My last several posts have concerned my deal with women, as usual, but the tone may have shifted some this past month and a half or so.  I'm talking more and more about the role I play in my failings with women, and the steps I can take to correct that.  As far as the women I see in my day to day world, I've got this idea of not doing anything in an attempt to get me closer to them.  Now, that could mean trying not to stare at them, as well as refrain from asking them out on dates, or maybe just not try too hard to come off as some super great guy and whatnot.  I seem to have a magnetic repulsion effect on women in my world when I try to get close to them in those kinds of ways, I think.

A few posts back I talked about how I'm pretty sure that there is no woman or women in my world that I'm really attracted to burning some secret torch for me that I just have to uncover.  That whole looking for a love interest thing concerned that line of thinking.  I stand  by that  statement now, as I did a few weeks ago: that I'm pretty sure there's no heart of gold out there in my world that awaits my discovery.

The thought that occurs to me is that women have to like me first before they can ever love me, and some quest to unearth their "secret heart" might get in the way of that process.  That said, I'm not really holding my breath for some sort of breakthrough with anyone in my world right now.  I just go out to see bands, perform at open mics, and other stuff a lot, where I see friends, and even then I don't really pressure myself to meet women.

A topic I wanted to bring up concerns aggression.  I talked about the possibility that certain predatory women I've dealt with these past several years where basically visiting a weird, feminine kind of aggression on me when I suspected that maybe someone or other wanted to play me. New readers to this blog just have to go to January 1st of this year and read up to about last Summer to get a sense of what I refer to.

My point is, if that kind of thing counts as aggression, I've at least become really good at dealing with this one type of aggression.  I may never be a righteous ass-beater of bad men type, but this type of aggression against me, if that Is what it is, is something I've gotten pretty good at dealing with, if I do say so myself.  Believe me, this one type of aggression has been the bane of my existence for all of my adult life, too.  I may be the kind of puss that just lets some belligerent, drunk guy beat me up, but this one deal, boy, I seem to have it down.

I've been pretty anxious these past several days.  Sure, it's just the akathisia (restlessness; the need for movement; such as getting in one's car and going somewhere) from the antipsychotic medication, but it's also the Richy Vegas thing.  I keep thinking that someone wants to hire the services of Richy Vegas for something or other.  This kind of thinking just seems to ebb and flow like some tide going in and out.  The distraction can drive me to distraction, I tell you.  My handful of friends that I call to talk about stuff in general don't pick up when i call and don't call me back.  That has led me to post for the first time in two weeks.  I've been shaking off a weird cold/flu thing for all that time.  I had a flu shot, and it seemed to make the way I felt yesterday not last all that long.

I've got a gig at a coffee shop on the weekend before Christmas.  I'll post things on Facebook, and tell people in other ways, but I might keep the specifics of this gig off of this blog for security purposes.  A lot of you all seem to want to be my secret admirers, so, okay, that can cut both ways.

There could be some similarities between some of my experiences and all this news about women coming out with sexual harassment and assault allegations against men in entertainment, politics, and the private sector industries such as the tech industry in Silicon Valley.  I've certainly felt as if I had to deal with a great deal of pressure.  I feel as if I've often been subjected to a weird kind of psychological aggression in my dealings that I've been writing about on this blog since 2015.

But there are important differences as well.  I don't feel that the institutionally tolerated harassment and coercion these women such as Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, and the other women in other sectors talk about is anything that one can say they've brought on themselves.  In recent posts I've talked about how my belief that I needed a love interest to focus my energies on left me vulnerable to some predatory women in my youth.  So, whether or not I "brought it on myself" becomes an essential issue when I contrast my experiences with someone whose main crime seemed to be that they were female, attractive, and twenty-two years old or thereabouts.

I don't like to blame myself too, too much in regards to these horrible experiences I had, pretty much all of them many years ago, now.  I just think it's more constructive for me to look at the role I played, and see how I could do better, and I think, for the most part, I've both recognized the problem- the "need" for a love interest- and I've taken measures to improve the situation.  The gist of the solution lies a willingness to go in other directions in regards to women I'm attracted to other than a direction that attempts to bring me closer to them.

I still have room for improvement, boy howdy do I.  I'm reminded at times that I still have reprehensible habits, such as staring at women I'm attracted to (very recently reminded), and the more inner life problem of looking to rebound with another love interest after some ordeal such as the one I've chronicled throughout this year with the Invisible Woman.

