I will try to stay on one aspect of this topic in this post.  If anyone who has read the previous post finds themselves wondering, "Why would any man want to be a nice guy?" Well, I will go into some major reasons why I chose that path in my earlier days, and why I still make no effort to disavow whatever kinder aspects of my nature towards women that remain.  

I read a little piece in one of the major newspapers I subscribe to, maybe the Washington Post, that told of a psychological survey some researchers undertook not too long ago.  It had to do with young men in their formative college age years, whether they went to college or not, and their beliefs about how the deal worked with women.  This survey found that about 1 in 5 or so of men of this age had the biggest mouths about their exploits with women.  These loudmouths would go on at length about how shabbily they treated their girlfriends or whomever, and would go on at length about their deviant sexual exploits and so on, to the point where the "nicer" types thought that this was how the majority of successful men their age related to women.

As someone who had to listen to some of these asshole types run their mouths at length during those years, that can be a really soul-killing experience.  This one close friend of mine, like that, kind of served as a negative role model for me.  I was willing to do anything to forge an identity that did not involve treating potential girlfriends of mine as shabbily as he regularly boasted about concerning women I considered friends, or women I at least liked and had some attraction to myself.

This effort to forge a separate identity from such a type led me to make some horrendously bad decisions that involved just picking some women who flirted with me a little for my ever-lasting-true-love love interests and going for it full throttle.  This kind of thing could scare the bejesus out of those around me, and lead me to some really bad psychotic episodes.  I guess it was in my nature to be that way in the first place, but good lord, listening to just one of these guys just run his goddam mouth at length along those above-mentioned lines had the opposite effect on me than what he must have intended with this "advice."

I've come to think of a lot of the women I obsessed on in those days as having a lot in common with the men I had to put up with in regards to the relentless boasting these men did.  The women, like their male counterparts, tended to look really good, but the conquest they attempted and often succeeded in visiting on me was more a breaking of the spirit that did not involve a sexual component.  To let me have sex with them would mean that I "won," I guess.  Jenna was notable in that she seemed to make it clear that getting with her involved jumping through some kind of hoops, such as her male counterpart overtly initiating the sex deal by making a big move.  So with Jenna, there wasn't a subtly escalating back and forth that I was more comfortable with in my better sexual encounters. 

But Jenna had the quality of being emotionally unavailable.  I remember talking to her the night she had a little Thanksgiving dinner with my male roommate, whom she considered a platonic friend.  I went to bed that night thinking that I had a good shot at making things work with Jenna down the line someday soon.  The next Saturday, I ran into her at a friend's party, and she'd met some guy at his party before I had arrived that she wanted to talk to at length in front of me and flirt with, exchange phone numbers with etc. etc.  Of course, it was her RIGHT to do such things, but she really didn't have any concern at the time about turning me off in any way with any of that.  Emotionally unavailable, yeah.

My last hurrah with Jenna involved an effort on my part to make things right with her after things had totally gone to shit with her the following Summer.  After my encounter with Gil at that party, it seemed like the right thing to do.  After I made things right with Jenna, after I went out of my way to visit her at her movie theater job and let her know that she could still call me if she had a mind to, after I left, and went home, and worked all night at the factory, and didn't sleep, and figured out the next evening that she was not still a virgin, that she was not going to call me, and that the darkness would soon descend on me in the form of yet another psychotic episode, I figured that one Billy Billiams might have been exerting his own kind of pressure on Jenna at the time, and that my "Nice Guy" gesture towards her in that movie theater might have made it clearer to Jenna as to whom represented the bigger threat to her between myself and Billy Billiams.  So, I was a "Nice Guy" like "Yojimbo", the great Toshiro Mifune, at the end of Sanjuro.  Or, maybe more accurately still, a "Nice Guy" like Charles Bronson at the end of Once Upon a Time in the West.   I can live with that.  

I've not out and out broached the subject of Nice Guys vs. Assholes.  The fact that I have made no attempt to harp on the apparent paradox of how Assholes get the women while Nice Guys get the shaft may be a reason why this blog gets the readership it does.  

There's several reasons why I haven't bothered to directly go into this cultural touchstone of a topic.  The first reason I can think of has to do with the reality of my relationships with my fellow men.  I learned a long time ago that a lot of men who have enjoyed much more success with women than I have, whether they achieved that success by playing the jerk to women or not, really do tend to take quite a liking to me as one of their fellow dudes.  I get a lot of bro love.  What am I to do?  Tell these guys to go jump in the lake?  So, I tend not to view these types as my competition.  That's kind of hard, because I have been in many situations where the women around us seem to always take a liking to these other guys over me, but on the other hand, I consider myself a friend to these same guys, so I try to have a bit of generous spirit about the whole thing, I guess.

