Does she?  I make no apologies about my attraction to her and desire to see her socially.  Maybe I might as well shoot pixie dust out of my asshole as speculate on her state of mind.  I'm no mind reader, dig.  Me, i'd love to have coffee with her and really get to know her on some social level.  Maybe she's just not interested in a likewise manner towards me.  If that's the case, then I guess she will never have to think, FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE, about what might have happened if she'd been a little bit forthcoming towards me about something that might weigh on her conscience.  After all, and seeing as how this line of reasoning I'm on may have ZERO basis in reality; and if it does have ZERO basis in reality, then I don't have to worry about what amounts to just another very attractive young woman who has ZERO interest in me as a potential friend or more; but yeah, what if she has some major shit to hide?

Well, I'll try and help her out, if that's the case.  Tell her what I'll do: I'll try to come off as obnoxiously as possible to the point where she will GLADLY hide whatever she's hiding from me, and she will GLEEFULLY continue to collaborate with any confederates on her end in whatever shit she's got herself mixed up in.  After all, could law enforcement, whether on the the local, state, or federal level potentially take an interest in what's going on on her end of things?  Again, this blog, I just run this crazy-ass shit up the flagpole and see who salutes.  "Oh pay him no mind.  It's just that crazy Richard Alexander."  And I hope it is just little old crazy me.  I hope she all she has to hide are like, boyfriends, or some such shit.  No big deal.

Me I'm totally down with seeing her socially.  But if she's got some big thing to hide, I can see where that would never happen, if she has any say in it whatsoever.  Which, of course, she does.  Yeah, I'd probably be a real asshole about whatever's eating her, if it's as wildly grandiose in scale as my imagination can make it.  It's only as if I've pretty much had to deal with shit like this all of my adult life, so she can bet I'd probably not take it too well.  But, what about my end of it?  I've gone over all kinds of shit I'm not proud of from my past, right here on this blog.  For all the world to see.  So, again, pixie dust out of my asshole, maybe, but that would explain why I'm down with seeing her, but she's not down with seeing me. 

So, myself, as a person with a major mental illness, I learn to play to two or more possibilities in situations like this.  So here goes.  There exists the more mundane possibility that she just has not interest in me at all.  No bizarre plots or conspiracies to speak of.  None.  That's one. Another possibility resides in the notion that yes, she's come to care for me, but she thinks I won't accept that she's orchestrated a rather ordinary, run-of-the-mill, years long cat-and-mouse game by me and that I couldn't move on from that and allow things to grow.  Then there's the possibility that this crazy shit I've alluded to in previous sentences actually has quite a bit of basis in fact; and I'm talking about the use of the internet to stalk me, the Invisible Woman, people from my past, younger guys wanting to beat me up at clubs etc., etc.

But here's the thing.  I have found that the best possible course of action to take in these kinds of situations is....to not do much of anything about any of that, really.  If she's just not interested in me, then I just need to leave her alone.  I'm okay with that.  If she cares for me some, but thinks that more involved interaction with me might not work because of some run-of-the-mill cat-and-mouse game she orchestrated, well, that's her prerogative to not get mixed up with me.  Now, the third possibility I've outlined, the crazy stuff, this gets interesting, but still, it might turn out for the best if she tries to work things out without my help.  Me, I have no substantive proof that the craziest scenarios have any basis in reality, just me thinking out loud again.  And she might well know that if she did come clean on something like that, that I'd probably hit the fucking ceiling over it and want to go right after whomever put her up to her role in this.  She wanted to take the point position in that deal, how's she liking it now?  That kind of thing.  So, not much for me to do but leave her alone, and not do much of anything else.

Ever since this young woman who works at this business whom I can go on and on about on this blog started in on me with her subtle yet effective flirtations, I've felt compelled to play to the notion that she really has no interest in me.  And so it goes that I still play to that notion to this day.  Oddly enough, that does not bum me out these days.  I still find her pretty inaccessible, and a HUGE reason I feel I can't just talk to her about anything under the sun when I do see her centers around this concern that she really doesn't want any part of that kind of dialogue with me.  But, that doesn't bum me out, either.

Early this morning, I found out that what bummed me out these days centers around an imagined scenario where I would feel compelled to say no to any chance of going out with her.  Then I realized this; I cast my vote for seeing her socially two months ago when I invited her to my comic book sale.  I haven't changed my mind ONE LITTLE BIT on that score.  I'd totally love to see her socially if given the chance.   The apparent reality that she really doesn't want that doesn't bother me so much, because that's just something I can't control.

I want her and everyone else concerned to understand this: My behavior towards her and willingness, or lack of willingness, to interact with her comes from a palpable feeling on my part that she doesn't want me bothering her.  I want NO ONE, including her, to think that my lack of willingness to engage with her comes from a place where I don't want anything to do with her.  I just don't want to bother her.  I repeat, if it were up to me, I'd go out with her in a heartbeat.  No question about it.

