The last couple of posts might have given those out there the impression that I have some policy of going around telling beautiful young women that I kind of like to go fuck themselves.  That's not it at all.  That statement usually only comes after I've considered other possibilities, and I conclude that letting such a person know that they could go jump in the lake is the most intelligent decision that I can make.

It's true, I've never really dated an uberbabe type, and I'm getting up there in years, and that dream is looking pretty cheap these days.  The only arc I've been able to generate with an uberbabe, goddess, call them what you will, was to make intelligent decisions about them.  And, up to this point in my life, the most intelligent decisions I've ever made about such women was to cut them loose, let them go, call it what you will.

I first made a such a decision about such a woman in 1988 with Sara.  In every major instance before then, the decision to let go of such a woman was always made for me- by the woman.  The problem with that course of action, is that the shit could really hit the fan in major ways before it ever came to them making that decision.  With Sara, if one were to find her these days, I doubt seriously that she could truthfully have any complaints about the way I treated her, or have any problems with how I let her go when I did.

The decision to cut such a woman loose comes when I decide that it is in both of our interests for me to do so.  Sometimes I pick up a vibe that I'm making style points with other men when I make these decisions, but really, I don't get a lot of satisfaction for my ego when I make these decisions.  Who wouldn't want to date an uberbabe/ goddess type?  Letting such a person go amounts to the best possible course of action for me to take, not the most desired course of action, but the best course of action.

In yesterday's post I wrote about the type of woman that I would always admire from afar.  She would be very attractive, young, and project a lot of confidence that would enhance her beauty.   Invariably, these types would also have a very mean, bitchy side as well. I've never dated this type, really.  The last woman I sort of dated had some of these qualities, but could be very uptight, pathologically obsessed about her looks etc.

She made it pretty clear that she didn't really want to date me seriously.  She said she wanted to be someone who caused me a lot of grief.  She let me know this when she said she wanted for me to add her portrait as one of the women/ snakes coming from my mother's head in my painting. "Medusa."

That pretty much sums up why I never really had any luck dating those really pretty types.  I never really was their guy, I suppose.  With that said, is such a woman really MY type?  If I've had a great deal of interest in these types, but these types never really had much of an interest in me, can they really be said to be my type?

I've kind of alluded to some of the famous women I've had fantasies about meeting through my legacy as the legendary Richy Vegas.  And, from what I can tell, they all pretty much could be the beautiful, bitchy types that never took any kind of sustained interest in me.  How would that go, if I actually met one or more of  these types?

I think they might meet me, and as they got to know me better, they might feel like they see the little man behind the curtain manipulating the image of the Great and Terrible Oz, and treat me accordingly.  That kind of thing has happened in the past.

There's several types of unavailable women.  There's the woman who's logistically unavailable because they are in a relationship.  I've had plenty of trouble getting past something as simple as that in my youth and moving on.  There's the more predatory type who represents themselves as available and interested when they are usually unavailable, never really interested.  I've learned to sniff out that rat pretty good in the fullness of my years.  Then there's maybe the worst type, the one that I would call emotionally unavailable.  That could be someone I've even dated in the fullest sense of the word, but who never really cared for me.  That kind can really ruin a lot of years for someone who is not willing to face this reality about them.

I think if the legend of Richy Vegas ever became manifest in our mutually acknowledged reality, the emotionally unavailable type would be my biggest worry.  Near as I can tell, the emotionally unavailable type would most likely be wrapped up in a pretty package of beauty coupled with great confidence, with a really mean and bitchy side to their personality as well.  If such a type were to come along because of this Richy Vegas stuff, I'm not sure how I'd get to the stuff I need to get to in order to make an intelligent decision about them.  I think my greatest asset would be my ability to tell where I left off and such a person began; where I could tell that my issues weren't really my issues, but instead their issues, one might say.

Anyone whose been reading this blog for the past few years knows that my thinking about myself can get pretty grandiose.  In the web comic on my home page, "Richy Vegas: a psycho memoir," I basically credit myself with ending the nuclear standoff between the West and the Communist bloc while I was in the eighth grade.  Well, basically.  