Another big reason why I haven't gone into the Nice Guys vs. Assholes paradox is that I really try to look past the surface of the dilemma and figure out the appeal of a lot of jerky guys to women, and why guys who consider themselves some kind of martyr don't come out well.  The guys who do well with women, I've noticed, will pay attention to their personal appearance and hygiene, they might exercise on a regular basis, they might pay attention to their diet, their wardrobe, etc.  It's true that a lot of them are just really good looking to start with, so right there, a guy can be nice, or a jerk, or whatever, but if he looks really good, that smooths a lot of things over.

I remember a dearly departed friend of mine, on the other hand, who would say things along the lines of, "They are just going to have to love me the way I am."  I mean, it's okay to love oneself "the way one is", whatever that means, but what comes across to women from men who make such statements is a defiant, entitled attitude that basically tells them that the man who says such things is not willing to meet women even halfway.  A lot of womanizers can have this scary chameleon-like quality, where they can just instinctively know how to be whatever it is the woman they are trying to conquer needs them to be.  This kind of thing is extreme, but men who want to just be their "true selves" all the time might do well to steal a few pages from these more "successful" types and make the more palatable elements of the womanizer's game their own.

As far as personalities go, I think a lot of women will see the Asshole as being exciting to be around vs. the guy who's just trying to find that one special girl to settle down with blah, blah, blah... I think maybe the Nice Guys are looking for that special girl to take them out of their unexciting, humdrum, often depressing life as a man alone.  While the asshole type is the SOLUTION for girls looking for a man to take them out of their unexciting, humdrum, often depressing life as a woman alone.  See what I mean?  It's the PROVIDORS of stimulation that get the action.

Which brings me to another point.  I should be the last man on Earth to judge any woman for going for the asshole type, when I have, time and time again, gone for the asshole type of woman myself.  Yeah, these types typically look really good, they have an excitement about them, and they get the pick of the fucking litter as a result, ANNND they take advantage of that fact.

Which brings me to another point.  I don't really think I can attribute my overall lack of success with women as a factor of my being too nice a guy.  I think I have been seen as a guy with a mental illness who tends to obsess romantically on individual women. I think that women would choose just about any other type, whether they are Nice Guys, Assholes, or whatever, over a guy whom they worry might stalk them or otherwise go dark in that way.  So I think I've been laboring under the onus of being seen as a bad guy type for good deal of my adult life without realizing that was what I was having to live down.

I don't know how much further I want to go on with this topic.  I'm pretty happy these days.  I don't have a job that's too stressful or demanding, I respond well to my psych med ( I cannot emphasize how important to my well-being that is), I've made a lot of lifestyle changes I'm happy with (quitting smoking, quitting drinking, quitting drugs, refraining from the pursuit of unavailable women), I'm making art and music that I'm happy with, and, as a result, the rest of me has caught up with the notion that I realized many years ago that making too big a deal out of romantic love has, by itself, been a huge source of unhappiness for me in the past.  As far as the tendency to obsess on individual women goes, I've felt more free of that tendency for a longer period of time than I can ever remember in my adult life.  I think putting romantic love in its place, plus all the changes, has allowed me to transfer my obsessive nature to my art and music over any individual women in my world.  

Another factor for the change in my obsessive nature has to do with, I think, the three big trials I had with women since 2014.  First, there was that virgin girl at that business I patronize (I mentioned here in my last post), then there was her equally beguiling, infuriating friend, then there was the Invisible Woman.  Three women together are a big theme in world mythology for a reason, I guess.  There's the Three Furies, there's Faith, Hope, and Charity, there's the three witches from Macbeth, there's the three fairy god-sluts from those ZZ Top videos in the eighties, I can go on and on about three women.  

Maybe the guy who sees himself as a Nice Guy who gets dicked over by women would do well to not take the whole love game so seriously.  To the extent that I've tried to steal some pages from the book of men that many might consider to be assholes, I don't think doing so has transformed me into the kind of person I don't like.  My tendency to take the love game too seriously manifested itself most prominently in the way I perceived "opportunities" with women as if they were precious individual raindrops during a hundred year drought, and It was as if I ran around willy-nilly with both hands cupped trying to catch each drop as it fell from the sky.

