I told Vernon Hoe over the phone a few years back that my dilemma with that virgin girl at that one business I patronized made me feel as if I was young again.  And so it goes with this one young woman I've talked about frequently on these posts these past several months.  I feel as if she's presented the same dilemmas I faced as a young man with women such as "Katy," "Wanda," "Linda," etc.  The dilemma centered around the adversarial approach these women initially took towards me.  At some point I believe these and other young women back then had pangs on conscience that made them feel that I was not the; dumbass, bastard, or dumbass bastard they initially thought me to be, and that they accrued second thoughts in their adversarial journey to try to take me down.

For my part, the fact that woman such as these could be so attractive and have so much appeal at the thought of enjoying their company presented a great temptation for me to just forgive whatever cruelties some of them managed to visit upon me before they sort of had a change of heart.  Yep, ages twenty to twenty-eight all over again for me.

Being fifty-five and fully committed to following my buddha really helped show me the way out of such dilemmas.  I could imagine this young woman I became concerned with this past Summer toggling back and forth about me at something like the rate I would toggle back and forth about women such as her.  In a perfect world I would like nothing more than to get to know such an attractive young woman as this better, but we are not in a perfect world.  She had her agenda, maybe, and I'm faced with staying or leaving a situation that proved vexing in my past.  The only way I've ever known these woman for real is in the leavin'.  The stayin' just makes me crazy, and it doesn't seem to do much for them either.  If such a person comes off as more sympathetic in this post than in previous posts of mine, well, thank the buddha for giving me this insight into such a person.  My buddha's the strong one, while I'm just as weak and compromised as any two pack a day, 60 beers a week,  $200 dollar a month weed smoker can be about women such as the one I've been writing about this past Summer.  It's just that I'm the one with the wisdom and the insight to know better than to try and work something out in situations that have been the source of so much grief for me in the past.

To further run this into the ground; in the same way that I can't smoke just two or three cigarettes a day, have a beer or two now and then, and smoke a little weed once in a while; for those kinds of reasons I can't just work something out with an individual whose brought these conflicting issues into play; these issues brought about by how they initially came at me in an adversarial manner and then had a change of heart in the middle of their prescribed course of action.  I've come to an understanding with all of these addictive things that I can't have them in my life in any sustainable way.  I know this young woman is a person and not a thing, but the idea that one can run up against one's limits with a person in the same way that one can run up against one's limits with a thing shouldn't be something that's too hard to grasp for anyone out there.  

If what I believe to be true about this blog is actually true, then there's certain people in my day to day world who are used to knowing my mind.  My last post talked about how I might try to look into the notion that this young woman I've been writing about could have an interest in me after all.  After poking my head out of the sand these past couple of days, I've concluded that this young woman has no interest in me whatsoever.  I know, I know.  I've talked so much about letting this person go, and my last post marked a reversal in that course, but what can I say.  Nobody's perfect.

My last post talked about how I went to Houston Zine Fest last weekend.  Several years ago I sold one of my CDs to a woman at this event.  She liked it enough to contact me via email.  Long story short, I went to visit her in the town she lived in at the time in late 2015.  She had a lot of personal issues that I won't go into, but I'lll say that there was this one statement she made that killed the deal for me as much as anything else.  The first time she said, "I don't compete for men," was on the phone before I left for my trip to  her town.  I could tell over the phone that she had a smirk in her voice when she said it.  She said it again on our date once I'd arrived.  This time I could see the smirk on her face, as well as hear it in her voice.  I could have said, "I've built up my life as a single person to the point where I very much enjoy lots of activities by myself, and you are competing with this life I've built up.  And, that kind of attitude towards me that statement reveals won't cut it as competition between taking on your bullshit and staying with the life I have."  Whew! That's a mouthful.

It'd be nice if I could meet someone at one of these kinds of events.  Someone who seemed really cool and had her shit together and all of that.  Many years ago I had the occasion to hang out with this one guy who kept going on about, "I think I've met someone."  I'd heard so many stories about how insecure he was about rejection, which had been happening a lot to him at this time, that I took his statement with a grain of salt.

