Go ahead and read the article of you like. I found it in medium.com if the link doesn't work. I just want to talk about the times in my life that some women in my world saw me as having potential. The first time came within the first year of my first psychotic break and, several months later, my first major psychotic episode. The theme of my first psychotic episode centered around my virginity. I was waiting tables at a restaurant the night it happened. I first realized that all of the employees and some of the customers all knew that I was a virgin because this black kid who worked in the kitchen or maybe bussed tables overtly gave me shit about it the night before. I tripped on acid with Suckmeat and Carlos on Suckmeat's recommendation all night, and did not sleep, and went into work the next night. That was when I had the episode. I worked the whole shift and tried to get laid afterwards outside of a punk/metal show at Liberty Lunch by directly propositioning a girl that I was trying to date while within earshot of some punk kids who all seemed to know about the fact that I was a virgin as well.
The following Summer saw the arrival of not-yet-illegal ecstasy and I had a breakthrough when I talked to a couple of girls from the art school as I tripped on it on two different occasions. The first girl was an uberbabe of the school whom I had mixed it up with some the previous year. I heard from a sympathetic female friend that she'd said something like, "There's nothing wrong with Richard, except that he's crazy."
The night I tried to talk to her was when I went to this dance club by myself while tripping balls on this ecstasy. I took it while I was still at Suckmeat's house. Suckmeat and his two gay roommates plus two gay guys from Houston were there, I took the ecstasy and at some point one of the gay guys from Houston starts talking to the other gay guys about how he was talking about Georgia O'Keefe to some guy on some previous occasion. He related how her name had come up, and this gay guy had said, "Oh you mean that woman who does the vaginal paintings?," and how this guy he talked to said that he didn't know what he was talking about.
This gay guy from Houston then pulls the Georgia O'Keefe book from the shelf and shows the other gay guys the paintings of close ups of flower petals and says that the guy that he was talking to about this must not have ever had any blah, fucking, blah, fucking, blah. I left soon afterwards and found out a couple of days later that Suckmeat had unprotected sex with all the gay guys plus one other gay gay who came over after I'd left. He didn't get HIV though.
The drive down I-35 while tripping balls on ecstasy was challenging, but I made it to the club. I saw these three girls from the art school at the club, but I wasn't on very good terms with any of them. One of them was the girl that I'd propositioned that night of my first full blown psychotic episode, but the real problem one was the uberbabe that I'd also had a run-in with the previous semester. At one point I was really aware that the drug was making me really jump out of my skin and pace around frantically, so I decided that I just had to try to talk to the uberbabe and the other girl as they sat on a carpet covered bench that ran along a wall.
I was really polite to them and asked if I could sit with them and stuff. The one girl got up and walked off and left me with the uberbabe. I tried to be really nice and asked her to dance after a bit of strained small talk. She said no, I said okay, and I walked off after I said, "Nice talking to you, Julie."
I let the club soon afterwards. I didn't realize that I was no longer in the doghouse with the uberbabe, and thus, no longer in the doghouse with her friends either, until I fully realized it the night I tripped on ecstasy at another downtown dance club and talked to another girl from the art school. That time was real fun and trippy-to-the-max with the way the crowd all seemed to be in on what was going on with myself and this girl as we talked on the deck at the entrance to the club. The uberbabe was one of the other people there.
I dated that girl I talked to that night for like a month before the school year started. She really didn't want to date me long term, but she wasn't very nice about calling it off.
That Fall I took a painting class with Julie. She still seemed to like me. At our first critique she talked about how her painting tried to depict how her recently ex-boyfriend used to grill her about her provocative little mannerisms and gestures that I had also found so unsettling. I'm talking about the way she'd say hi when I passed her at school and such. The quirky mannerisms and smiles seemed to convey a sense that she was in on some joke, and that the joke was on me. I figured that she thought that my being so nice to her that night must have told her that I was willing to take all of that in stride and let it go. In recent times I recall that I was simply tripping balls on ecstasy and just dying for some interaction of same kind, and that she just didn't realize that.
So I totally worked that enlightenment-through-superniceness line of inquiry until I ran smack dab into a fucking impenetrable wall when I tried to date Wanda in 1987. I tried the turn-my-back-on-love line of inquiry only one time to full effect in 1988. That line of inquiry came a a result of reading through "Feeling Good" by Dr. David Burns and thinking maybe that my problems had a lot to do with Love Addiction. I talk about this in the post, "I'm Not Bad," from January 2016.
