For much of my adult life, really beautiful women, if they've been anything to me at all, have often played the role of antagonists.  It might have something to do with my mental illness.  They see me as a loser and/or dangerous, and they set about proving it to themselves and others by playing vicious, deceitful, hurtful romantic-love-oriented rejection games with me.  In several instances I knew for a fact that they did so to elevate some man in their life onto a pedestal by degrading me in such a manner.  Sort of a female parallel to the madonna/whore complex that can bedevil a lot of men.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if I didn't ADORE so many of these beautiful women.  One of the first things I taught myself to do in response to this phenomenon, in my twenties, while still undiagnosed with a major mental illness, is how to live without such women as friends or girlfriends in my life.   In my twenties, I read in Doctor David Burn's book, "Feeling Good,"  how he counseled so many patients to learn how to be happy without wayward boyfriends and separated spouses.  He emphasized that these women could learn to be happy without unreliable or unavailable partners and learn autonomy and self-sufficiency through these trying experiences.

Oftentimes the patients could turn the tables on their wayward partners through such learned behavior and be the ones deciding whether or not to have anything to do with these men.  I haven't typically had that level of success, but it doesn't really matter.  What matters is the fact that I learned to live without these women as lovers or friends eager for my company.  I simply learned to get along fine without them, because I really didn't have any other viable options.  My more trying times back then came from what I now consider relapses to my love-addicted ways.  Still, I completed an undergraduate degree, and then a graduate degree, both in studio art, largely through the sometimes reliable emotional and mental stability such cognitive behavior techniques allowed me to have. 

I'm now at a point in my life where I can employ many, many tools to bring about this state of happiness. Not only do I know how to provide myself with good company, even when alone, but I have a good antipsychotic medication, access to counseling and support groups, an understanding of my diagnosis, an ability to abstain from cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, and friends who are better, more supportive friends than many friends in my past.  All of these tools together help me to like women in general more and still have such a strong attraction to really beautiful women without feeling particularly threatened or compromised by that attraction alone.  If really beautiful women want to play hurtful games with me, still, they won't have an easy time of it.

I can't help but think a lot of these really beautiful women come from a place of unimaginable privilege with these hurtful ways they so often visit upon me.  They've simply never had to learn how to be the primary providers of their own happiness the way I had to learn at their age.  There's always been some guy ready to step up for them, maybe.

Perhaps, though, at least some of them have really painful and/or frightening experiences from their past that inform such behavior, but I don't see how attempts to punch down on someone such as myself will help them.  I can't help but wonder if so many of them come off as hopelessly needy and complex to so many of these righteous boyfriends they try to elevate by tearing someone such as me down.  I would advise these really attractive women to find constructive ways of seeking personal happiness and fulfillment that don't involve a boyfriend or husband playing the role of primary provider of that happiness and fulfillment.

I sometimes get the impression that some of the women in my world play to me as some kind of a phenomenon.  If I had to say whether I am a mentally ill man who is trying to work a recovery from love addiction or, to this impression I sometimes get, a phenomenon, I'd say that I'm a mentally ill man trying to work a recovery from love addiction.  I might seek out a support group in the next few days or so.  It's all very confusing.

My gig is one month away.  I read an interview with Tyler Mahan Coe the other day where he said that one should practice guitar ten hours a day, among other things, to know country music.  Not gonna happen.  I'm giving myself the night off from practice tonight.  No pressure.  Tonight, I'm still a mentally ill man trying to work a meaningful recovery from love addiction. My biggest push to become a better guitar player comes from trying to learn some classic rock covers that my music teacher wrote out for me to play.

The comics are coming along slowly. After all, I've got to learn all about country music and practice, practice, practice on that guitar.  I got a good review from Ryan Carey on his Four Color Apocalypse blog on Patreon for the latest book I sent him.  I'm quite ambitious about growing as a comic book illustrator.  I used a lot more light versus dark in the the last book.  I was inspired from readings of EC Comics illustrators such as Graham Ingels and Jack Davis.

I finished the arrangement of the song last night.  I wrote the lyrics in the early morning hours on Monday.  Some sample lyrics might give the reader the gist of the song: "Bad women you can hack/ but they won't love you back," and "I touched her heart and turned her loose/ then rode off on my cayuse."  So, I don't really date "bad women," but my unwavering attraction to such women is a gift from God.  It's up to me as to how I process my attraction to such women and what I do about it, given my limited access to them.

I think I may have gotten some positive feedback from my post about "Chelsea."  I'm saying this with a guess that my posts might show up on Reddit.  Last month a woman told me that she heard I was big on Reddit.  Okay, that's the basis of my guess.  So, if I am big on Reddit, and people, especially women, reacted positively to something I posted about my deal with Chelsea, what then, did they respond so positively to in that post?

I talked a lot about letting stuff go in my time with her.  Yeah, that's how I roll with attractive women these days.  I might approach such women, but if they don't vibe receptive to my overtures, I often let it go to the point where I just don't approach them again for social reasons at all.  I'll still like them, and I sure do wish a lot of the women I approach for social reasons were more receptive, but I can let all of that go on a dime.

Despite how she treated me over the years, I didn't have too much bad to say about Chelsea.  Maybe women who saw that post on Chelsea responded positively to that aspect of the post.  I mean, I've decided to try and refrain from portraying problematic women I've known over the years as total villains, because they had their point of view, and they are all probably something quite different than a total villain to a lot of people in their lives.  Also, every woman I've ever labeled as "problematic" was someone I initially had a very positive attraction to, and I think it would say a lot more about me than it would about all of them if I inevitably portrayed them all as total villains worthy only of the most vituperative invective solely based on how things shook out.

