Some weeks ago I put in a Facebook friend request for a young woman who works at a business I patronize.  I found her page via the usual search engine chicanery, i admit.  She didn't accept my request.  Some weeks later she gives me an "I long for you" look at this place of business.  

What gives?  If she's really so hot for me, why didn't she accept my friend request?  I've decided that the Facebook friend request is the ultimate line in the sand.  All that would have happened if she accepted the request is that I would have sent her a personal message saying, "What's up? How's it going?," nothing too much really.  If she hadn't responded to that at all, then I would just drop it.  I might send her a greeting on her birthday, or congratulations over big news such as a graduation or engagement to be married, as i have done with other attractive women in the past.

I figure that this young woman might give me this flirtatious, "I long for you" look with the intention of getting me to try some other approach, because I'm supposed to think, "Well, the Facebook Friend request didn't work, so I'll try something else."  If I was twenty-one or twenty-two, her move might have worked.  But, I've really tried to train myself since those nightmare-relationship-with-women days to not pursue someone to the ends of the Earth and back.  

I guess she's at an age where men of all types, ages, shapes, and sizes most definitely will pursue her to the ends of the Earth and back.  Or, maybe she just has me as that type.  I don't know.  I'm just trying to keep that in mind as I go about my day to day affairs. I admit, I can get pretty excited about attractive young women, but I'm also pretty good at snapping back to the fact of the matter.

Yeah, the Facebook move is a really unobtrusive, non-confrontational way to settle these flirtation matters.  I don't have any luck in really connecting with this move, but the Facebook friend request move really saves me a lot of time and mental energy that I would otherwise waste in an effort to connect with women in my world.  I've yet to send Zuckerberg that first box of chocolates, but I figure that I owe him about nine boxes by now.

All this sexual misconduct talk has celebrity men on the defensive if celebrity women call them out for not towing the party line.  I read an article in the New York Times where Matt Damon had some backlash for not being strident enough in his righteousness.  He said there's a gamut of behaviors that are all getting swept up and classified as all the same degree of seriousness that include some he considers not so bad such as patting a woman's behind.  All I have to say to you fellows is, welcome to my world.  For the longest time it seemed to me my transgressions against the wimmens were used as a catchall for all the sins of less vulnerable men such as the Donald Trumps and Harvey Weinsteins of the world.  I'm saying I've been a scapegoat.  Okay?   

Funny how I was out in front of all of this with the ordeals I've been going through that really take off as this blog started getting traction a few years ago.  Yeah, I admit to doing some pretty shitty stuff, but, "Let he (or she) who is without sin cast the first stone," and all of that.  

I wonder how my musical material will go over in the kind of zeitgeist we're in right now?  I do some pretty frank woman hate songs such as, "God You're Something Awful," and "I Didn't Know It Was a Gunfight (Until I Drew and Shot You Down)."  I don't know if I'll  get the chance to find out at my show this weekend.  We might have rain.  There might not be a turnout-especially from a general public that would get all bent out of shape over such material.  But, I've already been kicked off stage once this year, so I guess there's room for one more episode such as that before the year ends.

I've decided that, to maintain my equilibrium, I need to do three things on a daily basis.  1) stay compliant with my medication 2) maintain my commitment to abstinence from cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, and 3) try to refrain from endlessly searching for that attractive women with the heart of gold in my world; the one I KNOW secretly burns a torch just for me.  

That last one is one I've come up with myself.  It stems from my self-diagnosis of love addiction as the cause of most of my troubles with women.  At least it's one cause of trouble that I can do something about.  I can't cure my mental illness, or stop being a middle- aged white guy, but I can address my role in the whole mess by attacking the love addiction issue.

There always seems to exist a woman in my world, at arms length, who seems all to willing to help me go down that psychotic episode/ heartbreak rabbit hole.   There may be one or two women who see this kind of thing going on who may become, at least, sympathetic to my plight.  But, if they exist, I believe they would lose all sympathy for me if I try too hard to project onto them the sense that there is something "there" in their hearts for me to discover and unearth and have as my own. 

In the book Intimate Connections, by Dr. David Burns, Dr. Burns talks about a phase where the reader will experience some success.  He says, I'm paraphrasing, as you smile and flirt more, you will notice that others will pay some positive attention to you...  Dr. Burns then goes on to say that one should try to play the field instead of latching onto just one person.  He says something along the lines of, you regard one little morsel of attention as the whole banquet, and you react accordingly.  Dr. Burns emphasizes that the lonely person's tendency to try to make it all about one person at this stage will just get them rejected, because they will just appear needy to that one special someone.

I don't know if I'm experiencing the level of success that Dr. Burns talks about in Intimate Connections, but I do think I've collected several small morsels of attention from women in my world over the last couple of weeks.  One came at a business I patronized Friday in the form of a woman who used to live next door to me for a year or two.  She stopped me inside this store and reminded me of who she was, and we started talking.  The whole time in my I made myself think along the lines of, "Turn your back on love.  Do not ask her out."  

