I've been posting about the Legend of Richy Vegas these past several posts.  One of the misconceptions that people commonly have about people who think along these lines concerns the notion that the afflicted party must debunk or disprove these grandiose notions in order to move on and resume their life.  What happens instead, in my case at least, is that everyday routine takes over and these more grandiose preoccupations, such as the Legend of Richy Vegas, take a back seat to the more mundane aspects of my life.  It's as if the grandiose thoughts and ideas, and the "recovered memories" that go along with them, make up a radioactive substance that loses its charge with the passage of  time and the continued importance of attending to the stuff of ordinary existence.  

I started having this dilemma back in 1995.  The onset of relative mental and emotional stability that came with the introduction of medications that worked, and that I could tolerate, also brought on a tendency to obsess on what all I experienced when I was sick for so long.  I used to pick upcoming dates as the day when I would hope that I would have answers to all of that, and that the upcoming date would deliver me from my luckless, loveless, boring everyday existence and propel me into dizzying heights of fame, fortune, and acceptance.  From time to time I still can find myself doing this obsession on an upcoming date, but I've built up my real life in ways that give me genuine happiness and fulfillment, and that helps.

Quitting the cigarettes, and drugs, and alcohol, and the uptick in more constructive activities, have helped with this waiting around to become world famous dilemma.  The only real changes to my day to day existence, other than circumstances such as the medicines I take, my age, friends and family issues, and employment, have been these lifestyle changes.  So, I may not have become an a-list celebrity because of the Legend of Richy Vegas, and that may never happen, but I have a day to day existence that I find more sustainable.  Out went the bad habits, and instead I work on music and art on an almost daily basis.

Another change I've made concerns the way I've pretty much stopped pursuing unavailable women.  I really try to identify the women in my world in terms of whether I think they have any potential for further involvement with me on a social level.  For the most part, I find myself letting go of any notions of any of that.  From time to time I try to talk to women whom I think may have potential, usually when I'm out in the clubs with friends, but so far no luck.

Unlike a radioactive substance, however, these grandiose notions can take on a new life, i.e. become recharged, like a battery, and I find myself having to deal with them all over again.  I guess that happened in the Summer of 2016, and continued on to the Invisible Woman in 2017.  I really glad that the real person whom this chimera, look it up, this chimera of the Invisible Woman came from might not even know that I exist.  I don't mention her name on this web site, and my posts on her social media accounts are few in number and pretty innocuous.  At the end of the day, I don't really care whether the Invisible Woman had any basis in reality, but instead I care more that the artifacts of my struggles; the posts to her social media accounts, these blog posts, and the songs about Fuckface and whatnot, may not even come back to bite me in the ass one day.

In last week's post I talked about how I thought that maybe people in my world were finding out about the glorious Legend of Richy Vegas.   Now, it might just be in my head, and it's an awfully egocentric assumption to make, but it seems as if some of these young women at these food service places I go to all of a sudden are never there when I go there.  I mean, it seems as if they disappeared after I posted that last week's post about the Legend.

I thought about this today, and I started to get all hurt by that prospect.  How dare they to think that I would try to use the Legend of Richy Vegas to my advantage!  Why... I would never....um...okay, I would totally try to play the Legend of Richy Vegas angle with any of these young women if they actually knew anything about it.  

It's people like that Bikram Yoga guy and those priests and youth ministers that try to go around convincing the world that they are above such callings of the flesh.  The Bikram Yoga guy got in trouble for sexually assaulting women as he tried to play himself off as a holy man who had transcended such base longings through his righteously superior hot yoga.  And we've all heard about the trouble the Catholic Church faces world wide.  I understand that a lot of these offending men become priests in the first place because they hope that such a solemn vow will remove these kinds of worldly temptations from their minds and bodies, but, no such luck.

So, I guess the women in my world who are avoiding me for this kind of reason are right to do so.  I mean, I don't know this for a fact, I'm just running this notion up the flagpole, which I do a lot of on this blog.  I guess that I will have to go to other businesses and find other girlfriends now.

