I talked to a doctor today about the repetitive motion injury on my left hand.  He gave me a couple of suggestions, and also gave me the okay to resume light-duty art production and guitar playing.  I still have seven more issues of my comic book series, "The Legend of Richy Vegas."  I don't think I'll ever go back to cranking the rest of the books out at the same rate I did the first five.

"The Legend of Richy Vegas" goes into my deal with a young woman I later wrote off as a very distasteful person.  In the years that followed the events of "The Legend of Richy Vegas," she always seemed very glad to see me whenever we would run into each other.  I chalk that up to my total effort to take the high road with her for the entire duration of my dealings with her.  I chalk up my own feelings towards her afterwards as a realization that she felt no obligation to take the high road with me during that time.  Time has passed since those days.  I think she will come off as more sympathetic to readers in the long run than I originally intended.  I might attribute that to a holdover from my days with her back then, with my total effort to take the high road concerning her winning out after all these years.

I  think about Jenna in my dealings with the women in my world nowadays.  I've talked about "Linda," someone from a little before my time with "Jenna," and how Linda may still have issues with me after all these years.  All I can say about that goes back to what I said last Fall, I can offer myself up for a dialogue if anyone wants to engage in one with me, but I have the right to defend myself to the best of my abilities should it come to that.  I've had ZERO takers in engaging me in a direct dialogue about that time so many years ago, and maybe a few times where I've had to show that, yes, I will try to defend myself to the best of my abilities against whomever wants to go there with me.  I will say it again, I am willing to engage in a civil dialogue with anyone, but I don't think I'm much obliged like anyone at this point.

When I fist quit drinking ten years ago, I would talk about the overall topic of obsession and compulsion with various friends.  I would say that if one stops the obsessive behavior, the obsessive thoughts would eventually stop as well.  In the case of things such as cigarette smoking, that's true.  I stopped smoking in late 2002 as a result of a massive, comprehensive, determined campaign that involved first using the nicotine patch, then Zyban, along with a support group I found out about through the American Lung Association.  It's been a long time since I smoked, and no, I don't think about cigarettes all day and night, and it's been many, many years since I did.  Drinking was pretty much the same way.  I can go to clubs to see bands or play open mikes and not constantly think about how I'd like to have a drink.  It took some getting used to for that, but the aggravation of not drinking while in a club or bar passed as well.

When I talked about obsessive thinking back in 2009, for me that meant women.  I talk a lot about young, attractive women here on this blog.  A lot of entries have to do with me talking myself out of approaching or otherwise pursuing this or that much younger woman in my world.  Where is this all going?  Maybe if I refrain from approaching much younger women for social reasons over a long enough period of time, I will not find myself so preoccupied with them as frequently as I do.  I've cut way down on approaching much younger women over the years.  Last year I approached two who were in their early twenties, and one a little older.  This year I approached one younger woman in a club that I talked about here a couple of months ago.

I don't know if I want to stop approaching younger women altogether, but rather stop approaching waitresses, baristas, and whatnot who inhabit my everyday world.  Would that be enough?  Perhaps if I stop that particular practice altogether, and I have really dialed that back these last six years or so, I won't become so preoccupied with these women who inhabit my everyday world.  It might take quit some time and a lot of talking myself into letting such women go on a case by case basis before my tendency to become preoccupied with such women abates to a manageable level.  Maybe that process has started, I don't know. 

That guy who does the pop culture detective videos on youtube comes across all woke as fuck to the point of annoyance, but he does have a point there in a lot of what he says.  In one video titled, "Born Yesterday Sexy," he talks about how movies such as Splash. The Fifth Element, and the new ​Tron that feature emotionally childlike but fully grown up beautiful woman that cater to male fantasies of innocence and inexperience in said beautiful young women.  He says that such fantasies address the male viewer's fear of rejection by presenting women who would have never had other men to compare the male protagonist to.

I often write about attractive young women in my world. Right?  Beginning in earnest around 2009 and ending around 2012/13, I would ask waitresses and baristas out who typically spanned a great difference in age between themselves and me.  I've talked about compiling quite an oh-fer for my trouble.  I think I lost track at about oh-fer 17 or 18.  I decided that this represented a phase from that time that I don't care to get back into.  I think of it as just fine and dandy that I gave it the old college try, but as I just kept on coming up short, I've since considered ways to change things up that might actually work for me.

