I think a big reason for my relative lack of success with women over the years stems from an apprehension that so many of them have about me.  Namely, that I have formed or will form an inappropriate emotional attachment to them.  Ten years ago, when I asked mostly young baristas and waitresses out in front of God and everyone, this apprehension seemed to result in the defenses a lot of them would throw up in response to my entreaties.  The defenses came mostly in the form of really cruel games that I didn't think they could really justify as a reaction to my overtures.  I wished they wouldn't have such a fear about me just because I asked them out, but there you are.  I asked two older waitresses out at that time, and only one of them played some stupid game, but even she couldn't bring herself to come off as totally rude at the moment i did ask her out, but there's more to that story than I want to get into right now.

So, I think if I give off a general vibe to attractive women that I would form a premature and inappropriate emotional attachment to them at the drop of a hat, that might explain an overall lack of much in the way of opportunities with women in general.  Okay, since those days of ten years ago, I've taught myself how to refrain from approaching certain woman in such a forward manner.   Mostly, these women are still very young waitresses, baristas, or other young women I see on a regular basis on my day to day routines.  Hannibal Lecter said in Silence of the Lambs, about the serial killer Buffalo Bill, "He wants what he sees."  So, maybe going into online dating or something would sublimate my desires enough and I could find more appropriate women to approach for that sort of thing.  Oh well, that's for another day.

I think that the young woman I went on at length about this past year-plus definitely played to the notion that any attempt on my part to approach her for social reasons while she worked at her job would make me look bad.  I guess I should really thank women such as her for providing this siren type temptation for me to fight, and thus I became a bit more emotionally self-reliant and sharper in my game.

Before I sign off, I want to thank the fifteen or so additional unique visitors to this site this week.  That is, fifteen visitors more than usually visit the sight in any given week.  That's nearly double the normal amount.  I don't know how Weebly comes up with these numbers.  When I go about my day to day routines, it seems as if a lot of people in my world have read what I write on a regular basis.  But then again, I have a major mental illness that may cause me to project such thoughts onto people when they greet me or look at me on my daily walks, for example.  Fun with mental illness.  Boy howdy!

Sorry to go on about the same stuff all the time, but here goes.  In my last post I talked about how I never signed on for the Unavailable Woman Deal in regards to the young woman I've written so extensively about for over a year now.  Don't get me wrong, though.  I still liked her and found myself very, very attracted to her, but my understanding of how things go in relation to such women prevented me from chasing her to the ends of the Earth and back.  If I could count on one thing I knew for sure, that would involve the understanding that chasing this kind of person to the ends of the Earth and back would definitely not do it.  So, I very much wanted to get with this person in every sense, I just knew about one way to NOT go about it.

That leaves me with the belief that this person just did not have an agenda with me that involved love, girlfriends, or relationships.  So, basically, if she was never on board for any of that, our deal was never meant to be.   Maybe one day some august body will pin the medal on her she seemed to so desperately covet in whatever agenda she did have with me, if she had any kind of agenda at all.

Here I am, sounding like a broken record again.  Last year I feel as if this young woman I go on about made me an offer of an Unavailable Woman Deal.  Again, an Unavailable Woman Deal requires that I bend over backwards to accommodate the notion of this person inside of me, and that I try to work things out in such a way that makes both of us happy and all of those around us happy.  In exchange for my efforts, she gets to do whatever the hell she wants.  Again, I would routinely sign on for such a deal back when I was around this young woman's age.  Only when I turned the deal down did I ever see it for what it was.  I never signed on for this deal in regards to the young woman I've talked about so extensively this past year-plus or so.  I liked her, I just didn't like the idea of signing on for that deal.  Sure enough, she did whatever the hell she wanted, but I just refused to fulfill my end of the bargain, and that FACT makes me happy.  I have great confidence that, in the unlikely event I ever get to know this person better, she would still just do whatever the hell she wanted no matter what.  I'm not going to make any effort whatsoever to get to know her better, because that would, again, probably mean I'm bending over backwards to make things work out, so we're probably done. I NEVER signed on for that deal.

In my last post I mentioned an artist named Mark Hogancamp and his artistic response to a savage beating he received in 2000.  In one of my longer comic books I mention a female friend I went to school with in the eighties.  What I didn't mention in the story concerned the incident where a boyfriend of hers shot her at point blank range in the face when she was twenty.  In the story I wrote and drew I portrayed her as my rescuer.  

After the incident in the story, she talked about how much the gunshot wound messed her up.  She can't use a computer, for example, and I'm pretty sure she can't drive.  All of this because she loved the wrong person and "crowded" him one night as they argued in his apartment.  He was probably on something like whiskey and cocaine, but don't quote me on that.  She said she had an attraction to scary, dangerous men due to her relationship with her father.  She's someone who would never hurt a fly.

