In the last post I talked about how I put in a Facebook friend request for some woman I met last weekend.  On Saturday, she'd accepted my request, but by Sunday night she'd unfriended me.  I guessed several reasons for this, but the guess that most concerns me might involve how I talk openly and honestly about my mental health issues on this blog.  People who wonder why mentally ill people complain about a stigma really need to get hip to the idea that the possibility that this woman unfriended me for that reason seems very probable to me.

My guess is that her next move will wait until I see her at one of the clubs when I go to see a friend's band.  This could come in the next weekend or so, or six months from now.  It doesn't matter, because she unfriended me.  I envision myself talking to a mutual friend and how she might walk up an try to join the conversation.

Now, the only thing I that would concern me about how I'd react to that involves the notion that I would then try to prove what a great guy I am about being rejected by her, and try to come off as all super nice to her.  I will try to refrain from doing this.  I don't need to get all angry and make a scene, but I don't really need to try to prove what a great guy I am either.  I just see that kind of overture as an attempt to manipulate someone such as her into liking me, and I see my attempt to manipulate someone such as her into liking me after rejecting me as an attempt to pursue an unavailable woman, and I try not to pursue unavailable women anymore.  I don't need to be rude or nasty to her. I can just be kind of quiet and neutral, and maybe demur from any attempts to converse with her, and bow out of the conversation with the mutual friend or friends.  

This past weekend I met a woman who was pretty attractive and seemed pretty nice.  I decided to put in a Facebook friend request for her after I got home.  I put in the request the next evening (Saturday), and when she accepted it, that made me pretty happy.

This past evening I tried to search for her on my list of friends, and her name did not come up.  I searched Facebook to see if she'd left the site entirely, for perhaps the reasons people leave Facebook these days, but no, she was still on Facebook.  When I found her, I had the option of putting in another friend request for her, which I did not do.

I've thought of several possible reasons why she would drop me as a friend so quickly.  One could be that someone told her about what a bad guy I was, or she read some of this stuff on my blog, and dropped me out of concern for her personal safety.  Well, that's at least a kind of understandable reason, though I at least would have liked the chance to advocate for my side of whatever issues she had with me, but not matter.  I can just let her go and leave it at that.

Another possibility is that she had a jealous boyfriend who is three feet up her ass all the time and won't have her being Facebook friends with a guy he doesn't know.  Again, if she chooses to be in a relationship with someone like that, there's really nothing I can do about that.

The remaining possibilities I can think of involve the prospect that she doesn't really care what kind of an impression she makes on me.  Let's go over one, two, or three.  Shall we?  One possibility is that she thought I was someone else, and when she found out I was not the person she thought I was, she rescinded her acceptance for that reason.  Again, the overriding conclusion I can make is that she doesn't care what I'll think of such a move, so that makes her a write-off in that scenario.

Another reason might be that she's gay, but so what?  Like I can't understand if she replied to a personal message I might send with that explanation?  I guess that would do a pretty good job of explaining why she doesn't care what kind of impression she makes on me; she's gay, AND she's an asshole.

She might be going through a rough time right now, for some reason.  She seemed alright when I met her the other night, but one never knows, does one.  That would be the most acceptable explanation of this last category, so I guess I'd have to give her that.

If she's not going through a rough time, that would lead me to another, less savory, explanation.  Maybe she saw the gist of the things I blog about; my mental illness, my relationship with women, etc.  She might have decided that I wasn't a guy worth knowing better, and so it didn't matter to her that she dropped my request.

Okay, no one's obliged to want to know me better.  BUT, and this is big, a subset of such a sentiment is that she's trying to make some player move.  The move is this: the right hand gives, the left hand takes away.  This kind of player move is designed to reap maximum attention with as little effort as possible.  So, the right hand accepts my friend request, the left hand takes it away.