I should finish the inks on issue number 16 of Richy Vegas comics by the 21st or 22nd of next month.  That would make for a four month turn around for this issue.  That does not include the time I spent writing and laying out the text in pencil on the paper plates.

I wonder if the Legend of Richy Vegas is catching up with me again.  When I returned home from graduate school in 1991, I would see people react to my presence in a weird way.  It would depend on the person.  There was this little punk rock guy named Mark who would look at me with a big smile and wide eyes when I went to G/M Steakhouse and he worked that night.  He really stood out.  It only began to make sense why he looked at me that way when I started breaking down a full year later during the Summer of 1992.  Mark had long since gone by then.  Where to, I don't know.

My medication works very well now.  That's an advantage I have now that I didn't have then.  During the Summer of 2016 I had a vision of another glorious chapter of the Legend of Richy Vegas.  I was not psychotic, because the medication had that under control.  I could drive a car, for example, or do anything else, really, and groove to "recovered memories" of this latest addition to the Legend of Richy Vegas.

In the Spring of 2016, I received that CD of the Invisible Woman's latest record along with a half pound of coffee beans.  Then, that Summer I had that vision, and when my Badfinger CD came up missing a couple of days before New Year's Eve of that year, I connected the Invisible Woman to this vision, and figured that she knew about this latest chapter.

Anyway, once again, people in my world will sometimes look at me in a way that echoes the way that punk rocker Mark would look at me back in 1991.  For years it was as if I wandered some desert aimlessly, particularly after my problems in 1995.  I finally had a medication that took care of my symptoms, and I could tolerate the side effects okay, but I found myself grasping at straws as far as the Legend of Richy Vegas was concerned.  Now, it feels like some kind of homecoming.  If this thing in the world progresses in any way, the shit might really start to hit the fan in the foreseeable future.  It's not anything I'm dreading, it just that I might be due for a big change.

I posted last Summer about women going adversarial on me.  I gave three examples where I believed that to be the case.  The longest post brought up a time where I patronized a diner, and one of the waitresses had an issue with a t-shirt I would wear, among other issues she had with me.  Briefly, she didn't come out and say she didn't like my shirt, I just had to guess based on some cues she gave.

I decided to stop wearing the shirt in there, and also, to not call attention to that.  It took her over two years to figure out that I'd stopped wearing that shirt, and in the meantime she and other employees decided that there was some kind of running feud with me, and they treated me accordingly.  

She seemed happy about my decision to stop wearing that t-shirt, and I gathered that she decided that she no longer had a problem with me.  The trouble is, I've decided that I still have a problem with her.  I took her newfound niceness as an effort to sweep all of her nastiness under the rug.  I went along with it for a couple of years.  I didn't see her much.

Here's the thing, in last week's posts I talked about having one of two tough options with women who didn't like me and tried to shit on me: either have them behave in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and succeeded, or have them behave in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and failed.  It's a tricky proposition to learn how to prevent these women from shitting on me in the first place, and often times they don't like me much for winning.

And so it was with this waitress over the two-plus years she tried to shit on me and failed, over, and over, and over again.  She didn't like me much at all, until the revelation about how much of a sweetheart I was for not wearing the shirt.  That's all great, but I was once again faced with two tough choices:  Do I let her sweep all of those bad times she instigated under the rug, or do I speak up and say something.

I don't have much experience with speaking up and saying something, somehow or some way.  I did so on this blog, and then last week I went into where she worked just to take everyone's temperature.  She didn't want to engage with me, and others waited on me as she went about her business.

That's fine.  It's a tough choice I have to make.  I have no idea who reads this blog.  Her frostiness may have stemmed, instead, from how I  rebuffed my former neighbor.  That was the gal who had kept me at arm's length the entire time she'd lived next door to me, only to show a newfound friendliness towards me when I ran into her last December at Vulcan Video.  I had no idea where this friendliness was coming from.  I thought it might have been some kind of a trick, so I didn't ask her out or anything.  I only put it together months later that my former neighbor roomed with this waitress' sister while they lived next door to me for a time.  