No matter what kind of spin anyone out there puts on my behavior in the past, I've never physically hurt any of these women I go on about.  I may have done things like write a previous story about the antagonists of the later issue that features my above mentioned friend that depicts them in less-than-okay ways, but I don't know that a roadmap exists as to how to expresses anger towards people that doesn't do them harm but gets the point across, so one often finds oneself left to one's own devices.  Some of the things I've done in my past may have crossed a line, or maybe the way they spin things makes things seem much worse than they were, but they still can't go back into the past and change things around to where I physically hit them or verbally threatened them or did anything else like that.

As of this writing, I still have the privilege of patronizing any business at any time of day I choose, no matter who may work there at any particular time.  I don't plan on doing anything that would jeopardize that privilege.  I have no desire whatsoever to jeopardize my privileges of that nature.  I just wonder how much longer people can spin things to make me look really bad, if such a thing ever went on in the first place.

    

I saw a movie called Welcome To Marwen, starring Steve Carell, the other day.  It's about an artist named Mark Hogancamp.  He lives in upstate New York.  In 2000 he was savagely beaten by a gang of five men.  He was beaten up so badly he couldn't recall most  of his life before the attack.  They beat him up because he admitted to them he was a cross dresser.  After the attack, he couldn't draw anymore, but he made dioramas of dolls in a village that he would photograph.  The whole world he created had a WWII theme, and a lot of the dolls were based on people in his real life.  The hero was his alter ego, Hogie, and there was a band of sexy female partisan guerrillas that would always rescue him from the SS men, who represented his attackers.

I got very emotional watching the movie, and reading the book just now that features Mark's photos.  This past several years or so I recall several instances where I figured people wanted to beat me up.  That woman at that business seemed to relish riling up her boyfriends about me, for example.  A couple of times at The Lost Well I saw some guys who maybe had that in mind too.  I just had to let all concerned know that I was willing to defend myself to the best of my ability.  She's nothing but a bully and a coward, in my opinion. 

Since the age of twenty I've attracted the attention of a weird kind of female bully.  I guess they would characterize themselves as alluring femme fatales or some such shit as that, but really, they're just bullies.  I've been thinking about my relationship with this one older sister I had right around  the onset of puberty.  She would physically attack me and scratch my arms up with her nails and shit like that.  As my hormones progressed, I saw her as an alluring target for feels on her titties and peeping at her undressing and whatnot, which she would label as incestuous.  So, there's some sadomasochistic issues for you.  Eh?  

That would explain my attraction to these bully types I've encountered since the onset of my mental illness at the age of twenty.  For the past ten or eleven years I've been dealing with the symptoms of love addiction without really putting my finger on some of that stuff.  As far as my family goes, there's just a rich bountiful harvest of dysfunction to choose from, but yeah, the sadomasochistic issues with very attractive, young women.....

With this last bully, I never even tried to talk to her.  There was just something so sketchy about her from day one, that stopped me right there.  I wavered quite a bit from time to time, but "home" for me always returned to the idea of having no real desire to try to have anything at all to do with her.  Who cares from whence her shit came?  I don't.  Regular readers of this space know I went on quite a bit about her, but in real life, no attempt to have anything to do with her could contain the promise of possibility my fixations on these kinds of women used to have.  If she was doing her little schtick on behalf of someone from my past, well, some asshole type always wants to step up to the plate and face me- to the point where I don't particularly care what particular chute this or that turd rolled down from any more.  There's more where she came from, I guess.  What I'm hoping for is a reverse domino effect.  In other words, I feel no need to try and rebound with any other women in my world (young waitress/barista types) over this latest bully I've dealt with, and so I hope that state of mind continues.

I think it helps to view my problems with love addiction as a chronic illness along the lines of diabetes or arthritis.  One just needs to take care of it to some degree on an almost daily basis.  One will have better days, weeks, and months at some times and not so good days, weeks, and months at other times.  My love addiction comprises a key component to my mental illness that medication alone doesn't seem to meaningfully address.

As far as how that pertains to this young woman I've been talking about since last year, well, what has she "done," really?  On a few occasions she threw me flirtatious looks of varying degrees of intensity.  All the while she lived a personal life that didn't really involve me.  That's about all I have on her.

For my part, I wavered in my commitment to leave her alone from time to time, but as of right now, I have no "plans" for her.   The world doesn't seem to be in danger of running out of unavailable women any time soon, so I hope that my efforts to manage this aspect of my mental illness in light of this reality continue to prove as effective as in times past.

