I meant what I said a couple of posts ago about how I was glad to discover that there were no longer any love interests amongst the women in my world.  I attributed this mainly to the fact that I no longer actively look for viable love interests from the pool of attractive women that I see on a regular basis.

Look, when I had so much trouble with the women back in the 1980s and into the 1990s, however cruel a lot of them were to me, they could all pretty much say that I really had the desire to make them over into something that they really didn't want to be.  Now, there were some notable ones who totally represented themselves as something they were not; but, the fact that I tried to put this love interest stuff off on women who really wanted no part of it; that tendency also left me woefully unprepared to deal with those women who actively desired to deceive me over an extended period of time.

I mean, it's one thing to just flirt with me a little here and there, and it was bad enough for me to almost willfully misinterpret such actions as more serious, but man, just try applying that inadequate set of skills to those who really wanted to put one over on the likes of me.  The real thing I learned how to do with the "Turn My Back On Love" experiment was a to develop a whole new set of tools that prepare me for other possibilities that have nothing to do with love, girlfriends, or relationships.

I hope that I don't come across as some woman hater when I go on in this manner.  I truly believe that my ability to better manage the kinds of situations that I used to have so much trouble with in the past makes me like women in general a lot more than I used to.  I hear a lot of stuff about how one should "love yourself," but little in the way of practical advice from these same sources as to how exactly to go about doing that.  I think that one could slog through the posts from me of these last several years and get a very clear step by step idea of how I, for one, go about that. 

Earlier tonight I went to see some industrial music.  The first act I saw consisted of a young man and a young woman billed as Street Rat.  They were real loud, and they didn't play instruments as we know instruments.  I just saw some buttons and pads and maybe a computer keyboard.  The climax to this cacophony had the young woman setting fire to four one dollar bills in front of the little stage.

I traded CDs with her after their brief set.  She was from Miami, and she and her friend from Austin just came up with this one composition for this one show.  I told her that I was too scared to buy music like hers back in the day, and she laughed at that.  

I wanted to see if the Facebook friend who recommended this bill would show up, so I brought my latest CD.  He never showed, so I made good on the trade for the Street Rat CD.  

Today the image of Harvey Pekar throwing his comic books down a bottomless well from one of his stories came to mind.  I worked so hard on this CD, and I'm tired of twisting people's arms to give me feedback.  I contacted a booker with a link to my bandcamp.com page, but if the underwhelming response from the people I've sent the record to is any indicator, than I can probably just write him off as far as getting a gig.  Oh well, I've only got three and a half more full length albums worth of material to document in the next couple of years, so not getting my wing-wang sucked by super models over this one shouldn't bother me too much.  Maybe it'll happen with the next one, or the one after that, or the one after..... 

I've developed a tendinitis issue in my playing hand.  That's my right hand.  My teacher says it's because I grip the pick too hard.  I've decided to switch over to a thumb pick and see how that goes.  So far so good.  The Astros are still in the post season, so I will concentrate on getting the change in strumming down and not do any open mikes until the Astros are out of it.

These past several years, I've had three pain in the ass women to deal with as bogus love interests.  One was that virgin girl, starting in September of 2014 to January 2015, who worked at that one business I talk about, the next was her friend, from May 2015 to August 2015, and again from early to mid-2016, and then there was the Invisible Woman, from the first of this year until last Summer.  All three represented major-shit ordeals that I had to see my way through, each one as bad as the other.  

But, you know what? I look around now, and there are no more love interests out there!  Not one.  I can go around to places in my day to day routine and know that NOT ONE woman in my world can level the accusation about me that I am trying to make them over into a love interest.  That used to be the thing for me to do, and I think that I am right in my assertion that the endless quest for a love interest led to the crash and burn dramas that I've somehow survived without death, serious maiming, or incarceration in a penal institution for the criminally insane or, alternately, a civilian state psychiatric facility.

These past several years, it's all been on these women who vie for this love interest status in my heart, but who seemed to have a much darker agenda that I managed to root out.  As for the Invisible Woman, and whether that was all in my head, all I have to say is that she is well on her way to being the total non-entity in my inner life that the two before her are at this point.  I'm better at smelling a rat.  That's all I have to say.  

I started having lunches at a club for people with mental illnesses last Winter.  Frequently there will be really attractive young social workers and students and interns of various kinds that will have some sort of doings at the place.  Anyway, there was this one very attractive female student who volunteered there one day a week as part of her studies.  She was twenty-seven years old, and she mentioned right off that she had a boyfriend in another large Texas city that she would see every weekend.

At any rate, she seemed to like me in spite of this fact.  Her time to volunteer ended, and I was not at all inclined to pursue some angle, real or imagined, with someone who had a serious boyfriend.  I just derived a bit of satisfaction from the notion that she might possibly have been somewhat attracted to me.