If this blog post affords her the kind and quality of attention she desires as a result of such a move, well, it's more of a testament to her and her issues with being who she is than a statement about me and my issues, in my opinion.  If, on the other hand, she's really having a rough time of it for some reason, I apologize.  But, if she's making some kind of callous player move, I might suggest a creative writing class or art class or maybe musical instrument instruction so that she may find more socially acceptable forms of self-expression.  That is all.

I've finished inking forty of the eighty pages of the next issue of my comic book.  I figure that I will have this issue finished by the 25th of October.  That's a pretty fast turnaround- four months- for this issue.  That doesn't include the time I spent writing and laying out the text.

Now, I have to spend my time as constructively and productively as I am able to for the next eight months.  Why eight months?  In June of 2019 I will have my fifty-fifth birthday.  When I was in grad school, a fellow graduate student from Korea named Kim read my palm.  He said that in my mid-fifties, I would have a big change in my life.  I hope that doesn't just mean that I will have a massive heart attack and die.   Kim didn't specify what all would change.  He first said that I would marry and be very happy.  Ha!

When I had the vision of the new chapter of Legend of Richy Vegas, the issue of Kim's fortune for me came up in this way; I decided to make Kim's fortune a self-fulfilling prophesy.  The story on this home page, Richy Vegas: a psycho memoir,  chronicles the last time I was to inherit all of this good stuff in 1995, and how that all got screwed up.  So now, I have the Kim's fortune as my new date.

Over the years, I've found that these dates just have to pass.  There never is any way around it.  The year 2000, with the new millennium, brought dates that I just had to wait out for about as long a period of time as I have to wait out this one. My family scheduled a big Christmas get-together on one of our uncle's properties for Christmas 2000.  I must have anticipated something happening for at least the nine months prior.  Well, here I sit.   I wonder if there's any good new porn on the porn sites tonight?

Yeah, the big difference between now and the year 2000 is that I don't have the bad substance abuse habits now that I did back then.  I can pass the time with my books and my music.  I've also learned how to make consistently intelligent decisions about the women in my world these days.  At least, I think they're intelligent decisions.

An example: I play open mikes.  I do this to help me memorize songs and perform them competently for the purposes of gigs and recording of said songs.  The other day I ate at a restaurant where I perform.  A young girl who works there asked if I was going to play the open mike that was coming up in a day or two.  I said I might.

I got really excited that this young girl talked to me just this little bit, but when the night of the open mike came, I decided not to go.  I just saw this less traveled road open up at the fork, and I decided to take it.  I want to memorize at least one new song before I play out anywhere.  I have three from, ostensibly, the next album, that I've memorized, but I don't just want to do those again.  I want to uncork at least one or more new numbers at these events.

I figure that if this young woman just wanted to shine me on a bit, then I didn't want to show up all excited and just do the same songs.  If she was coming from a more sincere place, as another possible explanation, then waiting until I have some new material to play probably wouldn't put her off any.  I've had plenty of women do that jump through hoops stuff, and the predominant conclusion I can come up with about that is that they didn't really care for me that much.

Bill Kartalopoulos, the series editor of Best American Comics, recommended my books as "notable comics" on the web site for Best American Comics 2018:  http://on-panel.com/BAC2018/index.html   This is the second year that I have the honor of such recognition.
Stuff like this makes me feel like I'm getting something accomplished in this particular avocation.  

I applied for a showcase at SXSW 2019.  It'd be neat if I got booked for that as well.  It cost me $35 to apply, which they will surely keep if I don't get picked.  I would like to do the songs about Fuckface and whatnot for SXSW 2019.  I got the music from my latest album up on bandcamp.com, and there are now players for a couple of the songs on this website.  Yay!

I figure that I will finish the latest Richy Vegas book well before the end of the month. I've done the ink outlines for all of the pages already, so the book just waits for me to dive in and do the finished inks.  I've already finished 26 pages, one third of the book, and inertia just takes over at this stage.  Obsession is good for some things, if not others.