I've often talked about my impressions of interactions with various young women in my world that may strike many as paranoid and unhinged.  Regardless, I made  the decisions I made, none of which got me banned from any businesses, and, as far as I know, I haven't gotten myself into any other kinds of trouble. 

I've talked about that virgin girl from 2014/15 and how I think I made the right decision about her.   I just decided to slow things down, take my time, and accept the possibility that going on even one date with this person might not be in the cards at all.  I took me about four and a half months from the time she fired a shot across my bow for me to reach the point where we both knew that I would not pursue her romantically.

I was in the business where she worked one day in January.  By that time I figured that her game consisted of trying to get me to ask her on a date, or ask her for contact information or whatever, in front of God and everyone at this business where she worked.  My fifty year old ass asking this twenty-one year old for that kind of thing would have come off as awkwardly as if I'd tried to punch my way through a brick wall with my naked fist, and she totally knew that, and she would have reacted accordingly.

So this one day in January at this business, I just give her a look when I see her, and the astute, intelligent young woman that she is, she soon turns to her manager and loudly, gleefully proclaims, "YOU LIED!  YOU LIED!"  Yep, she knew she'd been busted.  About a month and a half to two months later, this virgin girl showed visible signs of pregnancy.

If someone at a business like this, say, another young woman, were to take more of a genuine interest in me, what should I do?  I think it would be okay to just slow things down, take my time, and accept the possibility that I might not even go on one date with such a person.  The logistics of reaching out to a much younger employee at one of these businesses has never been a winning formula for me.  I could see just letting someone who had a real interest in me- to some extent an interest- I could see letting such a person just slip through my fingers.

I've had to work very hard at ridding myself of the notion that I always needed a love interest in my life.  Furthermore, it wasn't just a matter of me myself just letting go of such a notion and that was that.  There have been genuine real world temptations from very attractive young women who, in my estimation, did not have my best interests at heart.  The example of that virgin girl is only one of several.

Perhaps it was good that I had these tests of my resolve, because I find myself in a place where I have little or no interest in taking on a love interest, no matter where this or that young woman is really coming from.  I've said it many times: my main criticism of my "turn my back on love" experiment from many years ago resides in the idea that I didn't take it far enough.  If I find myself older, grayer, and even more alone than I do now as a consequence of taking that experiment too far, maybe some after me will care enough about what I tried to do and hold it up as an example of what not to do.

I have my gig at Kick Butt Coffee on Saturday, September 1st at 9 PM.  I will use my Magical Mexican Telecaster.  I will ask my teacher today if the strings need replacing.  The pickup on the Mystical Martin is giving me problems, thus the decision to go with the Telecaster.

A couple of years ago I posted about how I tried to set up a date with a restaurant employee of a place where I would eat.  She stood me up, I think because I told her I didn't drink when she initially brought up the idea of us getting together at her favorite hangout.  

In that post I talked about how my usual method of operating would find me going into her restaurant a couple of days later and trying to come off as some great guy who can handle the rejection and still be a great guy about it.  I said in that post that I didn't want to do that this time.  I went in to her place of employment a couple of WEEKS later, and yeah, it was no big deal, but I didn't try to make a federal case out of what I great guy I was.

I thought about that again today, and why, specifically, I didn't want to do that kind of thing anymore.  That is, try to come off as a great guy about rejection.  The reason is, because I would then try to get with the girl by asking her out again or whatever, and this could just morph into some vicious cycle of entreaties on my part and rejections on her part.  In the endless varieties a ways that I can get obsessive about women, this represents a big one.

I don't really try to come off like a dick about rejection in an effort to change things up, mind you.  If it really is not a big deal to have one rejection from someone, then I could, theoretically, just leave it all at that one rejection and move on and not bother this person with any of that anymore.

My new CD, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, came back from Affordable Sound last Saturday.  I'm really proud of it.  I've been mailing copies out to friends, and driving around town giving copies out to other friends.  The music page of this website has multiple links to my bandcamp.com page.  People can listen to any of my stuff up to three plays each before they have to buy anything off of bandcamp.com.

I'm having a CD release at my gig on Saturday, Sept. 1st, at 9 PM at Kick Butt Coffee on Airport.  I will give away free copies of Sgt. Pepper's, and I will have copies of my other CD's and my comic books for sale for $5 each.  I will be the acoustic act before all the rockin' bands, which will include All Monsters Attack and Suckling, do their thing.

