When I think of women such as Veronica, Wanda, Ann Marie, Jenna, Sara, Linda, Julie Drake, that virgin girl who used to work at that one business I patronize, the girls at that business I patronize who came after, and several others, the word "fun" doesn't really come to mind.  Neither do the words "joy" and "happiness" come to mind, for that matter.  The word "ordeal" more readily comes to mind, even in regards to those later women.  Even though I made progressively and comprehensively more and more intelligent decisions about such women the older I got, I wouldn't call any of those times fun.

On the other hand, define "fun."  I think the skillset I've developed over the years in coping with these charged love interest types has progressively provided me with greater degrees of satisfaction concurrent with the development of this skillset.  Don't get me wrong, the necessity of developing good coping skills in regards to such women proved essential in helping me get anywhere in my life, and I'm glad I made those changes.  But, learning how to make intelligent decisions about such women never seemed to involve "fun," or "joy," or "happiness" in any recognizably conventional sense.

An aspect of my mental illness that it benefits me to pay attention to comes in the form of dissociative thinking.  I think of dissociative thinking as applying the interactions with and observations of other people as I go about my day to day life to a very specific context that has something to do with my deepest, most private self.  I can walk down the street on my daily walks, and if a man smiles at me and says hi, I often think he KNOWS things about me I may only confide in with close friends.  I categorize such grandiose thinking as visceral, gut-based thinking that has little to do with reason or logic.  I have such feelings and thoughts every day of my life, as far as I can tell.  A good deal of my thought process consists of parsing out which of those interactions of that nature have any basis in reality to what I think about and which of those interactions have no basis in reality.

The most constructive approach I've come up with in the area of interpersonal relations in these past couple of months still consists of the token reward system I've come up with.  Briefly, I give myself a sticker at midnight every day if I feel I've tried to get along well with and be nice to those it would profit me to get along well with and be nice towards.  On the first and fifteenth of every month, if I conclude that my efforts merit it, I reward myself with an inexpensive, easy to acquire CD, normally of music that I wouldn't normally buy.  Right now I'm listening to a Barry Manilow CD that I ordered earlier this month.  Good songwriter.

Am I a super-genius who finds himself beset by a perpetual confederacy of dunces, or am I just a mentally ill person who gets easily confused in his thinking along the lines of how I've outlined my day to day thought processes in the previous paragraph?  Regardless, I feel these thoughts and feelings as a kind of social heat I draw.  The token rewards might not answer those questions once and for all, but I can commit to a course of action and behavior that those around me and I myself find acceptable.   My own restrictions on what I can write about on this day of the month prohibit me from getting too specific, but I hope to try this token reward system on several people in my world sometime in the foreseeable future. 

  

I have a feeling that I might have "Yojimbo'd" a good deal of the audience that reads these blog posts, if anyone reads them at all.  To see what I mean by "Yojimbo'd," well, watch Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and then watch the sequel, Sanjuro.  Yes, watch both of them, all the way through to the bitter end.  Those in my audience who really needed, nay, deserved a good "Yojimbo-ing" will only upon watching BOTH MOVIES, ALL THE WAY THROUGH, will only then truly appreciate what a good, righteous "Yojimbo-ing" they just experienced.

I implore the members of my audience who experienced this good, righteous "Yojimbo-ing" to savor this moment while it lasts.  I'm getting old.  I'm tired.  How do I know?  I didn't even feel like watching Yojimbo and Sanjuro on the home theater screen tonight.  I watched Nebraska starring, among others, Bruce Dern and Will Forte.  I've seen all or parts of the two Kurosawa movies many, many times.  I know what happens.  I've never seen Nebraska, so I watched that movie instead.  Maybe the day will come when I more identify with Bruce Dern in Nebraska over Toshiro Mifune in the two Kurosawa movies.  Maybe that day is today.

I figure that if anyone regularly reads these posts, and they make up some of the people I encounter in my day to day life, I figure that this audience doesn't order my books online, because that just doesn't seem to be the case. Nonetheless, the following blog entry contains spoilers, so anyone who wants to not read key character and plot points of my books might want to not  read this blog entry.