  

I've been posting about the Legend of Richy Vegas these past several posts.  One of the misconceptions that people commonly have about people who think along these lines concerns the notion that the afflicted party must debunk or disprove these grandiose notions in order to move on and resume their life.  What happens instead, in my case at least, is that everyday routine takes over and these more grandiose preoccupations, such as the Legend of Richy Vegas, take a back seat to the more mundane aspects of my life.  It's as if the grandiose thoughts and ideas, and the "recovered memories" that go along with them, make up a radioactive substance that loses its charge with the passage of  time and the continued importance of attending to the stuff of ordinary existence.  

I started having this dilemma back in 1995.  The onset of relative mental and emotional stability that came with the introduction of medications that worked, and that I could tolerate, also brought on a tendency to obsess on what all I experienced when I was sick for so long.  I used to pick upcoming dates as the day when I would hope that I would have answers to all of that, and that the upcoming date would deliver me from my luckless, loveless, boring everyday existence and propel me into dizzying heights of fame, fortune, and acceptance.  From time to time I still can find myself doing this obsession on an upcoming date, but I've built up my real life in ways that give me genuine happiness and fulfillment, and that helps.

Quitting the cigarettes, and drugs, and alcohol, and the uptick in more constructive activities, have helped with this waiting around to become world famous dilemma.  The only real changes to my day to day existence, other than circumstances such as the medicines I take, my age, friends and family issues, and employment, have been these lifestyle changes.  So, I may not have become an a-list celebrity because of the Legend of Richy Vegas, and that may never happen, but I have a day to day existence that I find more sustainable.  Out went the bad habits, and instead I work on music and art on an almost daily basis.

Another change I've made concerns the way I've pretty much stopped pursuing unavailable women.  I really try to identify the women in my world in terms of whether I think they have any potential for further involvement with me on a social level.  For the most part, I find myself letting go of any notions of any of that.  From time to time I try to talk to women whom I think may have potential, usually when I'm out in the clubs with friends, but so far no luck.

Unlike a radioactive substance, however, these grandiose notions can take on a new life, i.e. become recharged, like a battery, and I find myself having to deal with them all over again.  I guess that happened in the Summer of 2016, and continued on to the Invisible Woman in 2017.  I really glad that the real person whom this chimera, look it up, this chimera of the Invisible Woman came from might not even know that I exist.  I don't mention her name on this web site, and my posts on her social media accounts are few in number and pretty innocuous.  At the end of the day, I don't really care whether the Invisible Woman had any basis in reality, but instead I care more that the artifacts of my struggles; the posts to her social media accounts, these blog posts, and the songs about Fuckface and whatnot, may not even come back to bite me in the ass one day.

In last week's post I talked about how I thought that maybe people in my world were finding out about the glorious Legend of Richy Vegas.   Now, it might just be in my head, and it's an awfully egocentric assumption to make, but it seems as if some of these young women at these food service places I go to all of a sudden are never there when I go there.  I mean, it seems as if they disappeared after I posted that last week's post about the Legend.

I thought about this today, and I started to get all hurt by that prospect.  How dare they to think that I would try to use the Legend of Richy Vegas to my advantage!  Why... I would never....um...okay, I would totally try to play the Legend of Richy Vegas angle with any of these young women if they actually knew anything about it.  

It's people like that Bikram Yoga guy and those priests and youth ministers that try to go around convincing the world that they are above such callings of the flesh.  The Bikram Yoga guy got in trouble for sexually assaulting women as he tried to play himself off as a holy man who had transcended such base longings through his righteously superior hot yoga.  And we've all heard about the trouble the Catholic Church faces world wide.  I understand that a lot of these offending men become priests in the first place because they hope that such a solemn vow will remove these kinds of worldly temptations from their minds and bodies, but, no such luck.

So, I guess the women in my world who are avoiding me for this kind of reason are right to do so.  I mean, I don't know this for a fact, I'm just running this notion up the flagpole, which I do a lot of on this blog.  I guess that I will have to go to other businesses and find other girlfriends now.