I believe that if I were to approach a twenty to twenty-two year old waitress or barista or some such nowadays, I could rightly classify such an overture as a fear of rejection. Here's why: If I approached such a type nowadays, and she shot me down as usual, I could just say, "Oh, she's only twenty-one. What does she know?"  Whereas, if I approached a reasonably presentable woman much closer in age to my age, and that older woman shot me down, I might tend to take such a rejection to heart and feel really insecure about it, because I would see her as having been around more and seen more of life and as having a more valid judgement of my actual worth and viability as a partner.  What might make such a rejection sting even more is if we had some things in common such as taste in music, comics or whatever.

Another reason a move towards a much younger woman, particularly one of these women I see on a regular basis, would reveal a fear of rejection on my part stems from the idea I'm too scared to move on.  In other words, much in the same way I would obsessively ask an individual woman out over and over and over again in my twenties, approaching these young waitress and barista types nowadays might just mean that I'm too afraid of experiencing loneliness and being alone in the face of trying to approach some other type of woman in some other type of environment.  So, one might call that a fear of the unknown, or, to put it another way, something about "the devil you know" vs. whatever unknown things lie in wait out there. 

There, I said it.  I often wonder how much of an "audience" I have amongst these very young, attractive women in my world, and I often fantasize about cashing in on such attention.  I don't have any issues with going out with a much younger, adult woman in theory, it's just that I have a problem with the idea of approaching a much younger, adult woman in the actual world I inhabit.  I'm juuust now beginning to introduce myself to some of  the women I've seen at clubs when I go to see friends' bands and whatnot, and no, they aren't twenty-two year old waitresses or baristas.

In a related topic, I'm thinking about patronizing a certain business at a certain time of day again.  Yes, I'm talking about the business where a young, very attractive woman works, still, I guess, but that I decided to kind of cede to her and not go there at her usual hours.  I never felt as If I did anything wrong by her, so there's that.  Also, I think I can go there and not get all hung up on the admiring-her-from-a-distance deal.  If I do find myself getting back into that same old shitty deal, I will just bail again.  It's just that I feel a bit inconvenienced when I think about continuing the current situation indefinitely.

I've been watching youtube videos from something called pop culture detective.  The first one had the title, "Stalking For Love."  I really liked it.  It showed some very popular movies, mostly romantic comedies such as There's Something About Mary, Love Actually, 50 First Dates, The Wedding Crashers, but also others such as Twilight, where male characters behave in ways towards their love interests that would generally not go over well in real life.  Such behaviors include: persisting in romantic pursuit after the woman or girl says no, spying on the love interest, showing up unexpectedly at the love interest's home or place of work, and putting the love interest on the spot in a public setting that the movie portrays as a grand romantic gesture.

I think I've taught myself how to refrain from pursuing women to the ends of the Earth and back pretty well by now.  I've spent enough time learning how to do this, or to not do that, if one prefers.  Why, for many years, I had this one female friend that I'd been with this one time who didn't even know me as the guy who kept calling and calling and calling in a one sided manner.  She's really pretty too.  The reason I know that she didn't think of me as the persistent caller stems from the time I asked her if she thought of me as that, and she said, "Are you someone who calls me a lot?  Ugh, no Rich."

I've talked a lot about this one girl in my world whom I decided to not go to her place of employment during her usual hours.  Well, there also exists in my world someone I put in a Facebook Friend request for in January of 2018.  She never accepted it, and I went on and on here about her bogus flirtations towards me after I put in that friend request.  I interpreted her looks of faux-longing as a defense mechanism that indicated she thought she might have a struggle with me further down the road if she didn't put me in my place first.  I called bullshit on her in this blog, and coincidentally or not, her bogus looks at me stopped.

She started being pretty nice to me after that.  And, you know what, I still haven't chased her to the ends of the Earth and back.  Why, one time she stopped me outside of her place of employment, her leaving and myself going in, I think, and it was friendly on both sides and no big deal.  I viewed the Facebook friend request as a line in the sand, and since she never accepted it, that was that.  I think her friendliness towards me stems from the belief that, no, I have no plans, now or in the foreseeable future, to ask her out at her place of employment, outside her place of employment, or anywhere else.

And another thing, she could give any of the most attractive young women in my world a run for their money as far as how good she looks.  In a town such as Austin, that's saying a lot.  So there's hope that with time and another, different type of persistence, I can impart to at least some of these women that, though I find them attractive, that does not mean that I will chase them to the ends of the Earth and back.