First off, let me apologize to "Jenna" for what I will write next, but I want to get this off of my chest.  During the Summer of 1992, some weeks after I made things right with Jenna on June 22nd of that year, at a movie theater where she worked on a Monday night, I came to consider the possibility that Jenna's dad had sexually abused her as a child, a very young child.  Jenna would employ a non sequitur mannerism at times; she would sit in a chair and look as if she were thinking about something and laugh to herself and shake her head.  I remember in January of 1992 how Jenna had said, "My dad didn't even send me a Christmas card.  That bastard!" with a sideways grin of indignation and look of reflection in her eye as if to add to her tally.

Several times, when Jenna and I sat next to each other, starting in the truck on our drive to Kansas City with my roommate Davey at the wheel, Jenna acted as if she wanted for me to make a move on her, such as hold her hand.  I never felt comfortable doing anything like that at these times, for whatever reason.  Every time after these "missed opportunities," Jenna would hook up with some other guy in a matter of days, and often act snotty towards me as well.

The first time I talked to Jenna, days before our Kansas City trip, she criticized Davey and I for not intervening when an older woman touched her inappropriately while conversing with Jenna at a party we'd all attended earlier that night.  Some days later, after the Kansas City trip, and after she turned down at date request from me, John-John at G/M Steakhouse said she had some guy who wanted to take her to a nude Lake Travis swimming hole, and how she really didn't want to go, but how she wanted a guy to be at her place to answer the phone in case he called again.

For my part, during that whole time I pursued Jenna romantically, I played to the notion that she reminded me of Sara, someone I had cut loose in 1988.  By that time I'd figured that Sara may have been a virgin during the time our cat and mouse game played out to the point of me cutting Sara loose.  In the Spring of 1990, I'd come to embrace the conviction that I'd made a big mistake in cutting Sara loose.  By the time Jenna came around, I'd become determined to see matters pertaining to these charged love interest types to the very bitter end.

I tried to let Jenna know by the whole of my interactions with her that I didn't just want her for sex.  Those times when it seemed that she wanted to try to initiate intimacy through these "jump through my hoops" moments just fell flat with me.  People at parties would seem to put out some vibe that I came off as foolish, or as a dumbass who didn't know enough to just go for it when she gave me the chance.

I even forsook potential opportunities with two other young women during the first few months of 1992, supposedly on behalf of my deal with Jenna.  After a particularly noisome rebuff of Alice's sexual overture to me at her party in April, I inadvertently began to really ramp up the pressure on Jenna. Jenna loudly and forthrightly said that she did not want to "do something" with me during Memorial Day weekend, and I demanded that she would have to call me if she ever wanted to go out with me again.  She did not take that seriously.

I saw Jenna at Emo's the following week on the Friday after Memorial Day.  She walked up to me and tried to introduce me to a girl friend of hers.  I angrily asked for a light for my cigarette, then said, "Forget it! Forget I said anything," and walked off.  I saw her the very next Friday at Emo's, she vibed pissed and standoffish.

I decided that I wanted to just leave Jenna alone after that, so I didn't go to Emo's that third or fourth Friday in a row.  On that fourth Friday, I attended a party at a girl named Michelle's house with my friends.  At the party,  Gil Wilson showed himself.  "Let me ask you this then, are you still having encounters with your mind?" Gil asked after we sat together to catch up.  We talked about "Tim." a mutual friend we'd both grown up with, and how he'd ratted out some accomplices in the aftermath of a big pot buy gone bad.

In the day or two after my conversation with Gil, even though he never mentioned Jenna, and I never mentioned Jenna, I just knew he wanted me to make things right with her, so I did.  I saw her at the Dobie Theater when I caught a movie there, talked to her a little, and parted with her by saying, "You can call me if you want to," then left.

In the days that followed, I'd come to the conclusion that Billy Biliams, a known serial date rapist, had, through his word or merely his presence around her, offered himself as protection for Jenna from me.   I freaked out in the following weeks over this and eventually went to the  psychiatric hospital for the first time, where I received treatment with antipsychotic and antidepressant medications and a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

In the Fall of 1992, after my release from the hospital, the pendulum swung from extreme psychosis over to extreme depression, and I had to go to another hospital for that by December of 1992.  I got stabilized enough for them to release me after three weeks, and I just rested and chilled out in Big Spring with my dad from early January until I returned to Austin in May of 1993.