I should finish the inks on issue number 16 of Richy Vegas comics by the 21st or 22nd of next month.  That would make for a four month turn around for this issue.  That does not include the time I spent writing and laying out the text in pencil on the paper plates.

I wonder if the Legend of Richy Vegas is catching up with me again.  When I returned home from graduate school in 1991, I would see people react to my presence in a weird way.  It would depend on the person.  There was this little punk rock guy named Mark who would look at me with a big smile and wide eyes when I went to G/M Steakhouse and he worked that night.  He really stood out.  It only began to make sense why he looked at me that way when I started breaking down a full year later during the Summer of 1992.  Mark had long since gone by then.  Where to, I don't know.

My medication works very well now.  That's an advantage I have now that I didn't have then.  During the Summer of 2016 I had a vision of another glorious chapter of the Legend of Richy Vegas.  I was not psychotic, because the medication had that under control.  I could drive a car, for example, or do anything else, really, and groove to "recovered memories" of this latest addition to the Legend of Richy Vegas.

In the Spring of 2016, I received that CD of the Invisible Woman's latest record along with a half pound of coffee beans.  Then, that Summer I had that vision, and when my Badfinger CD came up missing a couple of days before New Year's Eve of that year, I connected the Invisible Woman to this vision, and figured that she knew about this latest chapter.

Anyway, once again, people in my world will sometimes look at me in a way that echoes the way that punk rocker Mark would look at me back in 1991.  For years it was as if I wandered some desert aimlessly, particularly after my problems in 1995.  I finally had a medication that took care of my symptoms, and I could tolerate the side effects okay, but I found myself grasping at straws as far as the Legend of Richy Vegas was concerned.  Now, it feels like some kind of homecoming.  If this thing in the world progresses in any way, the shit might really start to hit the fan in the foreseeable future.  It's not anything I'm dreading, it just that I might be due for a big change.

I posted last Summer about women going adversarial on me.  I gave three examples where I believed that to be the case.  The longest post brought up a time where I patronized a diner, and one of the waitresses had an issue with a t-shirt I would wear, among other issues she had with me.  Briefly, she didn't come out and say she didn't like my shirt, I just had to guess based on some cues she gave.

I decided to stop wearing the shirt in there, and also, to not call attention to that.  It took her over two years to figure out that I'd stopped wearing that shirt, and in the meantime she and other employees decided that there was some kind of running feud with me, and they treated me accordingly.  

She seemed happy about my decision to stop wearing that t-shirt, and I gathered that she decided that she no longer had a problem with me.  The trouble is, I've decided that I still have a problem with her.  I took her newfound niceness as an effort to sweep all of her nastiness under the rug.  I went along with it for a couple of years.  I didn't see her much.

Here's the thing, in last week's posts I talked about having one of two tough options with women who didn't like me and tried to shit on me: either have them behave in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and succeeded, or have them behave in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and failed.  It's a tricky proposition to learn how to prevent these women from shitting on me in the first place, and often times they don't like me much for winning.

And so it was with this waitress over the two-plus years she tried to shit on me and failed, over, and over, and over again.  She didn't like me much at all, until the revelation about how much of a sweetheart I was for not wearing the shirt.  That's all great, but I was once again faced with two tough choices:  Do I let her sweep all of those bad times she instigated under the rug, or do I speak up and say something.

I don't have much experience with speaking up and saying something, somehow or some way.  I did so on this blog, and then last week I went into where she worked just to take everyone's temperature.  She didn't want to engage with me, and others waited on me as she went about her business.

That's fine.  It's a tough choice I have to make.  I have no idea who reads this blog.  Her frostiness may have stemmed, instead, from how I  rebuffed my former neighbor.  That was the gal who had kept me at arm's length the entire time she'd lived next door to me, only to show a newfound friendliness towards me when I ran into her last December at Vulcan Video.  I had no idea where this friendliness was coming from.  I thought it might have been some kind of a trick, so I didn't ask her out or anything.  I only put it together months later that my former neighbor roomed with this waitress' sister while they lived next door to me for a time.  