All I had to do to convince my disability examiner that I was a for-real-mentally-ill-person was mention that I have rather grandiose thoughts about myself.  I didn't even really have to go into specifics, and that, along with all the trouble I was having at the time with my full-time retail job, and the hospitalizations, and the documented, continued need for psychiatric care and medication, was enough to convince him to green light my benefits.

One of the main things I go on about in my head is this idea that, what has until now only really existed, so far, as a reality of ANY kind, has existed in my head, will someday be manifest in the reality-the "real world"- that most of us readily recognize as the reality we all exist in.  Of course, a guy who gets credited with singlehandedly ending the cold war in the eighth grade, among many other deeds, is going to be quite the something if that day ever does come.  That would probably mean that I would have the veritable pick of the litter as far as getting a real live girlfriend.  Would it not?

Here's the problem with that: for as long as I can remember, I've been the guy who admires the really attractive young women from quite a distance.  These women always had a lot of confidence that went with their great beauty, and that only enhanced their beauty.  They also tended to have a really bitchy, mean side to them as well.  And here's the problem with that: no matter what I did to prove myself worthy, and I'll give examples further on down, they always seemed to decide that giving me some arrogant, "kiss my ass" "opportunity" was plenty good enough for trash like me.

Two examples:  1) in 1988, while in my last year of undergrad at UT-Austin.  I managed to generate a cat-and-mouse game with Sara out of her attempt to take me down.  Look at the post "I'm not bad" from January, 2016 for some detail on that.  Anyway, I decided to end the deal when a friend of her's started conspicuously coughing when we two, myself and Sara's friend, were alone in an art studio at UT-Austin.  I hadn't seen Sara in two months, and this attitude her friend gave off that now was my "opportunity" to start kissing ass really put me off.  At least that's how I interpreted all of those forced-sounding coughs coming from this girl.

Example 2)  At SVA in New York City in 1991, I had assigned love interest status to one Ann Marie.  Unfortunately, I had come off as kind of scary to everyone, so she was having none of it, and she had moved on by my last semester in grad school in the Spring of 1991.  The critical juncture came in the last days of the Spring Semester, when I essentially let her go as she walked by me in the hall in one of the Art Buildings.

This seemed to please those that it mattered to me to please, such as a teacher/ artist named Brett DePalma, who seemed to be worried about me up until then.  Funny thing is, I saw Ann Marie on the streets of Midtown Manhattan in the days after school let out.  I felt her eyes on me, I smiled as I we passed on the street, as if to say, "You see! I really do love you."

A few weeks later, I figured that I had to go see her at a nearby gallery from where we encountered each other.  A gallery that I induced that she may have worked at, from interactions with my thesis advisor, among others, whose gallery it was that represented him, and I went there one afternoon.

There was a nicely dressed young man at the front desk.  I talked to him a little and looked at the brochure for the exhibit, and I heard a young woman's voice from an office directly partitioned off from the front desk.  Could it have been Ann Marie?  She talked on the phone, and the young guy at the desk coughed a forced cough, or "harrumphed," so I walked out.

Both of these examples have the quality of me showing up, and the other party giving me this "kiss my ass" attitude in response.  Mind you, I was the guy who made the crude sexual proposition that made the rounds in the UT Art building, I guess, and who was viewed as a threat to the girls at SVA , so these women saw these "opportunities" as good enough for me.

Maybe, in both instances, these women were trying to orchestrate "meet cute" moments, like those moments in the romantic comedies, and that "meet cute" quality didn't quite come off.  If this Richy Vegas stuff has any basis in reality, I would advise the Chloe Grace Moretzes, Jennifer Lawerences, or Ariana Grandes of the world not to try to meet me cute.  It might not come off as cute, and if I'm the kind of man that I've wanted to be for so many years, I might let them all know, in no uncertain terms, that they can go fuck themselves.  Please don't treat me in an arrogant manner.  Please?  

