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.
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.
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