Anyway, it's a tough choice.  Do I speak up somehow about my resentment about how she and some of the other employees treated me, or do I just let her get away with murder?  The problem with the latter choice, which I've made with other women in other circumstances, is that the shit can really hit the fan that way; an overture to sex that the girl reads as a rape attempt in my truck one night, as an example of the first time this happened, or a crude sexual proposition in a car one night, as another example, or depicting the transgressors as victims of the Whitman massacre in one of my comic books, as yet another example.

Sooo, I"ve learned the hard way that sweeping this shit under the rug and offering up my forgiveness too freely can have bad consequences, so I'm not going to do that again.  Not this time, at least.  If I go into this person's place of employment, and she continues with her frosty reception, that's fine.  I guess the civil rights protest I've talked about regarding her and others will continue.  I will be as polite as a customer in her place of work has to be towards her, other employees, and customers.  If just leaving her alone is as polite as I can be towards her under these circumstances, so be it.  At least I'm calling the shots more with this course of action than with the other course of action.   

In the Fall of 1986, I took a class in Pseudoscience offered by the Physics department at UT-Austin.  The class surveyed everything from UFO's, astrology, and Bigfoot, to alternative medicine and all of that.  The instructor tried to teach methods of critical thinking  about subjects no matter what the source.

At the beginning of the semester I'd had a psychotic episode that capped a fixation on a young woman I'd had over the previous Summer. I came across as pretty freaked out at the time, I guess, and it surely must have shown to the people in that class and elsewhere. One day in this class I sat there listening to the instructor lecture.  Out of the corner of my eye I sort of noticed an attractive female student walk in late and sit on my row a couple of chairs down on my right.  I continued to pay attention to the lecture. 

This female student cleared her throat at some point and rattled some bracelets she wore.  I looked over at her and noticed that she was dressed up to the nines in a sexy blouse and skirt ensemble and that her hair and makeup was done up as if she was on a date or something.

I took this to mean that she was looking for attention, but I didn't really take her seriously.  I looked over at her once or twice, but I also made a show of looking at a pretty Latina girl in the first row in front of me who had presented her profile for mine and others' approval, maybe.  The classroom featured raised, theater style seating, so the rows of chairs rose up from the floor where the teacher lectured, and the whole scene that played out with me and these two young women made for a bit of a spectacle that everyone behind us, plus the teacher in front, could see. 

In the days that followed, I figured that the girl who had got all dolled up must have been impressed by how cool I was about her looking so good, apparently for my benefit.  A couple of classes later I sat in a chair at the beginning of the class, hoping that I would have good things come to me.  This young women who'd got all dressed up walked in with another female student.  One of them said something like, "You can tell he's not a virgin, but he's a total dork."  Both of these women adopted a loud, snotty, pissed off tone of voice in their exchange, which went on for some length.  The professor, who stood at a podium arranging lecture notes, looked up at me and smiled as if to say, "Ha!"

Sooo my point is, I've had to make intelligent decisions about women in my world, and a lot of them don't like it much.  I frequently call out a lot of these women in these posts.  I might identify them as waitresses or baristas of businesses I patronize, but I don't name their names, or say the names of the businesses where they work. The only way I describe them, typically, is to say that they are young and attractive.

If it's a choice between women like this behaving in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and succeeded, or behaving in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and failed, what choice does my audience think I should make?  In a couple of posts I've written about how I viewed my defiant patronage of a particular restaurant as a one-man civil rights protest.  I guess that I will expand this protest to other businesses as well.  I will repeat what I said in those posts: as long as I am courteous to the employees and customers of these businesses, and am dressed appropriately, bathed etc., I have the right to patronize these businesses and not be fucked with or otherwise discriminated against.

If anyone gets the feeling that I'm going into their place of employment looking for a romantic love arrangement with themselves or any other employees, I will try to put a sock on all of that.  I think I will extend this protest to the night clubs and other places I may go.

