This past weekend I met a woman who was pretty attractive and seemed pretty nice.  I decided to put in a Facebook friend request for her after I got home.  I put in the request the next evening (Saturday), and when she accepted it, that made me pretty happy.

This past evening I tried to search for her on my list of friends, and her name did not come up.  I searched Facebook to see if she'd left the site entirely, for perhaps the reasons people leave Facebook these days, but no, she was still on Facebook.  When I found her, I had the option of putting in another friend request for her, which I did not do.

I've thought of several possible reasons why she would drop me as a friend so quickly.  One could be that someone told her about what a bad guy I was, or she read some of this stuff on my blog, and dropped me out of concern for her personal safety.  Well, that's at least a kind of understandable reason, though I at least would have liked the chance to advocate for my side of whatever issues she had with me, but not matter.  I can just let her go and leave it at that.

Another possibility is that she had a jealous boyfriend who is three feet up her ass all the time and won't have her being Facebook friends with a guy he doesn't know.  Again, if she chooses to be in a relationship with someone like that, there's really nothing I can do about that.

The remaining possibilities I can think of involve the prospect that she doesn't really care what kind of an impression she makes on me.  Let's go over one, two, or three.  Shall we?  One possibility is that she thought I was someone else, and when she found out I was not the person she thought I was, she rescinded her acceptance for that reason.  Again, the overriding conclusion I can make is that she doesn't care what I'll think of such a move, so that makes her a write-off in that scenario.

Another reason might be that she's gay, but so what?  Like I can't understand if she replied to a personal message I might send with that explanation?  I guess that would do a pretty good job of explaining why she doesn't care what kind of impression she makes on me; she's gay, AND she's an asshole.

She might be going through a rough time right now, for some reason.  She seemed alright when I met her the other night, but one never knows, does one.  That would be the most acceptable explanation of this last category, so I guess I'd have to give her that.

If she's not going through a rough time, that would lead me to another, less savory, explanation.  Maybe she saw the gist of the things I blog about; my mental illness, my relationship with women, etc.  She might have decided that I wasn't a guy worth knowing better, and so it didn't matter to her that she dropped my request.

Okay, no one's obliged to want to know me better.  BUT, and this is big, a subset of such a sentiment is that she's trying to make some player move.  The move is this: the right hand gives, the left hand takes away.  This kind of player move is designed to reap maximum attention with as little effort as possible.  So, the right hand accepts my friend request, the left hand takes it away.

If this blog post affords her the kind and quality of attention she desires as a result of such a move, well, it's more of a testament to her and her issues with being who she is than a statement about me and my issues, in my opinion.  If, on the other hand, she's really having a rough time of it for some reason, I apologize.  But, if she's making some kind of callous player move, I might suggest a creative writing class or art class or maybe musical instrument instruction so that she may find more socially acceptable forms of self-expression.  That is all.

I've finished inking forty of the eighty pages of the next issue of my comic book.  I figure that I will have this issue finished by the 25th of October.  That's a pretty fast turnaround- four months- for this issue.  That doesn't include the time I spent writing and laying out the text.

Now, I have to spend my time as constructively and productively as I am able to for the next eight months.  Why eight months?  In June of 2019 I will have my fifty-fifth birthday.  When I was in grad school, a fellow graduate student from Korea named Kim read my palm.  He said that in my mid-fifties, I would have a big change in my life.  I hope that doesn't just mean that I will have a massive heart attack and die.   Kim didn't specify what all would change.  He first said that I would marry and be very happy.  Ha!

When I had the vision of the new chapter of Legend of Richy Vegas, the issue of Kim's fortune for me came up in this way; I decided to make Kim's fortune a self-fulfilling prophesy.  The story on this home page, Richy Vegas: a psycho memoir,  chronicles the last time I was to inherit all of this good stuff in 1995, and how that all got screwed up.  So now, I have the Kim's fortune as my new date.

Over the years, I've found that these dates just have to pass.  There never is any way around it.  The year 2000, with the new millennium, brought dates that I just had to wait out for about as long a period of time as I have to wait out this one. My family scheduled a big Christmas get-together on one of our uncle's properties for Christmas 2000.  I must have anticipated something happening for at least the nine months prior.  Well, here I sit.   I wonder if there's any good new porn on the porn sites tonight?

Yeah, the big difference between now and the year 2000 is that I don't have the bad substance abuse habits now that I did back then.  I can pass the time with my books and my music.  I've also learned how to make consistently intelligent decisions about the women in my world these days.  At least, I think they're intelligent decisions.

An example: I play open mikes.  I do this to help me memorize songs and perform them competently for the purposes of gigs and recording of said songs.  The other day I ate at a restaurant where I perform.  A young girl who works there asked if I was going to play the open mike that was coming up in a day or two.  I said I might.

I got really excited that this young girl talked to me just this little bit, but when the night of the open mike came, I decided not to go.  I just saw this less traveled road open up at the fork, and I decided to take it.  I want to memorize at least one new song before I play out anywhere.  I have three from, ostensibly, the next album, that I've memorized, but I don't just want to do those again.  I want to uncork at least one or more new numbers at these events.

I figure that if this young woman just wanted to shine me on a bit, then I didn't want to show up all excited and just do the same songs.  If she was coming from a more sincere place, as another possible explanation, then waiting until I have some new material to play probably wouldn't put her off any.  I've had plenty of women do that jump through hoops stuff, and the predominant conclusion I can come up with about that is that they didn't really care for me that much.

Bill Kartalopoulos, the series editor of Best American Comics, recommended my books as "notable comics" on the web site for Best American Comics 2018:  http://on-panel.com/BAC2018/index.html   This is the second year that I have the honor of such recognition.
Stuff like this makes me feel like I'm getting something accomplished in this particular avocation.  

I applied for a showcase at SXSW 2019.  It'd be neat if I got booked for that as well.  It cost me $35 to apply, which they will surely keep if I don't get picked.  I would like to do the songs about Fuckface and whatnot for SXSW 2019.  I got the music from my latest album up on bandcamp.com, and there are now players for a couple of the songs on this website.  Yay!

I figure that I will finish the latest Richy Vegas book well before the end of the month. I've done the ink outlines for all of the pages already, so the book just waits for me to dive in and do the finished inks.  I've already finished 26 pages, one third of the book, and inertia just takes over at this stage.  Obsession is good for some things, if not others.