Regular readers of this blog will recognize the pseudonym Billy Billiams from earlier posts.  The first mention was from the post "Movies" from earlier this year, April I think.  Billy Billiams was a central figure in my massive breakdown in 1992.  Go to my MySpace link and check out "Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin, parts 1 and 2," for music that talks about him.

I looked Billy Billiams up on a site called truthfinder.com and found out that he's still alive.  This kind of blew me away.  I thought his heroin use might have caught up with him soon after the climax of the events of "Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin, part1." He lives in a small town out there somewhere, and it doesn't seem as if he could keep doing the kind of stuff he was up to back in the day in a place where everyone knows everyone's business.

When I was sick in the first several months of 1995, I had a series of hallucinations that centered around Suckmeat Muldoon's wedding reception in 1990.  I told Suckmeat in this hallucination to open up two roads to Billy so that he would have a choice between life and death.  I said that way everyone could do what they do with utter force and conviction, which in this case, was setting Billy up for my Yojimbo move when I made things right with Jenna.

Maybe he's real clever, though.  Maybe he does his thing after breaking up with his girlfriends by going to Las Vegas, where everything that happens there, stays there, apparently.

I looked up Master Dave as well.  He lives in a big metropolitan area.  I thought about sending him a copy of the Richy Vegas songs on my album, "Man's Inhumanity to Me," along with a copy of Richy Vegas Comics #12, which is at the printer now.  Then I thought that I'd better just let sleeping dogs lie.  I draw enough heat as it is.

So, Billy Billiams is still alive, which makes me happy somehow, and I'm back to Plan B.  Now go fuck yourselves.   

The issue of Richy Vegas Comics that I'd finished at the beginning of this month, issue number 12, is all laid up and ready for the printer.  I started issue number 13 a month early, and I've been dividing my time between the two books.  I'm still putting a six months deadline on the new book, even though I might actually finish much earlier.  I didn't have any pain-in-the-ass women distracting me for most of the last issue, and hopefully I won't have any for this one either.

I've decided to emphasize sales over productivity, though.  To that end, I went out to Red River last Friday and Saturday night.  As I handed out flyers last Saturday, I started feeling as if I was getting quite comfortable doing this stuff.  I have only been going out there for no more than fifteen minutes at a time, but if that's really the case, I could see going out there more often and spending more time out there when I do.

I'm trying to practice more on my music too.  I have no timetable as to when i will finally go out and try to play open mikes and what not.  I figure that if I get to where I practice both more frequently and for longer periods of time each practice, I will know better when I am ready to start playing out.  The whole object of playing out was to give me an opportunity to hustle comic books.  Again, sales over productivity.

I had to euthanize Buster last Thursday.  He kept having seizures that would appear a week or two after increasing his medication.  The doctor said that this indicated that his brain tumor was progressing.  He was up and walking and in good spirits when I made the decision, so that was hard.

I've mentioned that I inadvertently trained Buster to be my emotional support dog.  When he was a puppy, whenever I would exclaim, "Goddammit!," which I do a lot, whenever I couldn't find my glasses or for any other reason, and he was nearby, I'd say affectionately, "No, not you, Buster!" and I would pet him.  It got to the point that whenever I would say, "Goddammit," he would come up and nuzzle me, because he would associate that with getting petted.  As he got older, he would just kind of come near, but I would pet him just the same.

I found Buster across the street from my old house.  He was about ten or twelve weeks old.  I figure that someone was too cheap to pay the shelter to take him in, so they saw that I had a big back yard with a dog, and they abandoned him out front.  He looked well fed and not as if he'd been homeless for any length of time.  I took him to the shelter for "processing" and put out an ad on Craigslist if anyone wanted to claim him, no takers.  When I picked him up from the shelter, the tech had named him, "Mister Waggy Tail."  He was happy to see me again.  He lived to nine years.

I still have thoughts cross my mind that I have to feed him or walk him when I get home.  The stuff the vet gave me said not to get another dog right away.  I still have to deal with Buster's ghost, I guess.  I can sleep better, because my sleep is not so regimented around giving him his medicine.

I'm coming along on the new book really well, as usual.  Again, my problem is not productivity, but lack of sales.  I'm trying to play more songs when I practice, so that I can get ready to start playing live.  I would like to see if I can get myself down to Red River and hand out flyers later this week. 

I just filled out eighty note cards, each card representing a page, of my latest book.  I have set a six month deadline for the completion of this one.  I do a pretty good job of recalling stuff that happened so long ago.  The next series of books, "The Legend of Richy Vegas," has a lot of material that I have already documented in two manuscripts.  This series, "The Consequences of Bringing LIght," has a lot of stuff that I would have just as soon forgotten about, so I pretty much had to put all of it together after all these years.

I'm in no hurry to lay up issue #12.  Productivity is not my problem.  My problem is lack of sales.  All a big rush to get issue #12 laid up and to the printer amounts to is that I will have more boxes of books cluttering up my house that much sooner.  What's the point?

Issue number thirteen covers the years that I went to School of Visual Arts in New York city.  I first recap a lot of stuff that leads up to my matriculation, and a lot of that has to do with Billy Billiams.  I first talk about Billy Billiams in the blog post "Movies" from April of this year.  In issue number thirteen I retell the occasions that I visit Austin on Winter Break and all the goings on with him.