I just rewatched the beginning of the George Jones and Tammy Wynette episodes on Mike Judge's Tales From the Tour Bus.  Tammy idolized George Jones from her humble beginnings in Mississippi while married to a man who did not encourage her ambitions as a country singer.  She left her husband in Mississippi, took their three kids to Nashville, and quickly married a songwriter and performer who pitched songs to Jones.   Tammy met George while George was bivouacked at a cheap motel with two women.  

Tammy and her husband had gone to the motel to pitch songs to George.  The scene on the show has Tammy standing in the doorway while George sits up in bed with the two women.  The women narrating the story say that Jones completely ignored Tammy during this first meeting, and that Tammy regarded this indifference by George Jones to her as a challenge.

Whoa, stop right there.  Recognize any tendencies in Tammy's attitude and behavior to yours truly, Rich?  I think my tendency to gravitate to the best looking young women and fixate on them, particularly when they were somehow unavailable, is how this kind of thing would manifest itself in my own attitudes and behavior towards such women.

Again, as an antidote, I turn back to my time in my youth in my dealings with one Sara.  I decided to drop the ball on that deal one night in the art studios at UT-Austin in the presence of one of Sara's friends.  This whole cat-and-mouse game developed with Sara the previous Spring when I'd decided, for once, not to chase this one to the ends of the Earth and back.

That night in the big painting studio, I saw Eva.  I had not see Sara for a couple of months, and I was pretty ticked off that she had not shown herself in that time.  So, as I started to work on my art, Eva talked to a girlfriend a little.  The girlfriend left, and Eva started coughing in a way that seemed to indicate a dramatic purpose to her coughing.  

Mind you, she didn't say, "Oh hi, Richard.  Say, my friend Sara likes you, would you like to meet her sometime soon?"  Eva just started coughing in sort of a stagey manner.  I responded by slapping the heels of my palms together, which made a dull thudding sound, as if to mimic the act of beating one's meat.

I was pretty pissed off, and I put my stuff away and walked out.  That night sealed my decision to cut Sara loose.  For once, I did not accept the implicit challenge of trying to win a difficult, possibly unavailable woman.  Again, my time with Sara, that is, up until my belief that I'd made a big mistake when I cut her loose, was atypical to the usual courses of action that I would take with such women, and resulted in a markedly different outcome as a result.  In other words, I did not have a nervous breakdown, psychotic episode, call it what one will.  

At that food service business that I've talked about recently, one of the last times I spent in there a few weeks ago really made an impression on me.  An attractive woman who worked there looked at me with, I won't say fear, but with a look that indicated something along the lines of apprehension.  She gave me the impression that she thought of me as an unpredictable, loose cannon.  She gave me the impression that she had some apprehension that I would start something in the way of an inappropriate romantic pursuit of her or someone else there.

That constitutes one big reason why I'm really trying to not patronize that business again.  I'm tired of that kind of shit.   My dealings with Sara and others since have convinced me that I can, should, and will take drastic courses of action to counter these kinds of anxieties and fears that seem to grip so many women who come into contact with me.  I don't regard the notion that I'd do better to try and stick it out and somehow win someone like this woman at this business over as a particularly viable option these days.  I'm just not into accepting that kind of a challenge.

I've talked about this before, but loneliness can be described as a chronic affliction that affects millions of Americans these days, so I will rake over some of those same old coals once more.  After the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States by Al Qaeda, I, along with just about everyone else, felt pretty vulnerable in the aftermath.  I remembered seeing something in the New York Times about how single New Yorkers felt especially vulnerable in the wake of the attacks.

This led me to realize that I employed not-very-constructive means to cope with what seemed like an ever-present loneliness and almost daily spells where I had to spend long periods of time by myself.  My smoking, drinking, and drug use became the go-to means by which I would cope with loneliness and being alone.  My friends all partied pretty hardy, so they were of no help either.

I remember one night in October of 2001, maybe the 21st or 22nd, when this realization hit me, and for once I spent the evening in my apartment doing some cleaning and not using drugs or alcohol. I vowed to at least spend more time by myself in more such constructive ways, and after some days and weeks of this, I became confident enough to try to quit smoking.  I joined a support group and started on the patch and the gum at the same time.

My realization of how my substance abuse tied in with my feelings of loneliness and fear of being alone seemed to trigger such a strong desire to finally quit the smoking that no amount of relapses during the following year deterred me from my ultimate goal.  I finally ditched  the patch in the Summer of 2002 in favor of Zyban, continued to go to Nicotine Anonymous (somebody copyrighted the name Smokers Anonymous to try to make money, and so the free one became Nicotine Anonymous), and achieved my goal of quitting smoking.

