The job is hard work.  A friend said I'll build up stamina.  I might also become more relaxed as I get it down more, which should help to keep me from getting too wiped out by the end of the shift.  I have enough energy and wherewithal to continue working on issue 29 of my comic book. I hope to finish sometime in January.  I want to cut WAY down on trips to the coffee shops in the months of November, December,  January, and February.  I hope to use the saved money to help pay for printing comic books and traveling to conventions, among other things.  The job plus saving money on coffee shops and restaurants can give me a tangible means to pay for that stuff over the long haul.

I completed my first week at my new job.  The work was hard, and that's all I want to say about it at this time.  In other news, my latest issue of "Tales from the Richy Vegas Psychoverse" came back from the printer.  I've been sending copies all over the place, including Domino Books, an online distributor.  I have some drama going on that's proving too distracting for me to work on my next book right now.  I might give it a try right after I get off of here.

I'm starting a new job tomorrow.  It's part-time, and the scheduling allows me to go to conventions to sell comics.  It's customer service, but I think that will be okay, because my mood remains consistently good these days. My psych med allows for that.  I get down sometimes, but the cognitive behavior techniques I've learned over the years can get me to talk myself out of feeling bad for any appreciable length of time.  The fact that I don't drink, smoke dope, smoke cigarettes, or do anything else like that helps a great deal with my day to day mood too.  

I think I have an audience out there for this blog.  I got to thinking tonight that they might expect a weekly post, and that if I didn't do one, they might become concerned a little. I've talked about some pretty painful stuff from my past on this blog, and I wonder if that makes people care about me more than I realize sometimes.  One thing I realized today has to do with the quality of my friendships these days.  Now that my social activities don't revolve around heavy drinking and drug use, the quality of interactions with my current friends and the overall quality of my friendships show remarkable improvement over those more painful experiences from my past.

I think I treat those around me better than I used to, and that gets reflected in how they treat me.  Also, my social activities have a more constructive orientation such as music or comics.  Not all of my friends are angels about the pot smoking or what have you, but I see them and interact with them with a focus on more constructive, sustainable activities.  I've also learned to be by myself in much more constructive, sustainable ways.

Yesterday I went to the annual Austin Corn Lover's Fiesta (ACL).  As I sat there listening to the musical acts, the notion I had of the famous woman I've been going on and on about evaporated.  I wondered if this deal was over.  The notion of this goddess descending from her "A"-list Mount Olympus and bestowing her bounty on me at the Corn Lover's Fiesta evaporated as the day progressed.  Didnt happen.  Does that mean it's over?   

The thing I tried to look for was the persistence of the emotional and mental sine wave that I went through whenever my thoughts turned to her these past seven or so months.  No sine wave would mean it was all over for this unavailable woman fixation on her.  A sine wave is what I call the "She loves me, she loves me not" nature of my thought process as I think of her.  "She loves me," The sine wave goes up.  "She loves me not," the sine wave dips down.  And so it goes.  If that ends, the fixation ends.  I don't think of that former cashier in terms of  the sine wave these days.  I did during the summer of 2021.  I did for quite some time after.  But I don't think of that former cashier in terms of a sine wave anymore.

The notion that persists about this famous person has to do with what I saw on the liner notes of her last album.  She confessed to staying up late into the night, drinking wine alone.  The album has to do with the things she thinks about at these times. Weeks ago I posited that her thoughts may turn to me during these times, but I admitted that I could be wrong about that.  I said in one post that I might have been like Neil Gaiman's Sandman to her.  That I was totally in her head.  I'm not the Sandman, though, I'm human too.

I just learned to make peace, somehow, with these notions of these unavailable women that come forth in my consciousness more often than I like.  I will accept when someone rules that realm, with the understanding that they would probably not rule forever.  No one ever has before.  She's going to ramp up on her busy schedule in the coming weeks.  If she doesn't show in that time, that'll tell me all I need to know.  She's free to do whatever she wants about her dilemma, if she even has a dilemma concerning me.