If some of these much, much younger women in my day to day world wanted to go out with me, yes.  Unequivocally, yes.  Absolutely I'd love to go out with quite a number of the early to mid twenty-something years old women I see at coffee shops, restaurants, the grocery store.  Yep.

In a perfect world going out with such women would present no problems for me.  When I tried to get with the young women at this one coffee shop I patronize during the years 2009-2011, I came up empty and then some.   A lot of them tried to retaliate with mean rejection games, because, I guess, they viewed my overtures towards them as a type of harassment.  It's not as if I've gotten ten years YOUNGER since then, either.  In 2016, a young woman, I'll say early thirties, who managed a shift at a pizza place invited me to drink with her at her favorite tavern.  I told her I didn't drink, and we never went out.  But, she broached the subject, which I have ZERO problem with.

When I invited that young woman who works at that one business I patronize to my comic book sale late last October, I really counted that as an exception.  Understand, I had (probably still have, but maybe I'm coming out of it) an almost morbid fixation on her dating back to, I suppose, the Summer of 2019.  So, finally taking matters into my own hands and approaching her for social reasons almost THREE YEARS after she initiated her (pretty minor, but she's VERY attractive) flirtations represented a real raising of the bar for what it would take for me to approach a much younger employee of a business I patronize.

So, on the one hand, I really, really do have an attraction to MUCH younger women, but I think I'm willing to let just about anyone I can think of off-hand go out with the tide.  The whole notion of just letting opportunities with women in general just slip through my fingers really appeals to me, especially as that notion governed my behavior towards that young woman I wound up approaching last October.  I texted a friend of mine last week that I don't wreck myself on women anymore, and I think the way I'm just willing to let all of that go just because I say so, dammit, accounts for a big reason why I don't wreck myself on women anymore. 

I had someone tell me once that a mutual friend of ours said that I was compulsively self-revealing.  Okay, I guess this post will prove that.  I do this for a reason, though.  I've spent this overnight period in bed thinking about someone and where they might have been coming from with some of the kinds of attentions they did pay to me over these almost three years.  I thought the subject of where they might be coming from in general in regards to me so delicate and so personal that I figure it a good idea if I put the primary focus of this post on myself instead of them.

I first must extend my apologies to my sister, whom I will call Judy, because I will now tell a dramatic story from my childhood that involves her.  This story, whether one chooses to believe ALL of its narrative elements or not, at least reveals something about the nature of a youngest of five children who first grasps very, very serious matters with his gut years before he can intellectually process them with his mind.

One night in the Fall (?) of 1971, when I was seven years old, I lay in bed on a school night trying to get to sleep.  The problem arose  when my sister (17 at the time) and her boyfriend in the bedroom next to me started "fighting."  The fighting consisted of Rusty hitting my sister and telling her that she was going to "sleep" with him that night, and my sister crying and protesting that she did not want to "sleep" with "Rusty" that night.  I lay in bed in the next room wondering, I guess, why my sister didn't want to go to sleep with Rusty.  I mean, weren't they already in bed together?  Why was he hitting her over this issue?  Why was he so mad at her?  She might just take longer to go to sleep than he would.  He could go ahead and doze off etc. etc.

Now, in the years that would follow my remembrance of this episode, I would feel really bad about how I must have just lay there in my bed in the next room doing nothing while all of this went on.  It was only in my later twenties that I also recalled my dad being down there at some point and gently suggesting that Rusty might just want to go to his house that night, and Rusty being really super-nice about dad being down there and protesting that everything was fine to the point where he convinced Dad to go back upstairs.

I then remember Rusty being really gentle with Judy and how all of us went to bed and that was that.  A day or two later I told my friend and neighbor, Moose, about how Rusty and Judy had had a fight, and when Moose (8 years old at the time) asked Judy about it in the kitchen during the next day or day after, she told us to, "Fuck off!"

I confronted Judy about this night during a long period of psychosis in 1995, and she couldn't recall this particular night or the next day or so when Moose confronted her with what I had told him.  Judy told me she broke up with Rusty after a night at HIS apartment when he "wouldn't let (her) leave."  She had no problem remembering that night.

Now, the Legend of Richy Vegas, as I pieced it together over the years, takes us back to those moments as I lay in bed frightened about what was going on in the room next to mine.  My bed lay on the opposite side of the same wall next to Judy's bed.  So, as Rusty proceeded to hit Judy- this went on for a while- as Rusty hit Judy and demanded that she sleep with him, I started to recall something Moose said one day as we played in a pile of landscaping dirt for a new house in our West Austin neighborhood.  In the telling of the Legend, I recall Moose saying that if we ever found ourselves in a bad situation we didn't know how to deal with, I guess he supposedly said, that we should ask God for help, and that God would help us.