The next big realization in turning it around for me came in the early morning hours of December 28th, 2008.  I had a six pack I was working on while I watched a bad movie titled Blood Freak.  A couple of days before Christmas of that year, some people were over at my house.  It was me, two guys and two girls.  One of the guys had a live-in girlfriend back at his house, and the understanding about the other guy and one of the girls seemed to be that these two were trying to close a sex deal.  So they started making out on my couch, I lived in an 850 square foot house, so to kind give them a little room I went to see what was up in my bedroom, where my male friend had gone to lie down because he was so drunk.  

The other girl, whom I had something of an interest in, had gone in my bedroom before I did.  I went in my bedroom, and this other girl lay in bed with her clothes off talking to my fully clothed drunk friend.  Okay, so I was a third fucking wheel in my own fucking house that night.

As I watched the late night showing of Blood Freak the following Friday night/ Saturday morning, I had another epiphany.  The epiphany consisted of the realization that this lifestyle seemed to be working out fine for my drunk friend with the live-in girlfriend at home and the other girlfriend in bed with him at my house, but it really wasn't doing so much for in the relationship with women department.

This realization triggered such a strong desire in me to finally quit drinking and drugs that, for one, after I finished that six pack that night while watching the movie, I've never had a drink of alcohol since, and, though I used some drugs after that, the last time was  when I smoked a little pot in 2012.

The third epiphany came after many years of banging my head against the wall in the massive effort I've been making to improve my relationship with women.  I realized that an experiment I tried in 1988 to "turn my back on love" might not have been such a bad idea after all.  For those newcomers, the post, "i'm not bad," from January 2016 first covers that topic at length.  I write about this experiment many times in subsequent posts, and all of the things that it did for me, and I look at it from any angles in many posts. 

Last night I wondered if I would go through a prolonged period of dark loneliness as a consequence of my latest employment of the "turn my back on love" experiment.  A couple of posts back I wrote about how I've decided that I don't want to patronize a particular food service establishment any more.  After I decided to give that move a try for mainly financial reasons at first, I figured out that I went to this place that employed a lot of attractive young women because being around these young women made me feel as if I played some part in the whole love and dating game.  I decided that maybe my patronization of that business amounted to too much of a psychic crutch, and that I might want to try to make some of the food and beverage items I enjoyed there at home instead.

Anyway, last night I wondered if I had set myself up for a bit of hurt in the loneliness department with this latest move.  I remembered reading a book titled Son of a Gun, by Justin St. Germaine, that was a memoir of his and his mother's life, her troubled relationship with men, and her death at the hands of her fifth husband.  One passage of the book detailed a year when Justin was about fourteen or fifteen when they lived in a shotgun shack in Tombstone, Arizona, and how her mother valiantly tried to live man free.

Justin talked about how he would go out at all hours doing petty juvenile delinquent nonsense, while his mother would stay at home, alone, in that little shack, and just cry for long periods of time.  Justin remembered this as a relatively happy time in his childhood, because there were, at least, no abusive men around.

So I wondered, if by cutting myself off from these women at this business, if I'd set myself up for the kind of failure that Justin's mom ultimately experienced after man-free year had passed and she went back to her usual dysfunctional ways with men.  But, maybe a half-hour later, I realized that I'd been successful in the past with similar moves; with the cigarettes, and the drugs and alcohol, and that, so far, I've not wavered in those commitments.  Those commitments I made have led to the lasting changes that I'd sought for so long, that I had no reason to really believe that my efforts to meaningfully deal with Love Addiction these past several years would end in failure.

The phrase, "Taking the bull by the horns," really presented itself to me as to how effectively the insights that I'd gleaned in those first two big efforts really put me on the path where I am today.  I've talked at length about the war-of-the-sexes skirmishes and pitched battles that I've successfully fought, and the ways that winning at that kind of bullshit lead to insights that no amount of losing back in the '80's and early '90's had ever managed to help me.  Losing at those games never helped me even half as much as beating someone like the Invisible Woman like a gong has helped me.  

Last Wednesday night, I tried to sit up and count how many times I've had to make intelligent decisions about women in my world since, say, 2007, and I came up with forty plus women in various scenarios and instances, both big and small.  Not all the decisions involved adversarial women, but the large majority did, absolutely, involve women who went adversarial on me to a greater or lesser extent.  Why, just today I ran an errand, and if I had been with a friend, I could have pointed to an attractive woman that I saw and said, "Oh look, there's someone who represented themselves as something they weren't to me once upon a time.  Now, was that last year. or the year before?  Oh, I must be getting old, I've lost track."