So, I think my issues are more productive if I look at them as a personal conduct issue, whereas I think what's going on now with these reports in the media is more of a change the world issue.  To some extent, my personal issues touch on civil rights, and I'm prepared to function as a one-man wrecking crew when I sense that is the issue; my insistence that I have the right to patronize a restaurant or other business as long as I don't bother anyone, and otherwise behave courteously and appropriately towards the staff and the other customers, for example.  But, to undergo such actions effectively, an ability to know where I leave off and the other person begins becomes an essential cognitive tool.  

For example, at one restaurant I patronized, I caught the vibe that a waitress that I had an attraction to didn't like a t-shirt I would wear in there.  The t-shirt said, "I support single mothers," and had a silhouette of a stripper.  One morning this waitress talked about her struggles as a recently divorced mom and how her ex still expressed a longing for her physically.   

I thought, "This is pretty personal information for her to just talk about with a coworker within earshot of a customer." Also, I'd recently had an argument with a female relative about this same shirt, so that was fresh on my mind.  So, to test out the hypothesis that this waitress had a problem with my shirt, I decided to stop wearing it when I patronized that restaurant.  I never called attention  to the fact that I'd stopped wearing it.  I just no longer wore it there.  I wore it a lot less in general, really.  I remember one time I wore it to the veterinarian's office, and the female receptionists remarked that they thought ii was funny. I told them of my belief that the waitress at this restaurant didn't like it, and how I'd stopped wearing it when I ate there.

Another element to this story involves the fact that I'd worked at this same restaurant as a dishwasher in the Summer of 1990, and I really must have freaked out the female staff and the owner.  I talked about this to a waitress I was friendly with that same Summer that I decided to stop wearing the t-shirt.  When I talked about my previous employment with this friendly waitress, I was very open about how I had not been diagnosed and treated at the time of my employment.

Three months after I decided to stop wearing this t-shirt at this restaurant, I ate breakfast there early one morning.  A male waiter asked me how I was doing and all that, I said fine etc.  Then, as he walks off he sings the lyric to that Carpenter's song "Close to You."  You know: "Why do birds suddenly appear/ every time/ you are near/ just like me/ they long to be/ close to you."

So this kind of thing goes on for like, two years and four months from the time I decided to stop wearing that shirt.  There are several dustups, but I'm a slippery fuck.  Right?  One time, after two years of me going to this place, waiting for someone to notice that I'd stopped wearing this shirt, I tried to just make small talk with this waitress, and she was shaking, I think from pent up inner rage.  Right?

Finally, two years and four months after I decided to stop wearing this shirt, I go in there on a typical busy morning, and another waitress, an attractive friend of the aggrieved party, said, smiling and with emphasis, "Like your Butthole Surfer's t-shirt, Richard!"  This other waitress had started working there after I'd decided to stop wearing the "I support single mothers" t-shirt.  So , I sit down, and the aggrieved waitress comes up and looks at me as if she regards me in a whole new light.

For the longest time, I didn't know whether to hold any resentment towards this formerly aggrieved waitress or not.  Then, I decided, in light of how part of me perceived what went down with the Invisible Woman; in other words, that I might have been dealing with someone who had issues with me many years after the fact, I decided that I was cool with this waitress because she no longer seemed to have any issues with me.

Anyway, that's how I function as a one-man wrecking crew when dealing with the societal stigma of mental illness.  Anyone who faults some of these women in these news accounts for coming forward years after these incidents took place can kiss my ass.  Issues number 8 and 9 of Richy Vegas Comics detail how a gay male friend of mine tried to force himself on me one time.  For about twenty years I never told anyone about this incident.  It wasn't so much that I had serious trauma from it, I just saw this friend's assault as par for the course in how lots of friends treated me in those days.  As far as trauma went, it didn't stand head and shoulders above many other things I talk about in those two issues of Richy Vegas Comics.  By the way, in Richy Vegas Comics issue number 9, that's where I first bring up the crude sexual proposition I made to Wanda, so there's that too.  

In the last couple of blog posts I talk about how, in years past, I would desperately seek out a viable love interest from among the women in my world.  I would talk about how, upon believing that I might have found such a person, I would set out on a campaign to win her over.  Hilarity ensued.

I've thought about that.  It was not always the case that I would just try to win over someone I figured that was not particularly interested in me.  That kind of thing would usually happen after an initial rejection, the effort to then win that person over would manifest itself in going out of my way to prove what I great guy I was, and that I was not hurt by their rejection and I would try to score points that way.  I'm not talking about thirty years ago either, I've done this kind of thing pretty recently.  I guess it's not all that unusual for a guy to do this, but I've just kind of gotten sick of the whole charade, and I think that maybe I come across as trying to manipulate the love interest with this great guy shit.