I saw Jenna at a party in mid-June that Summer.  She greeted me with her snotty, "Oh, it's Riiich. Hey Rich," after I greeted her.  I caught some bits of conversation she made with some guy where she said, "If you or anyone else give me any trouble, I'll beat them up."  The guy came off as polite, and Jenna just said this as if to say, "That's just how I roll, nothing personal towards you." I just caught a bitchy vibe off of her, and didn't much want to talk to her that night.

I'd certainly changed a lot through my experiences of my romantic pursuit of Jenna, but was I the only one who'd changed?  In the years leading up to the completion of that whole saga in my books, I thought about what Jenna had said to that guy at that party in mid-June of 1993.  The girl I first met in 1991 had criticized Davey and I for not intervening on her behalf when some older woman had touched her inappropriately at that New Guild party where I first talked at length to Jenna.  From what I remember, Jenna just passively sat there as that woman talked to her and touched her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable.  A few weeks later, John-John related the story about the guy who'd invited Jenna to Hippy Hollow, a clothing optional swimming hole, and how Jenna wanted some guy in her apartment so he could answer the phone in case this invite extender called again.

Maybe Jenna had learned early on to passively endure transgressive behavior from her dad, and therefore had trouble fending off such behavior as a young adult, thus making her a tempting target for Billy Billiams. Okay, okay, and yeah, I'll say it: Maybe, just maybe, maybe, because I was a guy who wouldn't jump through her hoops whenever she tried to rush intimacy with me, and I tried to let her know in other ways that I valued her as something other than a recepticle for my seed, maybe I made her feel loved to the point where she could find the wherewithal to tell a Billy Billiams to go fuck himself and his offer of "protection."

So any woman out there who tries to make me feel as if I'm not performing up to their expectations in supposedly consummating our  deal can go fuck themselves running, for all I care.  The only expectations I have to live up to are my own.  If I never meet someone who can give and receive love in a way I can understand, then so be it. 

In those instances where I carried a torch for women such as Donna, Linda, and Gwen, I likely never thought of myself as the sole keeper of the flame.  I likely thought some mutual feeling for me existed in these women, and such a belief justified the flame I kept alive over a period of time when I did not see them.

What did wind up happening, as I see it, resides in the notion that these women felt touched by my expression of feelings for them after my "journey" for our love.  Somewhere in that mix, before, during, or after my heartfelt expressions of love, I experienced a mental breakdown.

So, if I ever find myself on a "journey" again in relation to someone I still think about, but whom I have not seen in a while, a little "math" might help me see things more clearly.  In effect, adding things up.

I recently had an occasion happen where I had to deal with close relatives on a daily basis over a period of some weeks.  Naturally, I started focusing on their shortcomings and how such shortcomings would make it difficult for me to get along with them.  But I had no way of escaping the reality of having to deal with these family members a lot over a period of around three weeks.  

I give myself token rewards in the form of stickers on my calendar for accomplishing certain tasks on any given day.  These tasks can include anything from housework, to abstaining from sweets for a day, to taking a walk for exercise.  So I decided to establish a token reward system for getting along with my family members.  If I could behave nicely to my family members until midnight on any given day, I could give myself a little apple sticker on my calendar at midnight.  On the first and the fifteenth of the month, I could buy an inexpensive, easy to acquire present for myself, such as a classic rock CD.

This system worked very well.  The family members I tried this with both reported to others that I got along well with them during our time together.  It worked so well I've decided to extend the life of this token reward system for getting along with various people past the point where I needed it for my relations with family.  I've decided to use if for anyone in my world I deem it necessary for me to get along with, which means I will use such a system every day for lots of people, pretty much.

Today I thought about my perceptions of discrimination from women I had or have an attraction to, regardless of what these women really represent to me in the real world.  One time I went on a date with this woman who said, "I don't compete for men," in this self-satisfied, smirking tone as we sat and talked.  I took this to mean that she didn't feel as if she had to compete for me.  I took great exception to this perceived slight in regards to my viability on the dating scene, and this became one of many reasons I pretty much had nothing to do with her after that one date.

She would occasionally write me, inviting me to come visit her city and hug me when she did see me after that, and I, for my part, did nothing to discourage those kinds of gestures from her, but I still pretty much rejected her.  That said, I never did anything to sabotage our deal, such as tell her she can suck my dick if she wanted to or call her names or behave in any other hostile, alienating manner.  Even though I really didn't want to date her, I still wanted to get along with her okay.