If I had the slightest inkling of a notion that I may have, maybe, met someone, the last thing I'd want to do is trumpet it around like this guy did.  It'd be great to meet someone at one of these Zine Fest events or Comic Conventions, but I don't know that I'd want to make an announcement that I'd met someone right off the bat.  I wouldn't want to count my chickens before they are hatched.  I mean, if it was someone from say, Houston, or San Antonio, that'd be cool.  Dallas, or Forth Worth, or Corpus Christie, for example, might be a bit of a hike on a regular basis.

On the other hand, if this person seemed really cool, and intelligent, and awesome, and interesting, and talented.... but I digress.  Far be it from me to be so presumptuous about another person I didn't really know and their possible situations in all kinds of areas of their life.  You see, if this girl I'd been going on about these past couple of months had done something like light up with a beautiful smile when she saw me and greeted me warmly, that really would have been something.  That girl did look at me in a way one time that made me think she'd read or heard about the "Legend of Richy Vegas" issue where I speculate on what might have gone on around me after I'd made thing right with Jenna in 1992, but, that girl I've been writing about had accumulated too much baggage for me by then.  Man, if I could just meet someone I didn't know really at all, who didn't have any psychic baggage with our deal, but who just really lit up when she saw me and said "hi" like it has happened sometimes in the past with me....Man, that'd be awesome.

My last post talked about someone in my world that I don't really know at all.  I concluded that she had no romantic interest in me.  If that is indeed the truth, I will try my best to honor her decision and not bother her.  I'm pretty good at doing that kind of thing too.  I would love for the opportunity to get to know her better, and if that is her wish, I will try to find that out and honor that wish.  Like I said, I'm pretty good at going along with whatever a love interest decides.  I just don't know right now if I've broken new ground, or if it's the same old letting-go-of-yet-another-beloved situation.  That is all.

In other news.  I sold 27 books at the Houston Zine Fest yesterday.  I'd hoped to sell even more than that, but I'll definitely take 27 sold.  Going to these things is pretty hard work.  I got lost on Houston's freeways for two hours after the fest.  Not to mention having to be "on" for all of the attendees and exhibitors and organizers at the fest.  I plan on doing these next seven issues of "The Legend of Richy Vegas" with an order of 100 copies per issue as usual.  But, when I start the next series, it will only consist of about 20 copies per issue and I will just hand them out to friends and family and whatnot and not try to sell them to the general public.  That will give me more time to try and get rid the inventory, both current and those I plan on printing these next few years, that consists of 100 copies per issue.  I told someone at the fest that I will try to sell this stuff at these kinds of events for the next few years, but that I will probably wind of recycling a large portion of my inventory.

I had a therapist describe the process of letting go of a failed love interest as a process that is similar to the grief process at the passing of a loved one.  He described how there were stages in both situations.  Briefly, that there's stages such as shock, mourning, anger, and denial before the "grieving" party can accept the finality of the situation.

My best guess about this young woman I've been writing about in these posts is that she was never really ever interested in dating me.  That covers all periods in which I've written about her, including the most recent periods.  She might not even be available now, and I don't think she was ever, or ever will be, interested in dating me.  I'm just glad the usual shit never went down in this kind of deal.  I have myself to thank for that.  Actually, I don't care whether this young woman really had some shenanigans planned for me. It's enough for me to accept this conclusion about her lack of interest in me and for me to move on.  That is all.

In other news, I sold all of the comics I brought today to Lone Star Zine Fest.  I sold twenty-eight books and used one more for a trade.  I sold them for a dollar each.  I'm glad that I'm able to bring them down in price to the point where people want to buy them.  I really don't want to recycle the vast majority of the books I've printed up.  I've sold more books this year than I sold all of last year.  It helps to have something going for myself in general, because it really helps me to come to the conclusions I need to come to as in the above paragraphs.