In the two books by Dr. David Burns that I've mentioned, Feeling Good and ​Intimate Connections, he emphasizes that when one discovers that one desirable person has an attraction to the reader, chances are that the reader might want to look around, because there might be others attracted to him or her as well.  It's a mojo thing: once a person gets their mojo workin', it can work its magic juju on more than one person.

That means that if one person has a logistical barrier such as a boyfriend, or a huge age difference as another example, it's not exactly as if some great tragedy is unfolding such as the story of Romeo and Juliet.  A person who is fortunate enough to at least maybe have more than one person with something of an interest in them can just say, "Well I like some of the qualities this person over here has, but some other qualities this person over here has don't make a very good fit, so I'll not really pursue that angle."

For me, that means that there is no one in my world who has any obligation whatsoever to follow through with me.  I understand all about how the realities of an attraction can put too much of a constraint on one person in regards to another, and the notion that love conquers all, while romantic, can just hit a wall.  

I get the sense that certain young women in my environment think I'm conceited.  Now, if I were to choose between having these young women think I was full of myself or that I am some marginalized person who would hurt them out of feelings of alienation or disenfranchisement from the mainstream of society, which would I choose?  I whole heartedly choose the former.  Yes, ladies, I think I am so great and all.

It reminds me of a Zatoichi where some Yakuza go after Ichi for no other reason than because he swaggers around, and they can't let him get away with that, can they?  They can't let this blind masseuse/ grifter/ drifter/ swordsman go around thinking he's better than the other Yakuza (Ichi identifies himself as a Yakuza).    So this instigator punk talks the crime bosses into going after Ichi for no other reason than to get a reputation for the lot of them.  Suffice to say, Ichi winds up going on a bit of a rampage at the end, but HE ONLY KILLS THE MEN, and they are all Yakuza punks, and it's only a movie.  Okay?

The first time I had a significantly younger female employee at a business I patronize attempt to, and in her case, succeed in shooting me down was with a girl named Kate at a coffee shop in 2005.  The last time anyone succeeded in really putting that kind of hurt on me was in 2007 at the same coffee shop.  I decided to go to another coffee shop.  The new coffee shop featured a female employee who succeeded in shooting me down in 2010.  I'd just kind of gotten fed up by that, so I really didn't care that much either way.

This problem has only gotten worse since I quit drinking and drugs in a concerted effort to improve my relationship with women in 2009.  It has gotten even significantly worse since I decided to revive the "turn my back on love" experiment in 2012.  The better I get at hitting the curve, the more they throw the curve.  I'm pretty satisfied with how I field this stuff these days, even though it's a pretty constant presence in my day to day life.

So when any young or youngish woman fires a shot across my bow, how do I regard it these days?  I admit, I get my hopes up for a while.  I thought about this tonight.  Now, when a young or youngish woman who works at a business I regularly patronize fires a perceived shot across my bow, what is the nature of the interaction that follows?   

Well, since Kate in 2005, I have been on zero dates with young or youngish female employees of businesses I patronize, shot across the bow or not.  I have had zero young or youngish female employees show up at a music show I was performing at a club.  One time I had a single young female show up with a group from the coffee shop at an art show at my house down the street.  She acted like she was there to get her teeth pulled.  I still like her to this day, though, she was pretty cool.  I showed up at a music show of a female employee from a cafe I used to go to.  I followed the usual rules of etiquette and didn't try to monopolize her time, and I just watched her perform, had nice things to say about her set, and left.

So what, if any, is the nature of any significant interaction between myself and a young or youngish female employee of a business I patronize after they have, as I put it, fired a shot across my bow?  These days that's about all that really happens, what is most significant is all that does not occur.  I do not come into said place of business with a raging hard-on the next occasion after said shot is fired across my bow in the hopes that I have at last found the love of my life.  I don't ask them on dates.  I don't invite them to any open mikes I might play that week.  I gave a comic book to a young woman who asked for one some time back, but I don't think I ever regarded her as a love interest.  If she reads this, I hope to dear god she doesn't take offense, I just mean to say that I don't regard such gestures either by myself or someone such as her as the start of something big.

So, zero dates, and with no dates, not much else.  What if someone of this category actually took an interest in me?  What would be my advice to them as to how to proceed?  I haven't the slightest idea, because that has never occurred.  I could only advise them to explore other options, such as someone closer to their age, in their social circle, who shares common interests that would all combine to make getting to know that guy better a lot easier than getting to know me better.  I mean, I guess I'm congenial enough, but other than that, I don't know.

I've both read the articles and looked at the naked ladies in Playboy for many years, off and on.  A few months ago I debated whether to get another subscription, put it off primarily for budgetary reasons, and what do you know, old Hef dies this past week or so.

Playboy and Penthouse had the most attractive models of all the jerk mags when I was a kid.  Penthouse won out as masturbation fodder by a mile because of the far more explicit pictorials with, again, usually very attractive models.  If you think I'm being a bit raw about all of this, you should read National Lampoon from the mid-to-late seventies up to the early eighties, because what I'm saying is nothing to how eloquently they could rhapsodize about the models in Penthouse and what all they would do while gazing upon yon lovely visages.

