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.