A couple of posts ago I talked about a movie I'd just seen titled, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot,  A key dramatic element in this biography of John Callahan has him working the ninth of twelve steps as an Alcoholics Anonymous member.  The ninth step is the one where the alcoholic makes amends to those he or she had harmed.  In the movie, we see a list of people on John's notepad, and as he does stuff like return a shirt he stole from a store, reconcile with his adopted parents, and ask the guy for forgiveness whom John let drive his car while drunk, resulting in John's paralysis, we see John cross these names off of his list.

Fresh from that movie, I wanted to work my version of that scene, but just find one person and ask for her forgiveness.  Well, that's kind of cooled.  I don't think it's a bad idea to do something along those lines in regards to this person, it's just that I don't have the guidance and prodding of a AA sponsor to help me along, and I've lost my momentum on this one.  If I see this person around or see anyone I know to be close to her, I wouldn't rule out some attempt of my part to come to a reconciliation for my behaviors towards this person.  I still think it would be a good idea to do this, but I'm in no rush.

The whole gist of my apology would center around what I consider the source of a lot of shit that went down over the years.  That is, the idea I had in my head that I needed a love interest nearly all of the time for years and years.  The shit would not ALWAYS hit the fan because of this idea, but the shit did indeed hit the fan often enough. I also want to emphasize that I wasn't just playing to some nameless void when I did this stuff.  There were real people who made decisions that weren't that great in reaction to my entreaties, but the whole love interest thing on my part seemed to be what got the whole thing rolling.

I guess I can come off as pretty intense.  I wonder if Beethoven had similar problems?  Women considered him pretty horrible, from what I can tell.  My solution for this problem seems to have evolved into just kind of moving along.  Whether that is the right solution or not, it seems a rather definitive solution for any attractive women who have any worries about being the focus of my intensity.  Wow, Beethoven.  Maybe I'll try to write an opera or a symphony about ol' Fuckface.

I've stopped patronizing a food service business that employs a pretty good number of attractive women.  Soon after I quit going there, I thought it might be a good idea to not go back there for quite some time, if at all.  There's the factor of money.  I have a lot of uses for the money I could save by just fixing stuff at home rather than go to food service places for the same items.

I figure that the main reason I would patronize this one establishment has to do with feeling as if I'm a part of the game.  Hanging around those attractive young women might tend to make me feel as if I'm playing some part in the love/dating game, however  small a part that is.

That's the same reason I would go around desperately seeking love interests to hang my mind on.  Needing a love interest and needing to feel as if one plays a part in the game is not a need like food, water, or oxygen.  The word "need" does not really apply to such a desire.  Therefore, I will try my level best, one day at a time, I guess, to refrain from patronizing this particular business or businesses like it.  

​Not one woman who currently works at this business would have to worry that I'm trying to make them over into a love interest if I just stopped going there altogether.  I count about seven or eight young women at this place that could just chill out about that if I stopped going there.  I guess I will know if I'm serious in about a month or a month and a half.

My last post talked about following my Buddha.  That's what this is about.  It's not as if anyone- myself, or these employees at this one business, or anyone else- has done anything that necessitates this move.  I just want to live life a bit differently than how I'm used to living it.  A few posts ago I griped about how nothing ever changes for me.  I griped about how, no matter what the changes I've made, nothing ever changes as far as any real improvement in my relationship with women.  I guess that's debatable, but there always seems to be some kind of significant change I can make; whether it's something such as trying to refrain from staring at woman and young girls, paying attention to my personal hygiene and grooming habits, or just taking a fork in the road that I usually don't take.  The biggest room in the world; room for improvement.  It's not all about losing and maintaining a forty to fifty pound weight loss, which is hard.

I saw a movie titled Don't worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot  today.  It is a biography of the late, physically disabled cartoonist John Callahan.  The movie inspired me to have a desire to take a course of action that I don't know if I will be able  to take.

John Callahan had a serious drinking problem, and he became an Alcoholics Anonymous member and quite drinking.  A key dramatic highlight of the movie depicted John taking the ninth step, which reads something like, "Made a list of all the persons you had harmed, and were willing to make amends to them all, except when to do so would injure them or others."

I'm not currently an AA member, but I do participate in a support group from time to time.  If I were serious about making amends to EVERYONE, I would have to start with kids I teased back in the 6th, 7th, 8th grades, and higher grades, come to think of it.  Who knows if I could find such people.