I will keep that in mind moving forward as I navigate my way through the world we live in.  I've vowed to give myself a token reward each day I make a sincere effort to get along with anyone I could potentially have a problem with.  Just because I perceive that a lot of women I have an attraction to seem to look down on me, that doesn't excuse me from trying to get along with them the best I can.  I can apply this same system to people such as guy friends who don't call me back anymore, but whom I'm likely to run into at a club one night in the foreseeable future, or the wives of guy friends who seem to know more about my past than I care for them to know and how that might affect their opinion of me, or that female gatekeeper type at that one comic book convention who tried to behave towards me in a less than wonderful way.  This kind of token reward system, one that materially rewards good behavior towards people I may have problems with in any context, can apply to all kinds of scenarios in my day to day life.

I mean I am very fond of this person, and I care for her a great deal, but the young woman I've come to know- to the extent that I know her at all- comes off as a ruthless flirt who always seems to have some boyfriend or other in tow.  In my last post I talked about Veronica Ortega, from way back in 1985.  In the process of putting together the broken pieces of that time, I've ascertained that Veronica just wanted me as an ardent admirer, not as a boyfriend and lover.  She wanted me for that to help her get over a painful breakup.  She wanted male attention from someone she wouldn't have to take seriously.

If I'd have known Veronica's agenda at a more timely juncture, how seriously would I have taken whatever attentions she paid to me?  I feel, that in dragging this deal out with this current young woman, I can see more clearly that she just wanted me as an ardent admirer as well.  How seriously do I have to take her, in light of this guess I have about HER agenda in regards to me?  

Things never went sideways between myself and this young woman, because I slowed things down to the point where I can pick my spots to make intelligent decisions about her.  My willingness to slow things way, way down, to the point where even I can sort through all the confusion, PROVES DEFINITIVELY, once and for all, that I care for this person a great deal, and I probably always will.  That doesn't oblige me to take her all that seriously, though.  

I get to order another Rush CD this morning, because it's the 15th, and I haven't mentioned that young woman I can go on at length about on this blog since the 1st of July.  The last time I saw her, in the middle of June, she seemed really cheerful at her job.  That surprised me, because my blog post prior to this encounter, and I pretty much do think she and others read these; my last blog post prior to this encounter had me writing about how the thought of her joining in on some effort to stalk and harass me made me not feel so much warmth and affection for her, even though I still cared for her a great deal.  I said in that post that I stood willing to walk away from the entire deal.  Her upbeat, cheerful demeanor when I saw her next made me think all kinds of things.  Did she like the idea of me bailing on her?  Did her cheerful demeanor at her job when I saw her last signal a willingness to dare me to bail on our deal?  Did she ever like me or want me in the first place?

I've talked often about how I've ascertained over the years that, to a lot of young, attractive women out there, the mentally ill guy with a tendency towards romantic obsession represents a bad guy type to them.  I've said that many of them would rather take their chances with a charming, player type with a reputation for treating women shabbily than take a chance on a type that will often declare, through his actions mainly, his undying love for them and then proceed to chase them to the ends of the Earth and back.  I imagine the stories they tell each other about romantically obsessive, mentally ill guys amount to a kind of folklore, and I imagine they may all have personal stories of their own to back up this view.

So, when I declared my willingness to walk away from this whole deal, this young woman I can go on and on about knows me well enough to know that I can and will back such statements up by doing just that.  The first time I avoided going to her place of employment at times I knew her to work there occurred during the Summer of 2019.  I did stay away from her that way for six weeks, if I remember correctly.  I've done pretty much the same thing several more times, and I'm doing this same thing now.  I haven't seem her since mid-June, and I might stay away from her place of employment at the times I've known her to work there for, possibly, the rest of the Summer, because I feel this break from our deal has done me a lot of good.

One thing I think I might have a handle on these past few days has to do with the idea that she DOES know enough about me to take me seriously.  She realizes by now, possibly, that I'm not some silly-ass, obsessive pest/menace who will just not leave her alone if she shows the slightest bit of favor towards me.  I've talked in the past about Veronica Ortega and how, in 1985, Veronica threw me a few bones of attention with the belief that I would give her tenfold the amount of attention back.  Veronica seemed to do this to help her get over a painful breakup with a live-in boyfriend.  She wanted male attention from someone she didn't have to take seriously, and she saw me and at least one other guy as her guys for that. 