The last couple of times I've patronized that business where that beautiful young woman works, she seems to have made a point of making herself scarce when I'm around.  I could take that a couple of ways.  The way I choose to take it is, I think it's....awesome.  I take it to mean that she doesn't want to fuck with me or fuck me up in my decision to let her go.  When I was her age I had the hardest time letting go of young women who looked just about as good as her.  This problem persisted throughout my twenties.  I only had a respite with that Sara in 1988.  Two years after I let go of Sara, I had a relapse.  That's a good word for it, relapse.

This girl I'm talking about now, this girl at this business i patronize, can do this making herself scarce on me bit all fucking day, as far as I'm concerned.  I think I get that she really understands that I don't want to fuck with her, but that I just saw stuff in our deal that wouldn't work.  She can do whatever the hell she wants as far as I'm concerned.  It would be nice if she refrained from really graphic PDA with anyone while I'm around, but other than that, I've got no problems with what she's doing or might do in the future.

During Winter break of 1984/85, I met "Katy" at a party.  I saw her arrive with a girl and two other guys, I think.  I took a liking to her and asked her for her phone number.  When she gave me the number, I got a high off of that.  Wolfgang, the gay-guy friend I went to the party with, asked to speak to me in Spanish.  In heavily American-English-accented Spanish he said, "Ricardo.  Creo que esta mujer es una puta barata." I tried to talk back in Spanish, but Wolfgang just pointed out in English that Katy and a girlfriend were in front of us laughing hysterically to each other.  Wolfgang said he thought they were laughing at me.

One our date New Year's Eve, Katy said that the guy I saw her with that night at the party was her boyfriend, but that she was going to break up with him.  At some point, at a party at a theater while we sat in an audience row, we made out.  Katy asked me if I was a virgin, and I said yes.  Katy then said she loved me.  Later that night, at some guy's apartment, I said that I didn't want to get her pregnant when she gave me the opportunity to have sex with her.  We sat in the bathroom while her friend had sex in the bedroom with her date.

Well, I didn't have sex with Katy on any of our subsequent dates, and she called me and said that her relationship with her boyfriend was no longer and open one.   I felt really bad about not getting to have sex with her.  Her boyfriend was a student in a drawing class of mine at UT the next semester.

I told a male friend in the Spring of 1985 my version of what had happened, and he said something like, "Dog eat dog," i.e. that I should have taken advantage of any opportunity Katy offered me.  I tried to get something going with Veronica that semester, but that didn't work out.

During the Summer of 1985, I called Katy and arranged a movie date.  I tried to initiate intimate relations with her in my truck, but she didn't want to.  I kept pressing until she practically had to wrestle with me to get me to stop.  I was very upset and I was very hostile and surly with her.  She drove my truck to her house and she went into her house, and I drove home.

I didn't realize how upset she was until I tried to call her a day or two later.  I called her again a day or two after that and offered an apology that she might have felt I tainted with my attempt to come off on some higher level, but I did most definitely apologize.  I  talked to girl I'd met through Wolfgang, who became the first girl I ever dated, a couple of days later as I tripped on ecstasy outside of a dance club.  I remember passing Katy in our cars a few weeks later and having a really wild, joyful look on my face that she might have taken the wrong way.  In the Fall of 1986 I had to stand up to some male friends of hers in a club and show that I was willing to defend myself.

Looking back, I wonder how much of an opportunity Katy really gave me that night or on following dates.  She might have figured that she could control me enough with her machinations, but that belief backfired on our date the following Summer.  

I've talked about a young woman in my world, a very attractive young woman, who may have come around about me.  My last post talked about how I'm not going to just forgive her unilaterally for the course of action I perceived her to be on before I may have turned things around.  

There's a lot of factors involved in my lack of willingness to pursue this young woman:  She works at a business where it would be weird for me to approach her socially.  She's no older than twenty-one, while I'm fifty-five.  I'm fifty-five, and therefore not exactly hormonally challenged.  I don't know that she's available.  But, the main reason I don't want to approach her socially has to do with her previous intentions.  I have several reasons to believe that this young woman wanted to hurt me emotionally for whatever fucked up reason she decided to take an emotionally abusive, sadistic path of action in regards to me.  I even thought she might have done so in the service of some crusade on behalf of a woman I now call Linda.  Linda was someone I'd had a run-in with thirty years ago.