Penthouse's value as masturbation fodder greatly waned with the advent of, first the home video, and then the internet, to the point where, as explicit as Penthouse may be now,  it is even more of an obsolete anachronism than the mac daddy of the mens' mags that started it all: Hef's Playboy.  Playboy still has the interviews and the articles.  Right?  All Penthouse had even in its heyday was articles about alien abductions and whatnot.

The models were always very attractive in Playboy, what was a drag for me was the insistence on featuring large-breasted women.  As breast augmentation became more commonplace in the culture, one would see slender models in Playboy with large breast implants.  It got so bad that it seemed as if the art directors, Hefner being chief among them, seemed to prefer the models with breast implants over all the others.  It was as if Hef had to compromise in the sixties and early seventies, in that he had to feature women with some curves to have his large breasts, and with the coming of the Reagan Era eighties, the old mummy felt like he had the best of both worlds with slender, primarily blond models with large breast implants.  The most famous of these were Anna Nicole Smith, Jenny McCarthy, and Pam Anderson.  I think they were all Playmates of the Year, too.  For variety Hef would toss out a token Black model with large breast implants (Rene Tennyson), or a  token Latina with large breast implants (Stacy Sanchez), and make them Playmates of the Year.  Whoop-dee-doo!  It got so bad during the eighties and nineties that I remember reading a letter from a male reader that went out of its way to praise Playboy for featuring a very attractive model with small ​breasts.

Another beef I had with the pictorials centered around the use of primarily artificial indoor lighting.  This made the pictorial seem, as a raunchier skin mag my brother had in the seventies put it, "antiseptic."  The models had virtually no definition of shadow to their forms.  It's as if they were laid out like particularly appealing confections in a box rather than a real human with a real body occupying a definite space.  A Brazilian edition of Playboy I bought in 1988 had "Sonia Cumbia" in sunlight, and the difference in showing the beauty of that woman was amazing compared to what one would typically get in the American version.

In recent years it seemed as if Hef loosened his grip on the choice of models, if not the choice of Playmate of the Year, and the general art direction of the pictorials, and one saw a noticeable improvement.  Also gone was  the "Girl Next Door" ideal, for the most part, and the models seemed to be LA based professionals who were willing to do the lucrative nude pictorials, so no complaints from me.  These models would typically be really slender, but as often as not have proportionally sized breasts, and hey, let's get a few shots of her out by the pool or on the beach in the sunlight- this ain't fuckin' rocket science guys.

A couple of years ago, the new management at Playboy, one of his son's (Probably the genius behind the Playboy Energy Drink. Remember that one?  Anyone drink that?), anyway, Cooper Hefner decided to do away with the nudity in the pictorials.  I still got the mag, and each month the pictorials would show more and more skin without quite showing ALL of it.  Pretty funny.  The models were all young, slender, beautiful, small breasted pros, so I had no real complaints, but I let the subscription run out anyway.  Earlier this year I got a card in the mail saying the nudity in Playboy was back, and to prove it they showed a little picture of a young woman with huge, natural-looking gazongas.  I don't know if I'll subscribe, though.

All the articles that excoriate his personal life are out there to see, but I'l just say this: Hugh Hefner cites his first wife's confession in 1949(?) that she'd been unfaithful to him as a hugely formative episode that shaped his future direction in life; meaning his founding of Playboy and the pains he took to his dying day to project the fantasy image of himself that attempted to reflect what was portrayed in the magazine.  Maybe he could have come to more meaningful terms with this one episode, his wife's confession of infidelity, if he hadn't forged his own key to the proverbial candy store that was previously accessible only to the Frank Sinatras and the John F Kennedys of the world.  I mean, as traumatic as that one episode must have been, it was only one episode.  Maybe the rest of his life and his relationship with women consisted of making damn sure nothing like that would ever happened to him again.

Maybe Hefner and I think along these lines more than I'm willing to admit.  There's  a lot of painful stuff from my relationship with women that I don't care to repeat.  Maybe the only difference between Hugh Hefner and myself in this regard is that I have long ago admitted to myself this: if I'm attracted enough to someone, and I like them, and I trust them enough to let my guard down, and they've decided it's their mission in life to do some vicious takedown of me, AND they are really good at doing that sort of thing, then hell yeah, someone could totally take me for a ride, just like in the old days.  No question.

I personally don't have any problem with looking at naked ladies in magazines in principal.  If anyone wants to say bad things about me for this, go ahead.  I think the condemnation of that practice in any form is just Puritanism, whether from the Left or the Right.  If I were art director of Playboy, I would go with whatever types of models shot in whatever way I thought was most erotic and beautiful, while adhering to the Playboy ethos of not going nearly as far as Penthouse.  Yeah, someone would probably have a problem with what they would consider my ideal in beauty, but I don't think it would be as narrow a definition as the ideal models of Hugh Hefner's imaginings seemed to embody.