Well, the Pocket Fishrman Fish Fry is an all ages event that is open to the public from Saturday, June 2nd, 4 PM, until the Hole in the Wall closes at 2 AM that night, so anyone who reads this can go. What I definitely will NOT do is personally invite any of the twenty-two year old waitresses and baristas and what all others who work at businesses that I regularly patronize to the Pocket Fishrman Fish Fry.

If any twenty-two year old waitresses and baristas and what all other types of employees would like for me to personally invite them to the Fish Fry, all I have to say is this: that they should have been around in 2009 or 2010, when I would invite such types to my shows all the time.  If any twenty-two year old waitresses and baristas and what all others these days have any complaints about not being personally invited to the Fish Fry, blame the twenty-two year old baristas and waitresses and what all others who never showed up for any of my shows back in 2009 and 2010.

One young woman who also did modeling work back then, in other words, an asshole, had me go to the trouble of putting her on the guest list for a show that I had with my old band.  As I stood onstage trying to do my set, I couldn't help but keep my eyes glued to the club's entrance in the hopes that she would show up.  Of course, I could only conclude that she never had any intention of showing up, whether she was on the guest list or not.  What a drag!

I can't think of any way I could personally sabotage my good time at the Fish Fry more effectively than to invite a woman or women in my world whom I had something of a fondness for to the gig, and then spend all fucking day at the venue anticipating their arrival/ knowing they are not coming.  Argh!  Any employee of one of these businesses who has the idea that they can get me to put myself out there for them like I used to back in 2009 and 2010 might want to get acquainted with the phrase, "Been there, done that."    

I'm recording the last three songs for Sgt. Pepper's... sometime in the next week.  One of the songs is about Donald Trump.  If he screws up and does something good in the next few weeks, I guess there will be egg on my face.  I hoped to have the songs ready for this weekend, but I may have to wait until Tuesday or Thursday.

The book is coming along pretty well.  I hope to finish at least sixteen or so more pages before this months is out.  I approached the book a little different than I usually do.  I outlined thirty-plus pages before beginning the fill-in phase.  I hope to have this one done at the end of July by the latest.

I don't want to go on about the woman thing too much this week. I will say that I posted something several months ago that said something to the effect of; I hoped that no-one sees me as some big woman hater, and that I thought that my improved ability to take care of myself in the love and dating game would lead to a more fond, affectionate view of women overall than in previous times.

There's definitely women in my world that I am very fond of, though.  I say that with some trepidation, because I remember, a couple of years ago, one young woman who seemed to react as if I was going to start obsessively stalking her after posts on this blog where I said something along the lines of: she's adorable, or that she might have an interest in me. 

I've talked about a waitress at a restaurant that I went back and forth with over the course of two-plus years.  The nature of my affront towards her seemed to be some combination of the fact that I freaked out the owner and some female staff when I worked at that same restaurant over twenty years before, and how I would go out of my way to say "hi" to this waitress several times over the course of some weeks early in 2012, and at the fact that I would wear a shirt that read "I support single mothers" that featured a silhouette of a stripper and a pole beside this phrase.

Anyhoo, we went back and forth until Oct 2014, when she finally figured out that I'd quit wearing that t-shirt in the restaurant when I figured out, in June 2012, that she didn't like it.  Towards the end of this ordeal, I remember trying to make small talk with her one day, and how she shook from her core and inhaled as she tried to respond.  I figured that she was so enraged at the outcomes of our skirmishes over the years that she could barely contain herself.

Yeah, a lot of times women will get quite upset when they lose at the cruel romantic love and sexual rejection games they try to play with me.  I guess they consider me less of a man because of my mental illness, and to lose to me so abjectly really wounds their egos.  One friend confided in me that she had a desire to harm herself after she and I had a dustup.  Thank God she did no such thing. But still.

My point?  Good question.  I have to deal with women playing these kinds of games with me A LOT.  I have LOTS AND LOTS of experience at this.  To guarantee defeat at my hands to anyone out there these days who desires to try me would not be....scientific.  Guaranteeing such an outcome may not be scientific, but to say that the probability that anyone out there these days will actually win at a level to their satisfaction; to say that it seems unlikely from where I sit; to say that seems reasonable.