I think another aspect of why some women in my world may have responded positively to my post about Chelsea has to do with the sex part.  Yeah, it wasn't some wild time and all of that, but I did have sex with someone I had liked for some time.  Women may have responded positively to the way I just let stuff go over the years with Chelsea, and how the hands off approach to her shook out with the sex part.  I remembered soon after that sexual encounter with Chelsea how it had taken me years of doing things that way with women to finally pay off with that sex time with her.

And that's STILL how I want to relate to women I desire.  It'd be nice if that hands off approach paid off more than it has, but yeah, I like women I desire more over all than I have in years past, and that should count for something, I think.  Women in general seem keen on rewarding a man with positive feedback in order to encourage behaviors and attitudes they want the man to continue to engage in with how he relates to women, so there's that, too.

I have another gig at the Carousel Lounge!  The one I played on May 7th went well.  My performance was uneven in places, but people showed up.  I had eleven people show up, which is good for four in the afternoon on a Thursday.  I knocked myself out to get this poster done early Friday morning.  If I knock myself out in my practices for this gig even half as much as I knocked myself out on this poster, I should do fine.  Even if I do wind up playing to the bartender and no one else, I'll be okay with that.  My whole venture into music and songwriting came about as a result of my extensive, dedicated commitment to quitting smoking in 2002.  I took the money I saved from not buying two packs of cigarettes a day and bought guitar lessons with that money.  So, yeah, just playing a show for the bartender would do me just fine.  She's nice.  I probably wouldn't book another show at the Carousel if I had a bad turnout for this gig-at least not anytime soon-but all in all, it's all good.

"Chelsea" was someone I met in 2003.  She was eighteen years younger than me.  She laughed a lot at me when we hung out with mutual friends on the first night we met.  She had an off and on boyfriend she really liked but she felt insecure about.  She would hang out with me with the understanding that we were just friends.  She was really attractive and I liked her.  This couple that worked where she worked advised me to go light on her and not come on like I was trying to have sex with her.

I lost touch with Chelsea by 2005.  She stopped calling and I just let her go.  Then one night in October of 2007 she called me out of the blue.  It was around eleven o'clock at night. She wanted me to pick her up from her apartment, where she lived with her dad.  I picked her up, brought her over to my house, and we had sex.  The sex wasn't really anything special.  She wouldn't let me kiss her, for example, and it was all pretty anticlimactic.  I took her home at around four in the morning.  She blocked my number from her phone when I tried to call her, so I just let it go.

I put in a friend request for her on Facebook in 2011.  By then I'd committed to abstinence from drugs and alcohol.  We reconnected, sort of.  She pretty much friend-zoned me for the next year and a half or so.  I decided to let go of her again after I called her in September of 2012.  When I called she was like, "Oh high."  She didn't seem enthused to hear from me at all, so I did some math on her.  I remembered her telling me she wanted to be represented in one of my paintings as one of the snake women that comes out of my-mother-as-Medusa's head.  I decided then and there that I no longer had any interest in dating her.

In the years that followed,  I figured she had sex with me that night in the first place to get back at an errant boyfriend.  I thought about that today. If I encountered any very desirable woman in my world who wanted to use me in that manner, I would seriously consider following my buddha and at least seriously consider letting such an "opportunity" slip through my fingers,  ESPECIALLY if it were someone I really liked a LOT.  I'm not prepared to say that I anticipate having such an "opportunity" with anyone in my world these days.  My over all relative lack of experience with women and sex might just mean I'm wildly off-base in whatever guesses I make about this or that woman in my world I like a LOT.

Am I big on Reddit?  A woman said she heard I was big on Reddit when I talked to her a couple of weeks ago.  I didn't press her for details.  I said something like, "Reddit? No, on Instagram, maybe."  But, yeah, am I big on Reddit?  Is that the online presence that I did not consent to and whose existence I've speculated on since November of 2018?  Anyone? Hello?  I did a couple of searches based on my name and my pseudonym and came up empty.  Am I on some Sub-Reddit such a r/sexualpredators or something like that?  Whatever it is, it wasn't a good presence for the longest time.  If I have a presence on Reddit at all, that is.

Oh yes, my gig this coming Thursday.

 I’ve talked a lot about crash and burn episodes involving mostly unavailable women that occurred in mostly my twenties. A principal element of dysfunction that I brought to those episodes was the high expectations that I had for these individual women. When I compare my experiences with individual, mostly unavailable women back then with my experiences with individual, mostly unavailable women these days, the sky high expectations are simply not there these days.

It’s not as if I one day simply decided to just be a good guy about my expectations for women and lived happily thereafter. I credit my improvement to following my buddha. The “what if I turned my back on love” path that I’ve embraced these past fourteen years allows me to more readily let go of my expectations for attractive women who seem to take something of an interest in me these days.

It is as if a fork opens upon the road I’m on and a rightward option appears before me that involves letting supposed opportunities slip through my fingers if I take that rightward path. It is in the taking of this path that I often question the actual level of interest these individual women have in me and I invariably seem to find my expectations diminishing. Maybe one day I’ll take this buddha path too far and let an actual, genuine opportunity with an actual, genuine very attractive woman actually, genuinely slip through my fingers. It hasn’t happened yet, to the best of my knowledge, but I suppose it could.

Ideally, I'd like to go to the coffee shop only once in a while so that the trip becomes a special occasion.  Here's my gig flyer again.