to memorize the songs for my next album, Sgt. Peppper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, soon enough.  I have three full albums of songs that I have to record.  After Sgt. Pepper's..., I have My Girlfriend Is a Hate Song, and I Didn't Know It Was a Gunfight (Until I Drew and Shot You Down).  I'm not even thinking about songwriting now.  Enough material already!  I have no idea how long it will take to document what I already have.  I hope that I will get the whole process down, and that by the fourth record, I can really whip these things out.

The other day I had dinner with family members.  One of my female relatives said, "...take advantage of..." in reference to something, maybe the fact that we were all together for a family photo.  But, let's play my favorite game, and take this phrase out of context and apply it to some personal issue of mine.  Nothing but entertainment on this blog, folks.

Suppose I apply it to my deal with the Invisible Woman.  When last we left that situation, I felt that I had resolved the conflict of a possibly induced fixation on a female A-list celebrity, a very attractive young woman; I felt that I had resolved the dilemma to my complete satisfaction.  For those who feel as if they've walked into the middle of a movie without knowing anything about it, read the very first post from this year (January 1st) and go from there.

Okay, while my foot is in this other world, let's go further.  What if the Invisible Woman were to manifest herself somewhere in my world?  What if she wanted to be friends with me?  Should I forgive her and allow that to happen?  Should I "...take advantage of..." this opportunity in the hope that good things could come my way.

Understand this: I only have my own personal history as a frame of reference to draw on.  If I were to go by my own personal history of when I attempted to forgive women who tried to hurt me very badly, or succeeded in hurting me very badly, in the hopes that good things would come my way if I did so, the answer would be an emphatic "NO!"  

I can cite chapter and verse where things did not turn out well when I tried to do that.  In 1985 "Katy" basically came away with the impression that I had tried to rape her after a date that was an attempt to make up for what I'd perceived to be a lost opportunity with her.  I apologized to her a couple days later and assumed the full responsibility for how things shook out that night, but she remained so freaked out, and I guess that when she saw me later, she assumed my wild-eyed look meant no real remorse (it actually meant that I'd met someone else a few days after Katy and I's date), that I basically had to demonstrate a willingness to physically defend my honor to some male friends of her's in the Fall of 1986.

Then there was Wanda in 1987.  Briefly, she did something very hurtful to me in 1986, then, because of one of my damnable "transcendent moments," she decided to take some kind of interest in me.  I still wonder about the nature of her interest in me to this day, but I do know, for sure, that my crude sexual proposition to her in her car in February 1987 did nothing to resolve my inner conflicts and, for sure, only made matters worse. 

The next transcendent moment came with Tarashula in December 1988.  Tarashula had done something very hurtful to me in the Summer of 1988, however, I was so determined to stay away from Sara (See "I"m not bad" from January 2016 for the main story of Sara), that I made it about Tarashula, even to the extent of blocking out the fact that Tarashula had a serious boyfriend.

The next notable thing that happened after my transcendent moment with Tarashula involved that time I waved an axe around near her house in West Austin.  It was on my Mom's property, and Tarashula's house wasn't even visible to me, it was at least a block away, but I guess that maybe there was a neighborhood watch in effect, and that maybe she found out.  So, what was meant to be gesture that would only have meaning to me became something else altogether.

Which brings us to the Invisible Woman.  Should I try to forgive her if she were to show up in my world, and I thought that was what she wanted?  First, what do we mean by "forgive?"  I think that forgiving such a person in an effort to bring her into my life would not constitute actual forgiveness.  I think that I would forgive her in hopes getting things such as love, sex, companionship, and overall acceptance by one of the Beautiful People, and that is just a formula for disaster.

Forgiveness in the hope of getting such things in return smacks of an unrealistic sense of entitlement on my part.  Perhaps this is a big reason why such seemingly magnanimous gestures by me in the past weren't so magnanimous after all.  I did not forgive women such as Katy and Wanda to the extent that I thought I did, and it turned out that a great deal of anger and resentment lay just beneath my surface of supposed generosity.

Again, the most useful template for how I most successfully dealt with abusive young women remains my experience with Sara, hands down.  From beginning to middle to end, I did it all just right.  I commented to Vernon Hoe several years ago in reference to my dealings with the Virgin Girl, that the only way I could have improved how I treated and dealt with Sara would have been to cut her loose sooner, if given another chance to do so, which I pretty much did with the Virgin Girl.

I think the best thing I could do, if confronted with that kind of "opportunity" from the Invisible Woman, would be to let her know that I did not care to associate with her at all.  I think that I would love her and respect her so much more if I put my foot down and let her know that she will never have the opportunity to behave towards me in the hurtful manner that at least a part of me believes that she attempted; not if I have any thing to say about it, at least.  Realize this: if I actually met this person, and this person were to let me know there was more of meeting her where that came from, that there is no way I could accept that circumstance as coincidence.  I could not help but tie what went down earlier this year with such an encounter, no way I couldn't.  I had doubts about the reality of my doubts about Sara as well, so that wouldn't even constitute a new wrinkle. 