I've gone over the reasons why I think that I have to deal with this kind of shit so frequently.  I seem to be typed as the the mentally ill guy with romantically obsessive tendencies.  One the one hand, that automatically makes me some kind of bad guy to a lot of women, and on the other hand, hey, goose me little and maybe some woman who so desires such a thing can maybe reap a boatload of, essentially, free male attention.  So, it seems I have to deal with impulses that exist at the level of temptation to a lot of women, and thus, the (once alarming) frequency of this kind of attention that I so often find myself in the midst of.

What do I do about someone who feels bad about losing at these cruel rejection games?  Well, I certainly wouldn't want such a person to hurt themselves, but I don't think I'd mind the idea of such a person feeling kind of remorseful about it, to tell the truth.  Understand, I repeat, I have to deal with this A LOT.   In a post from the Summer of 2017, I posited that God was giving me plenty of chances to get it right; that is to say, that these games where women represented themselves as something they were not; representing themselves as available and interested when, in fact, they were neither; well back in the day, the nineteen eighties mainly, I could retaliate in ways I now consider unacceptable- an attempt to force a sexual situation through a crude sexual proposition, for example.


As I said in my last post: the World's not running out of unavailable women anytime soon, and it seems as if it's up to me to just practice, practice, practice coming up with socially acceptable ways of dealing with this reality when I presents itself to me.  Did anything like this occur recently? Maybe.  This blog allows me the chance to think out loud about this kind of stuff.  If no such thing has occurred, then no harm/ no foul, I suppose.   

I've decided that I want to go to next year's MoCCa Fest as an exhibitor.  I will need to get serious about reducing my credit card debt, so that I will not just increase it with another trip next year.  The only luxuries that I can really cut back on are restaurant meals and trips to the coffee shops.  So, I think I will try to do just that.

This means that I will try to cut off my contact with the twenty-two year old waitresses and baristas.  I concluded that the world is not running out of unavailable women anytime soon, and that even if I never set foot in these food service establishments until after I get back from next year's New York trip, if then, that there's plenty more unavailable women in this world I can look at and admire.  I can just go hand out flyers on Red River for my music gigs and/or my comic books and see the most beautiful college age women this town has to offer.  I'm not so inclined to do that just now, but I'm not ruling it out.

It was nice being in New York and being some place where what I do as an artist is taken seriously.  There doesn't seem to be much of a self-published indy comics scene in this town.  A guy named Zac said that because there aren't any publishers of those kinds of books here, that may be a reason.  It remains to be seen whether I will follow through with this commitment to save more of my budget for a trip to New York next year.  I hope that I don't jinx my efforts by brining it up here.

I told someone some weeks back that making changes such as the ones I've made in regards to my relationship with women was akin to turning an ocean liner around.  I'll go further, and say it's like a combination of turning the Titanic around as it's headed for the iceberg AND having to do it over and over again until I get it right, much like the Bill Murray character in Groundhog Day.  I hope that my success in the past few years of identifying potential bad scene situations with women means that I have totally learned the art of this maneuver.

It's not only the major ordeals that I have gone on at length about, such as the the two women at that business in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and the Invisible Woman from 2017, but the relatively minor skirmishes that dotted these past several years as well.  An example would be the woman who inspired the song, "My Girlfriend Is a Hate Song."  In that post from late 2016, I guessed that maybe a waitress at a restaurant that I used to patronize had it in for me.  Specifically, that she wanted to take a shot at the Kid and get her some kind of reputation.

In that post, I put out the idea that this waitress was in the process of switching out boyfriends, and that she marked me as the loser in her own personal drama.  Whether that was really true or not, I wrote "My Girlfriend...," posted it, posted my musings, and didn't go there for almost a year afterwards.  I figured that however much of a total asshole this woman might have been, she had a right to earn a living, just like anyone else.  By the time I went back there, she was probably long gone from that place, because I never saw her again. 