I will try to stay on one aspect of this topic in this post.  If anyone who has read the previous post finds themselves wondering, "Why would any man want to be a nice guy?" Well, I will go into some major reasons why I chose that path in my earlier days, and why I still make no effort to disavow whatever kinder aspects of my nature towards women that remain.  

I read a little piece in one of the major newspapers I subscribe to, maybe the Washington Post, that told of a psychological survey some researchers undertook not too long ago.  It had to do with young men in their formative college age years, whether they went to college or not, and their beliefs about how the deal worked with women.  This survey found that about 1 in 5 or so of men of this age had the biggest mouths about their exploits with women.  These loudmouths would go on at length about how shabbily they treated their girlfriends or whomever, and would go on at length about their deviant sexual exploits and so on, to the point where the "nicer" types thought that this was how the majority of successful men their age related to women.

As someone who had to listen to some of these asshole types run their mouths at length during those years, that can be a really soul-killing experience.  This one close friend of mine, like that, kind of served as a negative role model for me.  I was willing to do anything to forge an identity that did not involve treating potential girlfriends of mine as shabbily as he regularly boasted about concerning women I considered friends, or women I at least liked and had some attraction to myself.

This effort to forge a separate identity from such a type led me to make some horrendously bad decisions that involved just picking some women who flirted with me a little for my ever-lasting-true-love love interests and going for it full throttle.  This kind of thing could scare the bejesus out of those around me, and lead me to some really bad psychotic episodes.  I guess it was in my nature to be that way in the first place, but good lord, listening to just one of these guys just run his goddam mouth at length along those above-mentioned lines had the opposite effect on me than what he must have intended with this "advice."

I've come to think of a lot of the women I obsessed on in those days as having a lot in common with the men I had to put up with in regards to the relentless boasting these men did.  The women, like their male counterparts, tended to look really good, but the conquest they attempted and often succeeded in visiting on me was more a breaking of the spirit that did not involve a sexual component.  To let me have sex with them would mean that I "won," I guess.  Jenna was notable in that she seemed to make it clear that getting with her involved jumping through some kind of hoops, such as her male counterpart overtly initiating the sex deal by making a big move.  So with Jenna, there wasn't a subtly escalating back and forth that I was more comfortable with in my better sexual encounters. 

But Jenna had the quality of being emotionally unavailable.  I remember talking to her the night she had a little Thanksgiving dinner with my male roommate, whom she considered a platonic friend.  I went to bed that night thinking that I had a good shot at making things work with Jenna down the line someday soon.  The next Saturday, I ran into her at a friend's party, and she'd met some guy at his party before I had arrived that she wanted to talk to at length in front of me and flirt with, exchange phone numbers with etc. etc.  Of course, it was her RIGHT to do such things, but she really didn't have any concern at the time about turning me off in any way with any of that.  Emotionally unavailable, yeah.

My last hurrah with Jenna involved an effort on my part to make things right with her after things had totally gone to shit with her the following Summer.  After my encounter with Gil at that party, it seemed like the right thing to do.  After I made things right with Jenna, after I went out of my way to visit her at her movie theater job and let her know that she could still call me if she had a mind to, after I left, and went home, and worked all night at the factory, and didn't sleep, and figured out the next evening that she was not still a virgin, that she was not going to call me, and that the darkness would soon descend on me in the form of yet another psychotic episode, I figured that one Billy Billiams might have been exerting his own kind of pressure on Jenna at the time, and that my "Nice Guy" gesture towards her in that movie theater might have made it clearer to Jenna as to whom represented the bigger threat to her between myself and Billy Billiams.  So, I was a "Nice Guy" like "Yojimbo", the great Toshiro Mifune, at the end of Sanjuro.  Or, maybe more accurately still, a "Nice Guy" like Charles Bronson at the end of Once Upon a Time in the West.   I can live with that.