If I were to limit my amends to those most directly affected by my love addiction, I might be able to narrow the list a little.  Since I'm not really working the steps with a sponsor and all of that, I would, if I had the balls, make a unilateral apology to just one person from back in the day who seems to still be around.  Actions speak louder than words, so I will have to just be patient and see if my willingness intersects with my opportunity to do so.

I think following my Buddha will help me maintain the willingness over the period of time that I think it might take-if I even have an opportunity at all.  The last post about the fork in the road has to do with following my Buddha.   Specifically, to make a move away from all of my traditional pursuits of love interests from among the women in my world.   I guess I'll have to see if I can even pull THAT one off as seriously as I want to right now. 

 

Well, the Invisible Woman must have got in her black helicopter and flown off to the Illuminati convention, because the last guy who came out to fix my A/C fixed it, and it stayed fixed.

In other news, "When you come to the fork in the road, take it," Yogi Berra.  I see a fork in the road, and I am going to take a road less traveled.  It's a simple enough move, but that doesn't make it easy.  I will see in a month and a half to two months if I am serious.  Until then, it's one day at a time. 

My stated goal, as I said in a couple of posts ago, was to not have any love interests from amongst the women of my world.  That's still my goal, it's just that my solution is kind of radical.  Oh well.  No crazy, obsessive men, or their potential love interests, will be harmed by this procedure, whether I meet with success or not.

Anyone out there read The Idiot, by Dostoevsky?  There's a scene where a young girl rages at the Idiot, and her parents conclude that she's in love with him.  There's other parts of the book as well, but this scene came to mind as I wrote this song just now.  So, Dostoevsky's got my back, En-vis, who's got yours?  What are ya gonna do about it?.....Punk.

It Must Suck Bein’ You
A, D, E
Bv^, Bv^

Verse :
A
Oh I ain’t got no pretense
   E
no I won’t put on airs
      D
it’s ninety-one degrees
          A
in my apartment upstairs.

A
You got nothin’ on me baby
       E 
six posts I can count
         D
each one rather bland
      A 
on your Facebook account.

 

 A
you can snarl you can gnash
    D
caterwaul caterrage
        E
you won’t find your name
                    A 
on my any web page.

A
Each day I dispatch
       D
the part of me that is you
     E
it swirls ‘round and ‘round
          A
on its way down the loo. 


Chorus:
D
Baby oh baby
           E
it must suck bein’ you
    A
to love an animal
         E
who prob’ly eats his own poo.

D
Baby oh baby
               E
what are you gonna do?
                 A
Gotta mile of crow to eat
                E
between me and you.


D
Baby oh baby 
               E
see the big man hit the curve
             A
knock it out of the park
                  E 
work your very last nerve.

A
Baby oh baby
    E
it must suck bein’ you
   D
a gal with no game
                     A
has to face what is true.


Verse:
A
Now dearest now darlin’
      E
can it be all that bad?
        D
You got the comfort of love
                  A
from your look-alike lad.

A
You got them loyal fans
       E
you could sick them on me
     D
it could save you the pain
     A
of havin’ to deal with me.


  A
To feel a thing for your lesser
  D
oh babe is it that bad?
   E
After all there’s your boy
           A
your look-alike lad.

A
When you tried to dick me over
          D 
babe was this in your plan?
        E
Now how does it feel
     A
to lash out at a man?



Chorus:
D
Baby oh baby
           E
it must suck bein’ you
    A
to love an animal
         E
who prob’ly eats his own poo.

D
Baby oh baby
               E
what are you gonna do?
                 A
Gotta mile of crow to eat
                E
between me and you.


D
Baby oh baby 
               E
see the big man hit the curve
             A
knock it out of the park
                  E 
work your very last nerve.

D
Baby oh baby
    E
it must suck bein’ you
   D
a gal with no game
                     A
has to face what is true.


Richy Vegas  7/19/2018

I've got a bit of a situation here at El Rancho Richy Vegas.  As the A/C repairman was out here for the FOURTH time in ten days, I couldn't help but think, "Ol' En-vis is back."  That's the Invisible Woman to the uninitiated.  So I  thought I'd write a song as an offering to my recurrent nemesis.  I'm going to keep an eye on this A/C situation regardless- it's not as if I have a choice.






Fuckface Fix My A/C
Chorus: D, A, B7
Verse: G,C,D,Em

B v^ Bv

Chorus:

D
Fuckface fix my A/C
    A
I admit it babe you got me
                   B7
They won’t let you in the JayCee’s
       A                       D
so Fuckface fix my A/C.