There were others, with the same old bullshit, that even I felt like I had to make a call on after the kinds of situations I would find myself in over the years.  One thing I learned how to do was identify those friends and family whom I could count on for support, and those friends and family I definitely could not count of for support.  The people I could not count on would typically tell me that all of that stuff I talked about was all in my head, and they would continue along in the vein of how they were right and I was wrong about whatever I wanted to talk to them about.

The friends and family I could count on for support didn't do that.  They might not have agreed one hundred percent with what I said, but they somehow had the skill set that would dictate that they didn't want to start arguments with me, and they somehow had the social skills to know to just keep their mouths shut and just listen.  There were a couple of these people who really came through when I was at the end my rope a couple of times.

Here's the thing: even though I might be wrong or mistaken about where some of these women are coming from, or whether these scenarios I talk about with people have any basis in reality, but I'm satisfied with the outcome of these crises, real or not, in spite of the fact that I have not consulted someone who just seems to blather on about how crazy I am and how that means that they are always right about everything.  The reason I believe that I am so satisfied with the outcomes, is that I play to the more paranoid sounding possibilities as if they were at least one of several possibilities.  Of one looks back at the posts from these past several years that put these musings out there, I don't think there might be even one that I would dismiss out of hand.  I'm pretty careful in what I say, for one thing, which means that I couch my statements in a lot of skepticism and try to provide a context within which I make these statements in the first place.   

I've been thinking about this stuff because I have just read a list of prominent men alleged and/or confirmed to have engaged in conduct that was, sometimes, not far enough from some of the stuff I've done.  This was in Jezebel.  These past ten or fifteen years or so haven't seen anything from me quite as bad as some of my escapades in eighties, but there's stuff from as recently as 2009 that I'm not exactly okay with.  I'm speaking of stuff that falls more along the lines of inappropriate remarks in a work setting than the high crimes I go on about in Richy Vegas Comics.  These kinds of articles cast a pretty wide net as to what kinds of behaviors make these lists, everything from suggestive comments in a work setting, to groping at an employee function, all the way to out and out coercion and assault.  This Jezebel article was pretty long, so there was a lot of myself to see in some of these listed behaviors.  Again, turning around an ocean liner.

I went to New York City for MoCCa Fest last weekend.  I had a table at the convention and sold twenty comics.   That might not sound like a lot, but it's the most I've ever sold at one of these things.  It's been several years since I've even done a two day event such as this, and it went as well as I could expect.

I saw Austin English at the festival.  Austin runs a small press and distributorship called Domino Books.  He gave me some money for the sale of some of the Richy Vegas Comics that I sent him last year on consignment.  He was really nice, and yesterday he emailed me a blurb that he wrote about my issue # 13 and the run in general.  The mini review appeared online in The Comics Journal in their Best Comics of 2017 issue.  Here it is:

​"I am a big fan of these Richie Vegas comics. They are (I believe) semi-autobiographical and unflinching. Alexander draws his comics in circular images on paper plates. They are a unique way of expressing a life on paper, and while the emotions and situations seen within these pages are strong and sometimes upsetting, they are a valuable example of cartooning's power to get ones self down on paper and patiently wait for a receptive reader to engage. Visually, they offer moments of unexpected and thrilling beauty, as a near perfect image appears among pages of mundane day to day struggle."

I hope he's okay with me pasting it here.  I'll write him and ask him, just to make sure.

As far as material success in this or any Arts and Entertainment field goes, I think about where I am now and where my work is most likely to be situated in the next several years, and I have to just redefine success with an emphasis on the more personal goals I've managed to achieve.  Namely, my ability to deal with the Unavailable Woman Deals that have consistently reared their ugly heads pretty much since late adolescence right up to the present time.