When we look into the mind of the seven year old Richy Vegas, God comes to him with an idea.  So, Richy Vegas stands up in his bed, pounds the wall with his fist several times somewhere above his head, Rusty exclaims, "What the fuck is that?," Richy Vegas stealthily runs upstairs and tells his mom and dad in a drowsy manner that Rusty and Judy were having a fight, whereon Dad goes downstairs, but not before Richy Vegas goes downstairs ahead of him and gets into bed.  That might explain why Rusty was so loudly, exceedingly polite and cooperative when Dad came downstairs and confronted the situation.

After Dad goes upstairs, and after Rusty promises my sister that he won't give her any more trouble, he calls to me as I lay in bed.  He asks me about the pounding, I profess ignorance and say it must have been my older brother (13) whose bedroom resided in another part of the downstairs.  According to the Legend, I said that my older brother must have been in my room looking for something, but that I was trying to get to sleep, like I was when Rusty woke me up to ask about the pounding.  

The Legend has Rusty ask my older brother sometime later about that night, my brother professes ignorance, and Rusty is, not only the first person to guess that it was indeed me who pounded on the wall, but the first person to disseminate the origin story of the Legend of Richy Vegas to people as he turns his life around in later years.

So, the next day, I had no recall of the pounding on the wall.  God had apparently struck a rather devious Faustian bargain with me, whereon in subsequent years, these acts of divine intervention I practiced left me with no memory of them in the wake of said acts.  It was only in the aftermath of my conversation with Gil Wilson at that party in 1992, where I had recovered memories of that night at the Cannibal Club in 1989, that I started to have a clue about the supposed existence of my alter ego, Richy Vegas.  

The Legend really kicked into high gear during that months long period of psychosis in 1995, when I really needed a medication change but didn't get one until, like I said, months after my first symptoms of voices and "recovered memories"; it wasn't until that long period of psychosis that I had the conviction that the Legend of Richy Vegas extended well beyond that night at the Cannibal Club and all the way from the age of seven until that period in 1992, which marked the beginning of the end of Richy Vegas.  Or did it?

Let's get back to some facts, shall we?  In 1985 and into 1986, I dated Lisa and Jeannette.  I didn't date either of them for over a month, but I never laid a hand on either of them.  In the 2000's, I sort of dated "Chelsea," but we were more platonic friends that people who dated.  Never laid a hand on her.  I had some loose sex with two other women, paid for three more.  Never laid a hand on any of them.  I've gone on at great lengths about the misconduct I did engage in with "Wanda," "Linda," and "Katy,"  I don't want to dredge that up.  Regular readers of this blog know enough about those stories.

I'm a big guy with a mental illness who has acted out at times in his life.  I can understand how someone might, if they heard about that stuff from third parties, might feel torn with indecision about me.  I would caution such a person to watch out for ANYONE who seems a little TOO understanding and TOO patient and TOO nice and TOO smooth about any woman they supposedly care for taking up what must seem like a permanent residence astride a fence about them. 

In 1989, I worked at G/M Steakhouse.  "Dickbag McNuttsack" blabbed to our fellow employees that I had been cleared of an attempted rape charge only after submitting to a photo lineup, whereupon the victim emphatically said I was not her attacker AFTER she picked a photo of a guy that did more closely resemble her stated description.  After my run-in with "Linda," during the Winter months of 1989, but before I waved an axe in the direction of Linda's house from my mom's property during the Summer of 1989, I had a run-in with "Myrna," a fellow employee at G/M.  

From what I pieced together years later, during and after my psychosis in 1995, I guessed that certain employees at G/M took this rape lineup story that DB McNuttsack related a little too seriously, and that would explain how things shook out.  For my part, looking back, I did not see MYSELF as a rapist, because I had never raped anyone.  So when my fellow employees alluded to this or that around that subject, such as one story a punk girl told about being raped outside of Liberty Lunch, any idea that those allusions had anything to do with me, in their minds at least, just went right over my head and didn't register at all.  Anyhoo, just yet another time when I arrived, youngest child that I am, very, very late to the the ball everyone's been attending this whole time.

If any women out there have such misgivings about me that they hesitate to approach me for social reasons despite their attraction to me, I might advise them to just not bother with me.  I don't like being jerked around any more that anyone else does.  Furthermore, I have met attractive women in my life who seem to not feel at all threatened by me from the get go, and sometimes we hit it off.  They exist.  I don't need to rely on anyone who has such major misgivings about me to enjoy some of the finer things life. 

My invitation to that young woman at that business had two purposes.  The primary purpose for me reaching out to her came from a desire to see her on a social basis, and since she seemed to have no desire to initiate those kinds of interactions, I went ahead and took charge of that.  The secondary purpose to my invitation to my comic book sale at my friends' business came from a desire to issue an ultimatum.  The ultimatum aspect meant that if my primary desire did not get addressed in a meaningful way by her, that I would just go ahead and get on with my life.  