Verse:

G
It’s the middle of July
            C
rather than sit here and fry
         D
and piss and moan oh why oh why
         Em
and curse the clear blue Texas sky

Oh babe I think I know my sin
I must have got under your skin
Oh I must be a perfect ten
I might fit in your cooter pen.

you’re a lady on the go
but I hear your tale of woe
but if it’s me you gotta know
it’s really suck babe it’s not blow.

Baby blow’s just an expression
and lick my balls in our love session
my hair is short I ain’t no Hessian
let me put this one request in...

Chorus:

D
Fuckface fix my A/C
    A
I admit it babe you got me
                   B7
They won’t let you in the JayCee’s
       A                       D
so Fuckface fix my A/C.

Verse:

G
Babe you got such style and grace
        C
and baby such a pretty face
            D
here’s my entry in your race
           Em
you’ll admit it sets a pace

how ‘bout a puppy for the road
with peanut butter and a toad
in your hand one dumps a piss load
while Rex licks Jiff from your wee node.

See babe I’m thinkin’ for ya’
those nights I can’t be there with ya’
and on a notion and a whim ya’
call that makeup girl named Kimya.

Kimya puppy peanut butter
should keep you off all of the others
I promise not to tell your mother
but baby if I had my drothers...

Chorus:

D
Fuckface fix my A/C
    A
I admit it babe you got me
                   B7
They won’t let you in the JayCee’s
       A                       D
so Fuckface fix my A/C.


Richy Vegas   7/18/2018
 

I said in my last post that I didn't thing any women whom I'd busted with their hands in the cookie jar should feel bad about it.  Well, maybe I'd like for them to feel a little bad.  I don't want them to do anything really shitty to themselves because I may have hit a nerve, but yeah, I wouldn't mind if they felt a little bad.

A lot of my maneuverings I talk about in these recent posts have to do with not allowing women I find attractive to treat me shabbily.  I'm stating the obvious, but if one were to go with the conciliatory, magnanimous tone of the last post, it might not have been so obvious to me when I wrote that.

I've cut ties with a male friend recently whom I felt didn't treat me well over the years.  It's precisely because I've taught myself how to not allow women to treat me the way they've treated me in the past that I've also severed the ties with this friend.  It's been a long time coming for him.  I remember first talking back to him not long after my dealings with Sara in 1988.  Since I took up that baton again this go 'round, I've made decisions about him that are long overdue.

Also, I'm not obliged, I think, to particularly like any women who have tried to treat me in a shabby manner.  I have a great problem with trying to come off as a great guy all the time, and this allows people in my mental space that don't belong there, if the past is any indicator. 

In my last semester at SVA, a fellow male student beat up his girlfriend in the graduate fine arts studios one night.  The cops were called, and he was expelled.  His roommate had this to say: "It was 15 percent her fault, but it was 85 percent his fault."  His roommate was from Taiwan, while the perpetrator of the violence was from South Korea.  I only mention where Chin, the roommate, was from to say that he might not have been so constrained by the bounds of political correctness when he attributed 15 percent of the problem to the offender's girlfriend.

I've  thought about his statement often over the years.  In my last post I go into some instances where I believed that women went adversarial on me.  If I went along with the usual role I would play in the obsessive pursuits of such women, maybe I would have to own 85 percent of the responsibility for any shit that went down.  When one appears before a judge and that whole system, 85 percent would mean that I would be the one to go down.

I see all the coping tactics I outlined in the previous post as something akin to taking my antipsychotic medication; as a way to manage my symptoms.  One of the major points I want to bring across is that I make it my stated goal to have no love interests amongst the women in my world.  I'm not against the idea of having a love interest under any circumstances, but in my current situation I don't want any woman in my world to have the feeling that I'm trying to make them over into a love interest.

I think in the examples I gave in the last post of women who started in on me, they were all playing to the notion that I was someone who could become obsessed with them and thus pursue them obsessively.  I see the various subtleties of interaction they employed as defense mechanisms against such a possibility.  No one has to feel bad about employing such tactics if that truly is the case.  I can only imagine how frightening it might be to have someone stalk one, and for one to feel that one's life is out of control just because a scary guy is attracted to one.  I do not feel as if I am entitled to hassle anyone because I might have caught them out or "busted" them for using subtle coping tactics that are less than on the up and up.

Also, I honestly don't feel as if I have any burdensome romantic attachment to anyone in my world right now.  Like I said, all the tactics I related in my previous post and posts; the avoidance, the stepping back, the walking back of how things progress, the snarky songs I write, the "turning my back on love," couldn't have been developed if I didn't first acknowledge that I myself had a problem with my thought processes, attitudes, and behaviors that I needed to address in a meaningful way.