In my previous post I said that this young woman didn't mean shit to me as a romantic love interest, but that she meant something to me as a human being.  Well, pardon the hell out of me!  I wish I'd taken that viewpoint in regards to Katy those many years ago.  I think a lot of my troubles with women in my past had to do with perceived opportunities to connect in romantic and sexual ways, and how I somehow blew it with this or that young woman who supposedly gave me such an opportunity.  I care enough for this young woman that I can accept an outcome where we may not connect in any way romantically and/or sexually.  I don't want to get hung up on some supposed opportunity with anyone whom I guessed might have come at me with abusive intent.  That's all I've got to say about this complicated subject right now.

Okay, I'll add this.  I've talked often about how I found myself through my dealings with Sara in 1988.  Back then I decided to see what would happen if I turned my back on love and let whatever opportunity I perceived with Sara slip through my fingers.  My only criticism of my approach back then is that I didn't take it far enough.  I really wish I'd stuck with that course of action with "Linda" and "Myrna."  I don't want to make that mistake again.  I'm following my buddha.  There, that is all. 

I have the impression that some of the women in my world may have read my "Legend of Richy Vegas" comics.  They may have read up to the latest issue, and now have some remorse about their attitudes and behaviors towards me.  I ask a few questions about such remorse.  Suppose my conclusions about Billy's courtship of Jenna had no basis in reality?  Suppose Jenna really didn't even know Billy at all?  Suppose my belief that I showed Jenna that Billy was the threat to her, not me, just wasn't so?

Suppose my experience a week and half later, that of talking to Michelle at the Cannibal Club, a "recovered memory," was not a memory at all, but a hallucination?  What if this stuff was all in my head?  Would that make the course of actions these women in my world took towards me okay again?  What if I'm just a guy who made some bad decisions, experienced a lot of stress, and had a breakdown as a result?  What if these women succeeded in taking me down like they wanted to?  Would they derive the great sense of satisfaction from such an outcome that they'd hoped to derive?

My past experiences, where women with these same attitudes towards me, engaging in the same kinds of behaviors, women who did indeed win at these games they played with me, did seem to derive a great deal of satisfaction from the attitudes and behaviors they visited on me.  They really did seem to think that God was on their side in these conflicts, and that the good guys won in the end.  For all I know, women such as Myrna, and Wanda, and Veronica may look back at their time going up against me and winning as some of the happiest, most satisfying moments of their youths.

So, am I now supposed to feel sorry for these women I beat these days at these games they play?  These games that are games of their own choosing, with their own set of rules, with their own definition of what constitutes victory, and yet they lose.  Am I obliged to like these women?  Am I obliged to forgive them, unilaterally, as a matter of course?  Why am I obliged to forgive them?  Is it because they're so pretty?  They don't ask me to forgive them.  They never admit to the games they play, or to the attitudes they have towards basic human worth and decency that compel them to try and shit on someone they perceive as vulnerable to such a course of action.  They're just entitled to my forgiveness, maybe.  Just like they were entitled to take the course of action they tried to take towards me in the first place.

I've never been in trouble with the law as a result of this kind of shit.  Isn't that amazing?  Even though people like this ain't shit to me as a romantic love interest, they mean as much to me as a human being as anyone else does.  I also know they're someone to somebody, probably a big deal to a lot of people.  Do they assume I'm nothing to anyone else, like I am to them? Who needs Donald Trump, with people like this around to stand in for him?

​  

The headline says it all.  Intelligent decisions these days haven't really had anything to do with love, girlfriends, or relationships for or against.  intelligent decisions almost exclusively have to do with when to cut the other party loose.   That's not to say that I will never have to make decisions about love, girlfriends, or relationships for or against, it's just that the issue has not come up in many, many years.  So, that's where I am.  I figure that I will feel compelled to make an intelligent decision about someone sooner rather than later these days.  I just don't, for the life of me, know right now what that decision will be.