What if she were to try to win me over?  Again, any attempt to win me over from my above stated position would show a definite lack of respect for me and my wishes-if my own experiences in trying to win individual woman over are any indicator.  If her friends are anything like her, I don't want to know them either.  If the Invisible Woman loves and respects me at all, she will heed this post, and just leave me alone.  

Oh well, another dispatch from LaLa Land.  Sue me.

I think the last three love interests that really got under my skin got my A game.  They all had in common the quality of being, pretty much, unavailable.  There never was a chance for me to get with any of those three from day zero to day one.  None the less, I think I negotiated my way through these bad deals in a, dare I say, highly professional manner.  The last unavailable woman deal was the Invisible Woman.  Again, what looked like something that could have gone on forever had a very finite beginning and end.  I credit my coping skills with bringing that whole state of affairs to a satisfactory conclusion.

But, there's a flip side to the unavailable woman deal.  The deal where the love interest appears to represent a very tangible, touchable possibility of working out.  Yes Virginia, that can be a crash-and-burn unavailable woman deal too.  I recall the first time this happened in high school.  I became so caught up in the idea of missing out somehow with someone whom I actually went out on dates with, and actually kissed on the mouth, and, and....  I became just as fixated on her as someone before her who, right off the bat, seemed totally unattainable.

Dig: I handled the Invisible Woman unavailable woman deal like a pro, right?  How so?  By vowing to do as little as possible about it as I could.  By slowing things down and picking my spots.  By saying to myself, the normal course of action for me in these situations is to accommodate this idea of this person in my head and my heart, but to understand also that one day, sooner rather than later most likely, I'm going to send that idea of that person on its way.  And so I did.  As far as my overall relationship with women is concerned, the only decisions I want to make are intelligent decisions.  Intelligent decisions about attractive women and my world usually don't have anything to do with love, sex, girlfriend, and or relationship for or against.  Intelligent decisions about the most desirable women in my world invariably involve just one decision, "When do I cut her loose?  Sooner, later, yesterday?"

I don't see why, if the Invisible Woman can get my A game, which consists of just letting this notion of this person go into the void, why someone whom I am in actual semi-regular contact with can't get the same consideration.  I remember one of these early- twenty-something types at one of these businesses I patronize giving me an I-long-for-you-look, and how when I walked by them the next time I saw them in there, how the expression on their face seemed to betray an effort to brace themselves for the flood of obsessive attention from me that was surely forthcoming, and, nope, not gonna happen.

Why can't I just let someone who seems to represent a genuine possibility go by the wayside as well?  Maybe my destiny is a life of lovelorn longing for those I can't have, and my willingness to lose out on a real possibility is just my way of shooting myself in the foot out of some reactive defiance, but I'm willing to take that chance.

Several years ago when I still did this sort of thing, I asked a waitress at a diner that I patronized on a date.  She said that she was seeing someone, I begged off, thanked her for being nice about it, and that was that, I thought.  I few months later I see her out and about at a coffee shop with another waitress who worked there.  The waitress that I had asked out had quit that restaurant by that time.  

The one I'd asked out was being kind of surly.  That was noteworthy, because in the months before I'd asked her out, she was always really SUPER  friendly with me: you know, "Hi!,"  and attending to me in a really over-the-top, super friendly way.  But, when I saw her at this coffee shop, she didn't appreciate my humor and she kind of talked to me in a snarling kind of way.  Plus, I thought that she might have had something going on with this waitress she was hanging out with at this coffee shop. 

I finish my coffee and say, "See ya," and leave.  I think nothing of it.  Several months later I see this Jekyll/ Hyde waitress on Facebook and put in a friend request.  She never accepted it.

What was up with that?  What could I have possibly done wrong to not get my friend request accepted?  She was just six or seven years younger than me, she was being really nice to me at he restaurant, she was nice enough to me when she turned me down that time I asked her out, and it seemed like a friend request was the thing to do.  What I figured was that she wanted to lower the boom on me when or if I'd tried to glom onto her and that other woman at that coffee shop.  I mean, they were talking about where they were going to go next, and that was when I took my leave.  Did she really think that I would invite myself along?  I'm not like that.

So yeah, I hope that feminism hasn't gotten so excessive that I am not allowed to at least ASK a woman if she single in one of these retail/ food service jobs at these businesses I patronize- that is, of course, only if she's being as SUPER friendly as was the case with this one waitress over a considerable span of time.  

There was this queen-bee-really-attractive waitress at this diner who had a big hard-on to do a shitbird number on me, and when I took this queen bee waitress to school over a period on months, I guess this other waitress decided to get all punk-ass.  I suppose.  

Mostly, I'm surly and standoffish enough these days where this issue does not crop up, but if it does, I will not consider it much of a dilemma to just bust some kind of move- as in just straight up ask about a woman's deal or whatnot.  All that experience asking those women out has to count for something, I guess.  Even if she's twenty-two, she's still an adult, so it's reasonable enough to expect such a one to act like one in such a situation.  Right?