As much as part of me wants the positive aspects that I fantasize about in this famous woman to come true, I still find myself left to my own devices when it comes to figuring out the actual reality of the situation.  A prevailing characteristic of these deals I get into involves how unsolvable they can seem to me at the time.  Here's the thing though; a particularly unsolvable feature from an unavailable girl situation I dealt with at the age of fifteen would not come up later at the age of twenty-one or twenty-four.  

For example, I remember the prevailing characteristic of my unsolvable fixation on the girl at fifteen had to do with the difference in how we felt about each other.  I remember going into a tailspin just KNOWING that there was NO WAY the girl felt the same utter intensity of  feeling for me that I felt for her.  That was all it took to introduce an almost total paralysis in how I could possibly solve that dilemma.  But later on, in college, I just made myself approach such a person, usually a classmate, if I so desired.  I wouldn't get the girl, but I would at least solve that aspect of my problem.

But again, here's the thing.  The older I got, the more experience I acquired, the more complex the problems seemed to me in trying to work this stuff out with whatever woman I fixated on.  The unavailability of the women in question morphed into other forms the older I got.  At twenty-one, I couldn't figure out that Veronica Ortega just wanted boatloads of attention from a less experienced classmate (me) following a painful breakup with her live-in boyfriend, and so that vexed me to no end.  My inability to figure out her point of view, due to my relative lack of experience in dating, made the dilemma she presented to me seem as utterly unsolvable to me at twenty-one as the dilemma I faced at fifteen.

And so it went.  In later years I could figure out the "free" attention angle a lot of unavailable women wanted to play with me, so that no longer presented problems.  But oh, here comes my psychosis, and hallucination narratives about "Monica" and Robin and "Sonia Cumbia," and lo, we have a whole new class of unavailable women.  The nearest I figure, those dilemmas, which featured women not actually present in any way in my real life, became solvable with just a little validation that I could attract women in the "real world."  I remember forgetting all about Monica and Robin around 1999, when I worked a dishwashing job that featured a lot of female employees that liked me socially.

One thing that really solved a LOT of these unavailable women dilemmas involved reviving the "turn my back on love" experiment in 2012.  If nothing else, I learned to exert a LOT of patience and self-control over ANY situation I found myself in that involved ANY unavailable woman under ANY circumstance.

 A prime example of that practice in action featured the former cashier at that grocery store I patronize.  She started in on me in February of 2019, and I didn't approach her for social reasons until October of 2021.  In between those two times I threw everything I knew at that dilemma.  I let go of her so-o-o many times...oh my goodness, did I just try to let her go.  But in the long run, I solved the dilemmas she presented to me, which included a massive age difference (35 years!), the fact that I only knew her from the grocery store I patronized (the only place I could approach her for social reasons, Not easy!), the way she always seemed to have a boyfriend (hey, I'm just inviting her to my comic book sale.  It's not a DATE or anything!), and lastly, the fact that she totally seemed to have it in for me.  Namely, that she was on some crusade seeking justice for women everywhere by taking me down.  I no longer consider her much of a factor in my day to day decision making.  The only decisions I have  to make about her involve my reluctance to patronize that business where I thought I encountered a girl that could be her sister, from what I could tell. I just try to refrain from patronizing that particular business these days.

Now, I have this "A" list celebrity I'm currently fixated on.  She's unapproachable in any context I know about.  What the hell am I supposed to do about that?  I tried writing her a postcard, nothing.  I sent her a DM on a social media account of hers, nothing.  I figure she'll just run out the clock.  For the longest time, I could tell myself that she was too busy with current projects to attend to me for real.  As of last month, that excuse can't cut it.  She still has several more weeks of, I guess, free time.   If she doesn't show up sometime during this window of opportunity, then she's run out the clock on our deal, and that's just one possibility that will end it.  Bear in mind, people, that I did nothing myself to sabotage this situation.  If she doesn't show in the next month or so, she doesn't show, and that just might end this fixation I have on her. 