How all of this relates to this article this woman writes about guys with potential follows. I think the girls at the art school saw me as a guy who had potential because 1) I seemed to be pretty talented artistically in school 2) and that I might have come across as some kind of genius as a result of these interactions with these girls while I tripped on ecstasy.
The girl I dated gave me shit about how I acted like she wasn't on my level and how that made me look like such an asshole. I also talked about my psychotic episodes and she couldn't really relate to what I said.
Another girl who took an interest in me at that time asked the art student girl roommate of that girl I dated about me. This was like in November. This girl told her something like, "He's one of the better students at the school, and people used to take him really seriously, but not so much anymore." Jeannette asked me what that girl might have meant by that, and I didn't have a clue.
I've had a couple of other times in my life where the women around me seemed to see me as someone with potential. The last really notable time came in 1998/1999. I had been diagnosed and treated for the first time in 1992, and in 1995 I finally got some medicine that allowed me to enjoy a long period of relative mental and emotional stability for the first time in my adult life.
Some women I met through this dishwashing job in 1998/1999 took an interest in me. A female manager talked about how I might be a genius. There was this uberbabe girl who'd worked there when I first started, and who was still a fixture socially, in addition to working an occasional shift or two. One day I concluded that I was really obsessed with her, and confessed this to the manager who talked about my being a genius and all that.
Issue four of Richy Vegas Comics, "Anita, You're the Reason I'm Not In Prison," tells a pretty good version of how things shook out with that deal. One of the key factors that led to my downfall, I think, was the belief that my love interest might really like it if I did the enlightenment-through-superniceness approach one more time.
I had, essentially, the features of a psychotic episode in the social sense, without the psychosis, I even had an appearance by what looked like a representative of Vernon Hoe and "The League" in the person of Anita. A couple of days earlier, as the shit seemed to be going down once again, I wrote in a notebook about how now all that needed to happen was for Gil Wilson to show up for me to know that everything was totally in the crapper with my love interest. I talk about Gil Wilson in the post, "Movies," and in the songs "Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin, parts and two," which can be found in my Myspace music link at the top of this page. A video of part one appears in my Youtube link.
Nope, not Gil Wilson this time, but Anita. I went to high school and art school with Anita, but have no idea when she was brought on board, if there is anything to this "League" stuff that is.
Anyway, I think that both times I had found myself in favor with those women from both those eras, I think that my downfall resulted from the perception that they had seen the the pathetic little man behind the curtain; the little man who projected the giant, booming image of the Great and Terrible Oz by manipulating little knobs and buttons and pulling an occasional lever, at least that was the contributing factor on their end of it. So I kind of read that article about how that woman rued the time that she'd wasted on men with potential with that in mind. My experience of being perceived as a genius both of these times is a definite double-edged sword, in that the perception that they'd discovered the pathetic little man behind the curtain led to that girl making that mean little dismissive comment about how people at the art school didn't take me very seriously anymore and the particularly vicious attempt to take me down that I depict in "Anita..."
I feel like things are going pretty good for me now. I don't really have what I consider a viable social circle now to meet women. Sometimes I bring up who all might read this blog and not tell me they read it. I talk about how I often play it as if women who work at some businesses that I patronize might read it. I also talk about how I'm trying to work the turn-my-back-on-love line of inquiry to the fullest that I am able to make it, and what all this may lead to. I'm pretty satisfied with all of that so far. Mostly because I seem to be really good at being able to smell a rat as far as the predations on me from some of these women in my world. It can take a bit of time, but shit, I've had this kind of problem since the onset of my symptoms, and it persists to this day, and true enough, the turn-my-back-on-love mindset is by far the best way to deal with it.
I've talked about how I've speculated that people from the League might have gone around to these various businesses and told some employees there to pay attention to this space. I remember in 1992 that I had the perception that something like that might have occurred with some of the employees at my factory job as the climactic events of "Blind Assassin" unfolded, I bring this up in "Who's turning the screws now?" from July of this year. Two of the cutest girls in the shop did not seem to be in on it, though. The difference between then and now is that I think maybe Vernon feels like I'm a lot better at sizing up women that I am so very attracted to these days than I was back then. Insert the usual skeptical disclaimer to the proceeding statements here.