We caught up a little, talked for a few minutes, she said that I looked good and that it was good to see me, and we went our separate ways.  When I got back home I remembered that when we were neighbors, I'd invited her to a little party of mine, and I remember the night of my party seeing her in her living room watching TV.  I didn't blow off asking her out at that business last Friday out of any sense of resentment over her not really showing any kind of interest in me when we lived next door to each other, I just wanted to experiment with trying the "turn my back on love" road-less- traveled path that I've been on since the Fall of 2012, and only after I got home did I reflect on our time as neighbors and remember that she kind of held me at arm's length back then.

From 2009 up to about 2012 or thereabout, I would most definitely just try to go for it as far as asking women in my world out.  I asked many a twenty-something food service worker at coffee shops and restaurants out in front of God and everyone, and I just came up empty.  I also asked a couple of older female employees of these types of businesses out, but I still came up empty.  All I can say is that I'm at least satisfied that I gave that approach at try.  If anyone has the desire to try what I'm trying now, i.e. just sort of blow off these supposed opportunities and go about one's business, I would urge that they first try to improve the situation by going for it a bit.   They might have better luck than I did.

The only real change I've made in the past couple of weeks is to try to patronize these businesses a lot less than I have been.  My monthly budget can't handle twelve to fifteen trips to the coffee shop or five trips to the diner per week.  I've attributed this tendency to go to such places so frequently as a manifestation of my akathisia.  Akathisia is a common side effect of many antipsychotic medications including, apparently, the one I'm on. Akathisia is a desire for movement, such as my frequent desires to get in my car and drive to the grocery store or the coffee shop.  Since I've regarded this urge to patronize these businesses primarily as a manifestation of this side effect of my antipsychotic medication, rather than a manifestation of some desperate need for female attention or companionship, I've been able to manage this tendency to get in my car and drive to these various places a lot better.

I don't know if this ability to control this urge has resulted in a slight, slight uptick in the attention from women in my world-in the case of the former next door neighbor not at all- but  I will, as usual, monitor the situation.  Whether I report any more findings on this blog remains to be seen. 

  

I've talked about a friend I've distanced myself these last few years.  He's had a lot of girlfriends and experience and all of that.  My overall lack of experience and my belief that I'm a better person than him often tempts me to tell myself that I deserve the love and attention from women that seems to come much easier for him much more than he does.

In 2012 I called a female friend to ask her for a date.  I adored her, and we had been intimate one night many years earlier.  At the time I called her in 2012 I wanted to take her out and tell her how I felt about her in hopes of taking our deal to the next level.  I call, she answers, I tell her who it is, and she says, "Oh, hi," in a tone of voice that betrayed a total lack of enthusiasm that it was me calling her.

After I got off the phone with her, I decided to reevaluate this whole "next level" business.   I remembered a time in the Summer of 2011 where she said that she would like to be remembered as a major problem for me in reference to a painting that portrayed such women from my past.  It was a picture of my mother as Medusa.  The snakes coming out of her head represented women that I had problems with to some degree or other.  Anyway, this girl I wanted to take to the next level expressed a desire to have her likeness added to the painting of the snake women.  One can see the painting on my "Art" page on this site.  After I remembered this remark by her, I never had the desire to take anything to the next level with this woman ever again.  In 2013 she eventually moved on to someone else.

My point is, once upon a time, when some woman expressed that she was tired of me calling her by how she greeted me when I called, I would disregard this feedback and try to press on.  I think the belief that I deserved this person's love fueled this tendency to try to overcome this resistance.

Now, my scoundrel of a friend would typically not ignore this type of feedback, and if he didn't just immediately back off, he would move onto greener pastures, because someone else would usually come along.  So my belief that I deserved to be loved more than someone I knew to be a bit of a slimeball would typically not amount much success for me.  Not only that, if I would insist on pressing forward against all odds, I could set myself up for a real crash and burn psychotic episode.

I'm writing this in part because, these past several years, I've not really had anything nice to say about this friend I've distanced myself from.  I'm just trying to say there's reasons he's had a easier time getting girlfriends and all of that other than he's just had lucky breaks that I haven't had.  He's real goodlooking and he has a high prestige job and he doesn't have any mental health deal to the extent that I have, but he also had more of an ability and willingness to let go of something that wasn't working for him initially than I had.

I also want to take this opportunity to say this about the unavailable woman deal that I found myself in earlier this year:  I couldn't have handled my deal with the Invisible Woman better if I had a hundred more chances to do so.  Whatever entity I was dealing with on the other end; whether it was all in my head or there was something really going that involved this A-list celebrity to a greater or lesser extent, I definitely brought my A-game to the table.

I have no regrets about posts where I said that I cared for the Invisible Woman a great deal, but I also stand by the post from June where I say, if any of this is for real, that this person has some sort of emptiness inside of her that compels her to try and shit on someone she considers both a bad person and vulnerable to being shat on by her.  If there is anything to this for real. the Invisible Woman and her cohorts were nothing but a bunch cowards who probably thought they were going to have such an easy time of it fucking me over in a major way.  People like this always feel like they'll have an easy time of it with me.