I've managed to memorize all fifteen songs off my next album, I Make Country Music Records, Sir.  Last year around May and June, I set out to memorize the remaining eight of the fifteen.  I figured two months would provide me with plenty of time to memorize the eight remaining songs.  Hah!  I gave up on that idea in late June of 2019.  In late July, carpal tunnel issues came up in my left arm.  That whole deal took about four-plus months to resolve.  I now wear a wrist brace on my left hand and wrist at night to keep from pinching the nerves in my wrist when I sleep at night.  I hope the brace helps me avoid getting surgery.

One of the last songs I had to memorize has the title, "The Man Who Never Washed Her Hair."  It uses a modal key progression.  That means the verses go up a half key during part of the song; for example, from the key of C, to C sharp, to D, to D sharp.  "The Man Who Never Washed His Hair" finds it's basis in a true story I heard a while back about a couple of people I knew.  In the song, I make myself the narrator, who buys a bunch of cocaine to bring to his girlfriend in Iowa.  As the narrator goes up IH 35 from Austin in his shitty old car, he skims off the stash of coke all the way up.  He finally arrives at his girlfriend's hotel room in Iowa, and he's done all the coke, and his "dick is dishrag limp and it's useless as a Trump."  I changed the narrator to myself to spare the real person's feelings if they should ever hear the song.  I plan on posting a video of it next month on my YouTube channel.

I'm also practicing my AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix on my electric guitar.  My teacher gives me new stuff all the time, but I'd just as soon memorize some of the stuff we've gone over so I could do some of it at an open mike sometime in the future.  I take virtual guitar lessons from my teacher ever since this coronavirus stuff hit.

I'm on the final stages of inking issue number 21 of Richy Vegas Comics.  I just inked pages 33 and 34 today.  I just ink two a day right now, because I want time to do other stuff like music.  This issue features Robin, who came to me in my head during my period of psychosis in 1992.  She's a lot like "Monica," the Mexican girl I met in Spain 1988, whom i feature prominently in, Richy Vegas: A Psycho Memoir.  I met Robin only once in 1989, but she took on a very prominent role in my psychotic hallucinations in 1992.  I looked up her Facebook page a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't put in a friend request.  She still looks good.  She lives in Austin, is married, and has a kid.   

In my last post I put forth the notion that other employees at this business wanted me to try to get to know this young woman I write about better.  If that notion has any basis in reality, I feel extremely honored.  I talk often about my desire to improve my relationship with women, and the idea that people would consider it a good thing for this young woman to become friends with me amounts to something like an Academy Award for self-improvement.  That does not go unnoticed or unappreciated by me, I assure everyone.

I just don't want to get in the middle of anything between this young woman and another person.  I'm sorry, but the other day I got the distinct impression that any effort to get with this young woman would amount to just that.  In better times than we have now, I would say that there's plenty of fish in the sea, and that I find no need to do something like that.  My last post touched upon the idea that any attempt to work stuff like that out during this time would prove inappropriate and too difficult to accomplish.  

But, again, I emphasize how honored I feel that people want me to try and get something going with her.  In my memory, which to me feels not too long ago, people definitely DID NOT see me as someone who might hit it off with someone like her.  In fact, people tended to see me as more of a threat to someone like her than anything else.  Again, thanks to all the well wishers, I wish I felt as if I could follow through on your wishes, if that indeed proves to be your desire.  But, one should remember, this young woman is an adult as well, and her wishes need honoring too.

I spent a good deal of last night going over things in my head in regards to this young woman at this one business I patronize.  I came up with a theory that other employees at this business want me to pursue a friendship with this young woman, no matter her personal life circumstances.  By that I mean, I think she probably has a boyfriend.  I'm flattered that perhaps a lot of employees like the idea of me pursuing a friendship with this young woman, but I don't want to do that right now.  

First off, I'm a fifty-six year old man.  I bring that up because I've been in this place before; where people had ideas about matching me up with this or that woman, and I looked into it a little, and I came to the conclusion that things wouldn't work, but people tried to overrule me.  A lot of people seem to have the idea that mentally ill people, regardless of their age or level of development, are more like children than adults, and that the mentally ill person can't make sound decisions on their own behalf.  That's very disrespectful.

Second, I realize that there can exist a lot of gray areas in these situations, but this time in our history and our own lives does not seem to present good opportunities to sort out those gray areas, in my opinion.   Now represents a time for all of us to just look out for ourselves and those around us as best as we can, and not the time at all for these kinds of romantic issues.

I repeat: I'm not going to try to pursue a friendship with this young woman now or in the foreseeable future.  I'm not interested in trying to be there for her, because I don't really even know her at all.  Please, I want people to respect my judgement, and for these employees at this business to treat me in a professional, courteous manner.