A very common scenario, a variation if you will, would go down like this: someone I had an attraction to would do some flirty thing or other, sometimes big, sometimes little, right.  Whatever it was they did, I would then harbor the conviction that there was something "there" as far as the extent of their feelings for me.  So, I figured that it was just a matter cashing in on what was already there in them to bestow on me.  I could carry a torch for months and months nursing such a belief in my breast.  

They could get really scared at the robustness of my undying ardor for whatever I was responding to, and then it could go far and wide that I was going off the deep end, and oh, the hilarity that would ensue.

Several times I would come to some realization or do some really heartfelt gesture showing that I really meant them no harm, and the sky would crack open at some point before or after this gesture and i would have a psychotic episode.  I would realize sometime during the breakdown phase that the feelings I thought these young women had for me weren't really there, but in the act of my heartfelt gesture, I could sometimes stir up feelings in them of tenderness towards me, to some extent.  

The only problem was, after I would have my breakdown, I had no desire to try to cash in, because I could get quite enraged at the ugly side of humanity, whether in the women themselves or the community around us, that I would see in the process of this psychotic episode that would unfold.  

So, for the record: I'm pretty sure that there are no young women that I am attracted to in my world that are awaiting my discovery of their feelings for me, so I have no concern about playing my cards right in an attempt to cash in.  Now run along.

The main course of action that I would typically take when I would assign the role of love interest to an attractive woman in my world would be to set out on a campaign to try to win her over.  So, I will now say this: there is no one in my world that I now have the slightest interest in trying to win over.  NO ONE!  One can imagine how well such campaigns would go for me in the past, and the likely results.

I would pull off some pretty miraculous, transcendent shit sometimes.  All on the way to a nervous breakdown, of course.  So no, ladies, rest assured, no one will bear the brunt of my supposed expertise in winning beautiful women over.  That is all.

One thing that prevents me from identifying myself as a feminist or a male ally of feminists is the issue of calling women out on their behaviors and attitudes when I feel that I would like to do so.  Another thing that prevents me from identifying myself as a feminist or male ally of feminists is the tendency these types have to label me as the bad guy and to then go adversarial on me.  But let's stick to the issue of calling (certain player-type) women out on their bullshit.  Actually, a woman doesn't have to be a 24/7 player type to engage in that type if behavior, either.

In 1999, when I had the desire to go off on the antagonists that I portray in Richy Vegas Comics, issue #4: "Anita, You're the Reason I'm Not In Prison," I sought the council of a now-estranged friend as to what to do.  After things shook out the way they did, in other words, after Anita prevented me from doing anything that I would immediately regret, I told my friend of my desire to really tell these women off.  My friend advised me not to, with these words, "You know who used to call women out on their shit, Vernon Hoe, and they hated him for it."

I followed the now-estranged friend's advice and went as far as attempting to forgive these women, because he said that the standards of behavior that they engaged in are to be expected from women these days, and that it was no big deal.  That attempt to forgive these women, without any expression of remorse on their part, or any attempt by them to ask me to forgive them, I now regret.  A month or two later, I depicted these women and and one of their men as victims of the Whitman massacre in the first issue of Richy Vegas Comics.  That started a whole chain of attempted retributions on their part over the next ten or fifteen years, and so the vicious cycle continued.  

Anyway, back to how bad it was that Vernon Hoe would call women out on their shit: lets see, this is the same Vernon Hoe who has been married to the same woman since 1995, and has a daughter that has grown up in a two parent household the whole time.  Oh, you mean the daughter who is an honor student at a prestigious private high school?  Why, yes, that's the one.

And my friend who told me about how bad it was that Vernon Hoe would call women out on their bullshit?  I guess that it was bad for Vernon to do this because that would mean that Vernon would have no chance of getting with these women.  Well, it's true that this friend has had a lot more "success" with women than Vernon Hoe.  I remember in college how this other friend would brag about how he would ejaculate in his girlfriends' faces, so yeah, that kind of success.  I won't go any further than to say that, because things never really got better for him on the dark stuff, and it's pretty depressing.

If anyone wants a historical example of a guy who was all about the acceptance and approval of women, rather than all about a higher moral code than the acceptance and approval of women, I suggest they google this name: Ted Bundy.  A real successful ladies man, that Ted.  

Now, there seem to be successful ladies men in history who actually loved women.  One might want to check out the memoirs of Casanova. I hear tell that Casanova tells vividly recalled stories of bedding something like one hundred women.  One reviewer I read said that the vivid detail in his recall might have reflected how he actually felt about his sex partners,  He used a sheep's intestine condom during the ages before people knew that syphilis was caused by a microbe.