Don't get me wrong, I make no apologies about how much I really do care for her, but I care for her so much that I found the ultimatum necessary.  I said in my last post that whatever I give that expresses my feelings for her, I don't even think I can take such expressions back if I wanted to.  The most I could do would involve some crude sabotage that would negate whatever more positive things I wanted to express, and I have no desire to engage in such reprehensible behavior now, and, in saying what I will say shortly, such acts of sabotage would prove as unnecessary as they prove reprehensible.

I said a couple of posts ago that she might find my paranoid speculations of where she came from all this time in regards to me upsetting, but I then followed with the observation that my almost total lack of meaningful access to her in the form of communication meant that, mental illness or not, anyone's imagination might run wild as to what really went on on her end this whole time.

And so it stands, and I will just say this: the reason I can't communicate with her in a meaningful way probably comes from the notion I have that she does not want me to have any meaningful access to her.  I don't think at this point the reason I can't call her, write her, etc., comes from a reluctance on my part to do enough to make that happen.  I think she does not want that at all.

I rolled out the red carpet for her when I told her about my comic book sale, and I saw her at her place of employment yesterday.  I walked up to her and asked her a question related to her job, which she and a coworker with her promptly answered.  But, she made no attempt to tell me why she couldn't take me up on my invitation to my show that I made in late October.  I think I can pretty safely assume that she just didn't want to come, and therefore, she doesn't have any desire for me to have any meaningful access to her.

I don't want to go into the possible reasons for her lack of interest in engaging with me. I've said enough on the subject in many, many previous posts, and I don't really have any desire to attempt to embarrass her now.  Right now I'm very comfortable with the idea of staying in my lane as far as the ways I go about patronizing her place of employment.  I saw my approach to her yesterday as more of a reflection of my desire to stay in my lane than any desire to obsessively favor her with attention.

I think that woman I go on and on about on this blog wanted to walk me down a path where I would wind up intensely disliking her, hating her, call it what you will.  I get the feeling she doesn't want me in that place now, as it turns out.  I say this based on past experience, in large part.  The fact that she displayed great kindness towards me when I approached her for social reasons probably put her in a place where she does not want me hatin' on her after all.  Very well.

She's not entitled to my love for her kindness towards me.  One can't invoke the dark things I suspect her of trying to invoke and just get all of that wiped clean in an instant.  But, however much I showed that I cared for her that day, I can't decide to take that back either.  That kind of thing is mine to give, as I see it, but not mine to take back.  

I still just want to get on with my life, because I don't see any real change in anything that goes on between us, and that's the way it's always been between me and her, as far as I can tell.  I've taken these deals to this place more than once, and never had the chance to cash in on any of that.  I don't really expect to now.

As of this writing, i have little or no desire to seek out the presence of that young woman that works at that business whom I can go on and on and on about on this blog.  The only drawback of my current approach, to just stay in my lane as far as how I patronize her place of employment and refrain from any attempts to favor her with my presence and attention, seems to reside in the belief that I the longer I do this, the more i might come to realize that she probably had it in for me all along, and that no real feeling on her end for me ever existed, and that no substantive feeling for me exists on her end towards me now.

On the other hand, I seem to enjoy my sense of emotional autonomy from all the dastardly shenanigans that may well have emanated from her and hers these past several years.  I often find I enjoy getting away from such a person if I give the idea of it a good chance to take hold.  As I wrote a couple of posts ago, I started training myself long ago to live without such women in my life, no matter how robustly or for how long the notion of them got under my skin.

A few moments ago, as I settled down for the day, I thought that one advantage of staying away from this person and just leaving her alone might come from how such a move might make me look to those in my day to day world.  This includes just about everyone, man or woman, any age, who may or may not have knowledge of the rather grandiose yet sinister notions I harbor of what all went on these past few years.  I like the idea of those around me seeing me more as a man, and less as an obsessive pest who may pose a threat to someone such as her.  I think if I take the additional step of removing the standard set of bottom lines as significant markers for success, i.e., don't make romantic and sexual engagement with attractive women the ultimate bottom line for what I consider a successful outcome to this whole deal, that I might really like the idea of those around me perceiving me more in a way I would like for them to perceive me.

Now, my fearful notions of where this young woman positioned herself in relation to me these past several years could prove wrong.  If this young woman reads this post and finds my paranoia upsetting, she should realize that, given that I still find her very inaccessible, and that I gave her a very, very, good chance over a month ago to make herself more available and accessible to me, and that she did not take advantage of this opportunity, well, she has to understand that anyone in my position might find their imagination running wild about all that has come so far.  That includes the fact that nothing really seems to have changed between us at all, even after I so unambiguously and emphatically reached out to her in the best way I possibly could over a month ago now.