For a good deal of my adult life, I've had a tendency to gravitate towards situations and individual women that invariably proved very difficult.  The women usually possessed a lot of beauty and youth, and the difficult situation usually involved unavailability or unapproachability as principal features of the women and the situations.  I'm trying to take a more compassionate course of action with myself these days, and just take it easy on myself and not try really hard to make things happen if I see a situation and an individual woman with these characteristics.  I'm fifty-five years old, and beautiful twenty-one year old girls are not any easier for me to get with than they were when I was twenty-one myself.  So, baby, it's not you, it's me.

I've thought about what I've just written up above and I want to add this.  I've learned how to bail when courtship situations get too difficult for me.  I figure the reason that such situations present difficulties that I can't get around or through or anywhere else has to do with the unavailability of the person.  In every situation I can think of off the top of my head, it took more courage to let go than to hang on.  And, in every situation I can think of off the top of my head, letting go of the love interest proved the right thing to do.  So, for me, the skill I've learned these past several years, the skill of just getting the hell out, serves me better than just about any higher level skill I can think of regarding my relationship with women. 

I'm putting anyone I should meet in the foreseeable future on notice; my skills at just up and quitting a situation are for their own good as well as mine.  There's some women in my world I like, and I need not feel intimidated by the situations or dilemmas they may present, because I've really learned how to let go of difficult situations and women should it come to that.  There's women I like and would like to get to know better, and knowing that I have the ability to let them go makes me feel better, and it helps me like them better.

My last post talked about the love addicted/ love avoidant dynamic.  When I finally let go of Jenna during the Summer of 1992, and in a matter of days found out that Sara was gay, the folly of my pursuit of both of these women really hit home.  I remember feeling as if, from that point forward, I had absolutely zero obligations towards these types of women ever again.  I mean, under no circumstances should I ever again feel the need to try and work things out with women such as Jenna and Sara.  If anyone in the future ever, ever reminded me of these two-plus quite a few others- I had every right to just walk away, no apologies necessary to ANYONE.

Saying that to myself in the run-up to my grand mal nervous breakdown, and actually putting that promise to myself into action in the aftermath of all of that drama, when the dust had settled, and I'm feeling good again, well, actions speak louder than words.  I had one more crash and burn episode in 1999.  It seemed as if I'd learned nothing from the Big One and my subsequent mental illness diagnosis.  The only thing I learned from that episode in 1999 was this: Even with a diagnosis, medication, therapy, and the support and understanding of friends and family, I could still crash and burn in the exact same way again.  That whole episode was just a psychotic episode on medications that had no accompanying mania, voices, or "recovered memories."

Whelp, someone in my world now reminds me of Jenna, Sara, Veronica, Julie, Wanda, Linda, Myrna, Katy, why, i have the veritable pick of the litter by which to make comparisons between this woman now and those women from my past.  I am rich, rich, rich with experiences to draw upon in making my decisions about this person.  Rich, I tell you.

There is not one person in my world that I have thought about in the past six months, the past eight months, the past year or more, that I wish to pursue romantically at this time.  NO ONE!  If someone in my world wants me to pursue them romantically- and let me make myself perfectly clear, I'm not sure that ANYONE wants me to pursue them romantically these days- but if the person I've been writing about these past couple of months or so wants me to pursue them romantically at this point in time, I have this to say: no dice.

Now, one might think me harsh on this person, but I have this to say.  Coming out and saying what I'm saying now might actually HELP in the chance that myself and this person could one day get together.  Think about it, at least I'm honest about what I want and what I don't want.  Now, in reality, my experiences have shown that if I don't sign on for a totally fucked-up, dysfunctional deal with a type that VIVIDLY reminds me of some of my most painful times with women, then no deal ever, ever takes place.  In theory, an up front, open, honest approach might actually work, but in real life, it's either a bad deal or no deal at all.  I choose no deal at all.