Issue number 15 of Richy Vegas Comics came back from the printer late this past July.  I've started the finished inks for issue number 16 today.  I hope to finish this crucial stage by the end of October.  It would be alright if it took a week or two longer than that, though.  I hope to have a four month turnaround between this issue and the next issue, so even if production on this one bleeds into November, I think that I can start the pencil illustration on issue number 17 while I'm finishing the final inks, cover, and book layup on issue number 16. 

I've got another book of songs that I want to memorize, rehearse, and perform live for my next record.  The next record will be titled, I Make Country Music Records, Sir.  I will take my time on this one, I hope.  I will not start on it any earlier that the beginning of next Summer, and that may come too soon for this project, so I might not start on it until next Fall or later.



  

I just rewatched the beginning of the George Jones and Tammy Wynette episodes on Mike Judge's Tales From the Tour Bus.  Tammy idolized George Jones from her humble beginnings in Mississippi while married to a man who did not encourage her ambitions as a country singer.  She left her husband in Mississippi, took their three kids to Nashville, and quickly married a songwriter and performer who pitched songs to Jones.   Tammy met George while George was bivouacked at a cheap motel with two women.  

Tammy and her husband had gone to the motel to pitch songs to George.  The scene on the show has Tammy standing in the doorway while George sits up in bed with the two women.  The women narrating the story say that Jones completely ignored Tammy during this first meeting, and that Tammy regarded this indifference by George Jones to her as a challenge.

Whoa, stop right there.  Recognize any tendencies in Tammy's attitude and behavior to yours truly, Rich?  I think my tendency to gravitate to the best looking young women and fixate on them, particularly when they were somehow unavailable, is how this kind of thing would manifest itself in my own attitudes and behavior towards such women.

Again, as an antidote, I turn back to my time in my youth in my dealings with one Sara.  I decided to drop the ball on that deal one night in the art studios at UT-Austin in the presence of one of Sara's friends.  This whole cat-and-mouse game developed with Sara the previous Spring when I'd decided, for once, not to chase this one to the ends of the Earth and back.

That night in the big painting studio, I saw Eva.  I had not see Sara for a couple of months, and I was pretty ticked off that she had not shown herself in that time.  So, as I started to work on my art, Eva talked to a girlfriend a little.  The girlfriend left, and Eva started coughing in a way that seemed to indicate a dramatic purpose to her coughing.  

Mind you, she didn't say, "Oh hi, Richard.  Say, my friend Sara likes you, would you like to meet her sometime soon?"  Eva just started coughing in sort of a stagey manner.  I responded by slapping the heels of my palms together, which made a dull thudding sound, as if to mimic the act of beating one's meat.

I was pretty pissed off, and I put my stuff away and walked out.  That night sealed my decision to cut Sara loose.  For once, I did not accept the implicit challenge of trying to win a difficult, possibly unavailable woman.  Again, my time with Sara, that is, up until my belief that I'd made a big mistake when I cut her loose, was atypical to the usual courses of action that I would take with such women, and resulted in a markedly different outcome as a result.  In other words, I did not have a nervous breakdown, psychotic episode, call it what one will.  

At that food service business that I've talked about recently, one of the last times I spent in there a few weeks ago really made an impression on me.  An attractive woman who worked there looked at me with, I won't say fear, but with a look that indicated something along the lines of apprehension.  She gave me the impression that she thought of me as an unpredictable, loose cannon.  She gave me the impression that she had some apprehension that I would start something in the way of an inappropriate romantic pursuit of her or someone else there.

That constitutes one big reason why I'm really trying to not patronize that business again.  I'm tired of that kind of shit.   My dealings with Sara and others since have convinced me that I can, should, and will take drastic courses of action to counter these kinds of anxieties and fears that seem to grip so many women who come into contact with me.  I don't regard the notion that I'd do better to try and stick it out and somehow win someone like this woman at this business over as a particularly viable option these days.  I'm just not into accepting that kind of a challenge.

I've talked about this before, but loneliness can be described as a chronic affliction that affects millions of Americans these days, so I will rake over some of those same old coals once more.  After the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States by Al Qaeda, I, along with just about everyone else, felt pretty vulnerable in the aftermath.  I remembered seeing something in the New York Times about how single New Yorkers felt especially vulnerable in the wake of the attacks.

This led me to realize that I employed not-very-constructive means to cope with what seemed like an ever-present loneliness and almost daily spells where I had to spend long periods of time by myself.  My smoking, drinking, and drug use became the go-to means by which I would cope with loneliness and being alone.  My friends all partied pretty hardy, so they were of no help either.