I've mentioned my struggles with obsession and fixation on unavailable women, and the crash and burn inevitable outcomes that used to be the bane of my existence, particularly in my twenties.  That tendency made it very hard to set longterm goals, such as how to pay off my student loans after graduate school, for example.  My family had to step in and pay those loans after my initial diagnosis of mental illness that occurred a little more than a year after my graduation from the School of Visual Arts.

So the ability to set long term goals such as the completion of the run of my Richy Vegas memoirs, and to have a reasonable expectation of finishing them at some time during the middle of the next decade, is a very big deal.  I just can't control too much whether the market will affirm the worth of what I'm doing in my lifetime, particularly while I'm still enjoying reasonably good health. Therefore, I'm compelled to define my personal ideas of what constitutes success more around my ability to manage and conquer personal demons, rather than what the larger society around me defines as success.  After all, ask Kurt Cobain or Marilyn Monroe what real world success did for them in their ability to manage things they probably struggled with every single day of their adult lives.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how I've come up with a set of standards regarding what I look for in a woman I want to go on a date with.  I said the three things I'm looking for are: available, interested, act like they give a shit about taking care of themselves.  This standard allows me to consider women that, in the past, I wouldn't have given the time of day to.  Hopefully, with time, this standard will allow me to develop better taste in women, because I think that basing one's attraction to someone almost solely on how good they look is an indicator of bad taste in women.  I think it also indicates that such a person does not like women in general very much, because the only women that such a person tends to believe have anything to offer them are really attractive women.

Okay, so I have a more forgiving set of standards for what will get a woman at least one date with me.  Here's the flip side of that: as long as I consistently make intelligent decisions about the unavailable, often predatory women in my world, I can make whatever decisions I want to make about any other type of woman in my world.  This includes women who are available, interested, and act like they give a shit about taking care of  themselves.  If I don't want to ask such a woman out on even one date, I don't have to.  Think about it; just because I've freed myself from feeling as if I owed very attractive, ultimately unavailable women a profound level of devotion-women I hardly ever really knew in most cases- why then, am I obliged to turn around and make it all about any other type?  Yet another reason I've banished therapists from my life. 

I submitted a book to Image Comics and Fantagraphics Books yesterday.  My submissions consisted of a copy of ​Richy Vegas Comics issue # 14: "'The Legend of Richy Vegas, book 1," and a one page synopsis of the plot line of the first five or so books.  I've submitted to Fantagraphics before and they rejected me, but I've never submitted to Image Comics before.  I followed the synopsis guidelines from Image, but submitted a whole book, which Fantagraphics would be more okay with.  It's also the type of book that I think Fantagraphics would take more of an interest in than Image.  It's just that I talked to a guy who highly recommended Image as a publisher, because they give their talent such good deals, apparently. 

I was at a support group last night where I talked about how it's pointless to have resentment against publishers for rejecting my work, because the Indie Comics world has so many people vying for a deal that they can't possibly give one to everyone who "deserves" one.  A top selling book might top out at around 300,000 copies in it's run before petering out.  So, given that the field is top heavy with talent and the fact that the market is relatively small means that publishers are taking a big risk in giving a deal to anyone.

The two or three editions of Best American Comics (2015, 2016 and 2017) I've looked through had a lot of self-published creators in them.  The book for this year had a guest editor that went out of his way to showcase self-published work, but the one from the previous year featured something like one if four creators that were self-published, along with the usual suspects.  I'm sure some of the self-published creators had previous work that saw print somewhere, but I imagine a lot of others are mostly known through their self-published efforts.

I finished the inks on the lettering tonight.  I have to make a few corrections on some of the pages, but I can start the final inks of the illustrations right away, and I hope to finish in three and a half months.

I want to try to sell some books at my gig at the Pocket Fishrman Fish Fry on June 2nd.  It's the best gig I've landed by far in these past couple of years.   It's on June 2nd, and I go on at 9:30- right after the Fishrman! I want to try to work on the album until then.  I have three more tracks to record of the guitar and vocals.  I'm going to add bass and percussion, but I don't want that to be some big time-consuming project.  I hope to be ready for mixing and mastering by July, but I'll accept October or whatever, if it comes to that.