I have no idea about whom, if anyone, this young woman at this business is dating now, or whom she'll wind up with in the foreseeable future, but if SHE takes me seriously regarding my ability to master my obsessive impulses, other women-women I might not even know about at this time-may already take me seriously as well, and that may explain why this young woman came off as cheerful and friendly as she did the last time I saw her.  In other words, regardless of how things shake out between us, she doesn't feel the need to write me off as a liability in her world or that liking me in SOME way doesn't amount to some big mistake on her part. 

 In my last post I talked about that virgin girl from 2014/15.  I busted her pretty good in January of 2015, and by February of that year she showed visible signs of pregnancy.  I figured that she wanted to lose her virginity to the guy who impregnated her, and to top it all off, she tried to play some cruel kiss off game with me.  Now that's some game going on there!  Like I said in my last post, I never did anything to sabotage my deal with her, she was just never there for me.

I think about someone such as that virgin girl whenever I find myself embroiled in a situation that feels very similar.  Since I never did anything to sabotage our deal, could I conceivably catch one such as her on the b-side?  What if her relationship with the father of her child didn't work out?  Maybe then.  I've never had anything like that happen for me, but I guess something like that conceivably could happen.

I've had instances where someone demonstrated interest long after I'd let them go, and that's the closest I've come.  In every instance, the women I felt compelled to let go of stayed let go of, period.  In the instance of Gwen at SVA in 1991, she clearly desired that I let her go the previous semester, and when she showed interest the following Spring, I had moved onto another fruitless fixation.  In a couple of instances in later years, inertia and the passage of lots of time just compelled me to blow off a couple of women who seemed to want me to make some sort of move on them when they stopped me in a grocery store and a video store, respectively.

So, someone such as that virgin girl or other turd who wanted to try to get something going with me looong after the fact would probably have to take the initiative in the initial loooong-after-the-fact encounter (Getting me to jump through hoops? Guess again), get some sort of contact info, perhaps even persist in their course of action for quite some time, and even then, they may just make a pest of themselves.  It may come off as if they are a whole different person than the one I had the fixation on, and that person may or may not interest me.

I've gone on dates  with women for the first time who first showed interest in me years before those first dates, but in the case of that virgin girl and her ilk, not really.  The premise in play with that virgin girl and her ilk resided in the notion that the attraction had a clear one-sided direction, from me towards them.  

I guess I can't totally rule out the notion that one of these girls at this one business who all seemed so intent on making me look like an asshole COULD, MAYBE get something going with me loooong after the fact.  I usually come off as pretty nice, and I can't think of anyone from that era whom I would refuse to talk to, but yeah, I'm not holding my breath on that.

In my last post I talked about how I mention that time with Sara in 1988 and one of the main reasons I bring it up so much. I came across much more sympathetically in my dealings with Sara than I did in every previous incarnation of that particular situation.  I guess I really gave those people who observed the unfolding situation the impression that I no longer had the willingness to settle for business as usual, but rather that my stance reflected an attempt to face the realities of Sara and the realities of the dynamic between us.   My willingness to let the whole deal with Sara go at any time seemed to emotionally prepare me for the actual realities of that situation.  Mind you, when I cut her loose that following Summer, I still didn't even know her name, much less the ambiguities surrounding her actual sexual orientation coupled with her, I'm guessing, lack of sexual experience at the time.  The whole deal just seemed to stink, so I cut her loose.

My whole, "What if I turn my back on love?," experiment represented an adaptation to three things: 1) My tendency to fall in love with the wrong person, and 2) What I think about this tendency, and 3) What I do about it when it happens yet again.  I still can't seem to help myself as to the types of women I still readily fall for, but the experiment I first tried in the Spring of 1988 allows me to forgive myself when it does happen, and to make the correct, intelligent decisions moving forward.

I don't believe I've ever sabotaged a deal with any of the young women on my docket since I decided to revive the experiment in 2012. I think of the crude sexual proposition I made to Wanda in1987 as a sabotage move. I never did anything like that to Sara, and I never did anything like that to that virgin girl in 2014/15 or anyone like her ever since.  I think I allowed for things to develop, should that virgin girl or anyone like her had come from a better place than they did, but since they did not come from a good place in regards to their intentions with me, nothing noteworthy ever developed.