I remember one night in October of 2001, maybe the 21st or 22nd, when this realization hit me, and for once I spent the evening in my apartment doing some cleaning and not using drugs or alcohol. I vowed to at least spend more time by myself in more such constructive ways, and after some days and weeks of this, I became confident enough to try to quit smoking.  I joined a support group and started on the patch and the gum at the same time.

My realization of how my substance abuse tied in with my feelings of loneliness and fear of being alone seemed to trigger such a strong desire to finally quit the smoking that no amount of relapses during the following year deterred me from my ultimate goal.  I finally ditched  the patch in the Summer of 2002 in favor of Zyban, continued to go to Nicotine Anonymous (somebody copyrighted the name Smokers Anonymous to try to make money, and so the free one became Nicotine Anonymous), and achieved my goal of quitting smoking.

The next big realization in turning it around for me came in the early morning hours of December 28th, 2008.  I had a six pack I was working on while I watched a bad movie titled Blood Freak.  A couple of days before Christmas of that year, some people were over at my house.  It was me, two guys and two girls.  One of the guys had a live-in girlfriend back at his house, and the understanding about the other guy and one of the girls seemed to be that these two were trying to close a sex deal.  So they started making out on my couch, I lived in an 850 square foot house, so to kind give them a little room I went to see what was up in my bedroom, where my male friend had gone to lie down because he was so drunk.  

The other girl, whom I had something of an interest in, had gone in my bedroom before I did.  I went in my bedroom, and this other girl lay in bed with her clothes off talking to my fully clothed drunk friend.  Okay, so I was a third fucking wheel in my own fucking house that night.

As I watched the late night showing of Blood Freak the following Friday night/ Saturday morning, I had another epiphany.  The epiphany consisted of the realization that this lifestyle seemed to be working out fine for my drunk friend with the live-in girlfriend at home and the other girlfriend in bed with him at my house, but it really wasn't doing so much for in the relationship with women department.

This realization triggered such a strong desire in me to finally quit drinking and drugs that, for one, after I finished that six pack that night while watching the movie, I've never had a drink of alcohol since, and, though I used some drugs after that, the last time was  when I smoked a little pot in 2012.

The third epiphany came after many years of banging my head against the wall in the massive effort I've been making to improve my relationship with women.  I realized that an experiment I tried in 1988 to "turn my back on love" might not have been such a bad idea after all.  For those newcomers, the post, "i'm not bad," from January 2016 first covers that topic at length.  I write about this experiment many times in subsequent posts, and all of the things that it did for me, and I look at it from any angles in many posts. 

Last night I wondered if I would go through a prolonged period of dark loneliness as a consequence of my latest employment of the "turn my back on love" experiment.  A couple of posts back I wrote about how I've decided that I don't want to patronize a particular food service establishment any more.  After I decided to give that move a try for mainly financial reasons at first, I figured out that I went to this place that employed a lot of attractive young women because being around these young women made me feel as if I played some part in the whole love and dating game.  I decided that maybe my patronization of that business amounted to too much of a psychic crutch, and that I might want to try to make some of the food and beverage items I enjoyed there at home instead.

Anyway, last night I wondered if I had set myself up for a bit of hurt in the loneliness department with this latest move.  I remembered reading a book titled Son of a Gun, by Justin St. Germaine, that was a memoir of his and his mother's life, her troubled relationship with men, and her death at the hands of her fifth husband.  One passage of the book detailed a year when Justin was about fourteen or fifteen when they lived in a shotgun shack in Tombstone, Arizona, and how her mother valiantly tried to live man free.

Justin talked about how he would go out at all hours doing petty juvenile delinquent nonsense, while his mother would stay at home, alone, in that little shack, and just cry for long periods of time.  Justin remembered this as a relatively happy time in his childhood, because there were, at least, no abusive men around.

So I wondered, if by cutting myself off from these women at this business, if I'd set myself up for the kind of failure that Justin's mom ultimately experienced after man-free year had passed and she went back to her usual dysfunctional ways with men.  But, maybe a half-hour later, I realized that I'd been successful in the past with similar moves; with the cigarettes, and the drugs and alcohol, and that, so far, I've not wavered in those commitments.  Those commitments I made have led to the lasting changes that I'd sought for so long, that I had no reason to really believe that my efforts to meaningfully deal with Love Addiction these past several years would end in failure.