And furthermore, this fixation I have on her might represent some kind of nadir, some lowest point, of my tendency to fixate on unavailable women.  That would imply, that after this one, I might not find any more "unsolvable" dilemmas that involve unavailable women tying me up in knots.  I mean, where could my brain take me to from here to find another unsolvable dilemma?  Might I wind up fixating on deceased movie stars from Hollywood's golden era?  I mean, there's no possible way I could bring Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn back from the dead.  Would that sufficiently tie me up in knots?  I don't think fixating on deceased movie stars is really a possibility for me to get hung up again.  I think I may have finally graduated from "Unavailable Woman U!"  That would be grand!

I started to read a William S. Burroughs quote on Facebook that said something about how it is human beings obligation to risk getting hurt really bad in the quest for a romantic love connection, blah, blah, blah...The world's full of people with advice like that.  Maybe it's my abnormal psychological profile, but that never really worked for me.  I've talked often about my "quest for love" in my pursuit of "Donna" during the summer of 1986.  That's the one where I'd hoped I could connect with Donna at a friend's party and wound up having a psychotic episode instead.  I had the impression that a lot of the people at the party knew of my fixation on Donna, and that they definitely did not like the idea of me carrying a torch for this person.  Donna stood against the wall and scowled as I walked by her, "Wanda" came up and laughed in my face soon afterwards, Michael laughed cruelly at me, as did Allyson as I left.

The next weekend, my male friend I'd had known since two plus years before said, "Sorry to fuck your world, dude," as I ate at Hut's with him, his girlfriend Allyson, and Wanda, and one other person.  I saw The Fly with Jeff Goldblum later that night with Allyson and Wanda.  I came off as conciliatory, self-deprecating, and nice the whole night with those people, including Wanda.  I saw Donna and her boyfriend at a party later that night.  I walked up to her, introduced myself, and overall just tried to make peace with the whole situation.  I didn't directly refer to the events of the previous weekend or the previous summer. Instead I brought up a friend of mine she knew and acted as if I was worried about a fixation he once had on a girl.

This gesture appeared to open up possibilities for me, but that proved illusory.  A lot of what I saw as possibilities just hinged on the high expectations I had of cashing in on the goodwill generated by my gesture towards Donna.  I harbored a lot of anger and resentment at  the way people treated me up to the point I talked to Donna at that party, and this resentment showed itself in the way I treated Wanda when she appeared to not be all she was cracked up to be.

These past seven months I wrote a lot about a famous woman I've never met.  I don't think it's a good idea for me to carry a torch for  her (duh!).  She had a busy schedule all summer, and so I could sort of justify keeping the fire going with the anticipation that she would have more free time right about now.  She chooses to spend that free time in ways that don't involve me, and I decided several weeks ago to bail on this whole deal.

I don't want anything like a repeat of that party in September of 1986 where all of those people were so down on me because of my fixation on Donna.  I'm just going to tell myself, "Suppose I don't do THAT this time.  How might things shake out if I don't do THAT this time?" Ugh!  I'm not doing anything AGAINST this famous woman by bailing on this whole (maybe self-constructed) deal I had going with the torch I carried for her.  I don't really anticipate anything like a party where she'll snub me.  It's more like, I don't want to come off as unhinged or unstable to those in my world who may or may not read this blog.  I don't want to write blog posts telling of my undying devotion to this woman and have to eat those words later.  So much for risking it all.

I finished this book last summer, but I just got around to preparing it for the printer last week.  I've got issues 3 through 6 laid out for the finished artwork stage.  That's what I did last summer rather than get to the pre-press for issue number 2 of Tales from the Richy Vegas Psychoverse.  Right after I get issue two to  the printer, I'm going to start inking the letters of my eighty page book, which is on issue number 29.  The four parts of "Psychoverse" I have laid out in rough form will tell the story of "Richy Vegas, the Serial Killer Hound."  I will toggle back and forth between the two books as I complete eachi issue.