Anyway, it's a tough choice.  Do I speak up somehow about my resentment about how she and some of the other employees treated me, or do I just let her get away with murder?  The problem with the latter choice, which I've made with other women in other circumstances, is that the shit can really hit the fan that way; an overture to sex that the girl reads as a rape attempt in my truck one night, as an example of the first time this happened, or a crude sexual proposition in a car one night, as another example, or depicting the transgressors as victims of the Whitman massacre in one of my comic books, as yet another example.

Sooo, I"ve learned the hard way that sweeping this shit under the rug and offering up my forgiveness too freely can have bad consequences, so I'm not going to do that again.  Not this time, at least.  If I go into this person's place of employment, and she continues with her frosty reception, that's fine.  I guess the civil rights protest I've talked about regarding her and others will continue.  I will be as polite as a customer in her place of work has to be towards her, other employees, and customers.  If just leaving her alone is as polite as I can be towards her under these circumstances, so be it.  At least I'm calling the shots more with this course of action than with the other course of action.   

In the Fall of 1986, I took a class in Pseudoscience offered by the Physics department at UT-Austin.  The class surveyed everything from UFO's, astrology, and Bigfoot, to alternative medicine and all of that.  The instructor tried to teach methods of critical thinking  about subjects no matter what the source.

At the beginning of the semester I'd had a psychotic episode that capped a fixation on a young woman I'd had over the previous Summer. I came across as pretty freaked out at the time, I guess, and it surely must have shown to the people in that class and elsewhere. One day in this class I sat there listening to the instructor lecture.  Out of the corner of my eye I sort of noticed an attractive female student walk in late and sit on my row a couple of chairs down on my right.  I continued to pay attention to the lecture. 

This female student cleared her throat at some point and rattled some bracelets she wore.  I looked over at her and noticed that she was dressed up to the nines in a sexy blouse and skirt ensemble and that her hair and makeup was done up as if she was on a date or something.

I took this to mean that she was looking for attention, but I didn't really take her seriously.  I looked over at her once or twice, but I also made a show of looking at a pretty Latina girl in the first row in front of me who had presented her profile for mine and others' approval, maybe.  The classroom featured raised, theater style seating, so the rows of chairs rose up from the floor where the teacher lectured, and the whole scene that played out with me and these two young women made for a bit of a spectacle that everyone behind us, plus the teacher in front, could see. 

In the days that followed, I figured that the girl who had got all dolled up must have been impressed by how cool I was about her looking so good, apparently for my benefit.  A couple of classes later I sat in a chair at the beginning of the class, hoping that I would have good things come to me.  This young women who'd got all dressed up walked in with another female student.  One of them said something like, "You can tell he's not a virgin, but he's a total dork."  Both of these women adopted a loud, snotty, pissed off tone of voice in their exchange, which went on for some length.  The professor, who stood at a podium arranging lecture notes, looked up at me and smiled as if to say, "Ha!"

Sooo my point is, I've had to make intelligent decisions about women in my world, and a lot of them don't like it much.  I frequently call out a lot of these women in these posts.  I might identify them as waitresses or baristas of businesses I patronize, but I don't name their names, or say the names of the businesses where they work. The only way I describe them, typically, is to say that they are young and attractive.

If it's a choice between women like this behaving in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and succeeded, or behaving in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and failed, what choice does my audience think I should make?  In a couple of posts I've written about how I viewed my defiant patronage of a particular restaurant as a one-man civil rights protest.  I guess that I will expand this protest to other businesses as well.  I will repeat what I said in those posts: as long as I am courteous to the employees and customers of these businesses, and am dressed appropriately, bathed etc., I have the right to patronize these businesses and not be fucked with or otherwise discriminated against.

If anyone gets the feeling that I'm going into their place of employment looking for a romantic love arrangement with themselves or any other employees, I will try to put a sock on all of that.  I think I will extend this protest to the night clubs and other places I may go.