The phrase, "Taking the bull by the horns," really presented itself to me as to how effectively the insights that I'd gleaned in those first two big efforts really put me on the path where I am today.  I've talked at length about the war-of-the-sexes skirmishes and pitched battles that I've successfully fought, and the ways that winning at that kind of bullshit lead to insights that no amount of losing back in the '80's and early '90's had ever managed to help me.  Losing at those games never helped me even half as much as beating someone like the Invisible Woman like a gong has helped me.  

Last Wednesday night, I tried to sit up and count how many times I've had to make intelligent decisions about women in my world since, say, 2007, and I came up with forty plus women in various scenarios and instances, both big and small.  Not all the decisions involved adversarial women, but the large majority did, absolutely, involve women who went adversarial on me to a greater or lesser extent.  Why, just today I ran an errand, and if I had been with a friend, I could have pointed to an attractive woman that I saw and said, "Oh look, there's someone who represented themselves as something they weren't to me once upon a time.  Now, was that last year. or the year before?  Oh, I must be getting old, I've lost track."

A couple of posts ago I talked about a movie I'd just seen titled, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot,  A key dramatic element in this biography of John Callahan has him working the ninth of twelve steps as an Alcoholics Anonymous member.  The ninth step is the one where the alcoholic makes amends to those he or she had harmed.  In the movie, we see a list of people on John's notepad, and as he does stuff like return a shirt he stole from a store, reconcile with his adopted parents, and ask the guy for forgiveness whom John let drive his car while drunk, resulting in John's paralysis, we see John cross these names off of his list.

Fresh from that movie, I wanted to work my version of that scene, but just find one person and ask for her forgiveness.  Well, that's kind of cooled.  I don't think it's a bad idea to do something along those lines in regards to this person, it's just that I don't have the guidance and prodding of a AA sponsor to help me along, and I've lost my momentum on this one.  If I see this person around or see anyone I know to be close to her, I wouldn't rule out some attempt of my part to come to a reconciliation for my behaviors towards this person.  I still think it would be a good idea to do this, but I'm in no rush.

The whole gist of my apology would center around what I consider the source of a lot of shit that went down over the years.  That is, the idea I had in my head that I needed a love interest nearly all of the time for years and years.  The shit would not ALWAYS hit the fan because of this idea, but the shit did indeed hit the fan often enough. I also want to emphasize that I wasn't just playing to some nameless void when I did this stuff.  There were real people who made decisions that weren't that great in reaction to my entreaties, but the whole love interest thing on my part seemed to be what got the whole thing rolling.

I guess I can come off as pretty intense.  I wonder if Beethoven had similar problems?  Women considered him pretty horrible, from what I can tell.  My solution for this problem seems to have evolved into just kind of moving along.  Whether that is the right solution or not, it seems a rather definitive solution for any attractive women who have any worries about being the focus of my intensity.  Wow, Beethoven.  Maybe I'll try to write an opera or a symphony about ol' Fuckface.

I've stopped patronizing a food service business that employs a pretty good number of attractive women.  Soon after I quit going there, I thought it might be a good idea to not go back there for quite some time, if at all.  There's the factor of money.  I have a lot of uses for the money I could save by just fixing stuff at home rather than go to food service places for the same items.

I figure that the main reason I would patronize this one establishment has to do with feeling as if I'm a part of the game.  Hanging around those attractive young women might tend to make me feel as if I'm playing some part in the love/dating game, however  small a part that is.

That's the same reason I would go around desperately seeking love interests to hang my mind on.  Needing a love interest and needing to feel as if one plays a part in the game is not a need like food, water, or oxygen.  The word "need" does not really apply to such a desire.  Therefore, I will try my level best, one day at a time, I guess, to refrain from patronizing this particular business or businesses like it.  

​Not one woman who currently works at this business would have to worry that I'm trying to make them over into a love interest if I just stopped going there altogether.  I count about seven or eight young women at this place that could just chill out about that if I stopped going there.  I guess I will know if I'm serious in about a month or a month and a half.

My last post talked about following my Buddha.  That's what this is about.  It's not as if anyone- myself, or these employees at this one business, or anyone else- has done anything that necessitates this move.  I just want to live life a bit differently than how I'm used to living it.  A few posts ago I griped about how nothing ever changes for me.  I griped about how, no matter what the changes I've made, nothing ever changes as far as any real improvement in my relationship with women.  I guess that's debatable, but there always seems to be some kind of significant change I can make; whether it's something such as trying to refrain from staring at woman and young girls, paying attention to my personal hygiene and grooming habits, or just taking a fork in the road that I usually don't take.  The biggest room in the world; room for improvement.  It's not all about losing and maintaining a forty to fifty pound weight loss, which is hard.