I used to think of a girl I call Monica as the One That Got Away. That's pretty fucked up, because Monica was a girl I met in Spain, made a clumsy pass at, and never heard from again after I returned from my trip. The vision that became my Monica first appeared when I was sick in 1992, and in an even stronger form in visions of her in 1995. I try to document this hallucinatory experience this girl I met in Spain served as a touchstone for in Richy Vegas: a psycho memoir, parts 2 and 3. The end of part 3 depicts the encounter I had with a couple in a 7-11 on March, 1st, 1995. I thought the woman was Monica with dyed blond hair and blue contacts.
In April of 1995 I finally got on a new medication that helped with these symptoms. I took a job at a restaurant that Summer and held it for a year. The restaurant routinely hired attractive young women as waitstaff and at other positions. The idea that Monica was the One That Got Away meant that the usual snotnosed, attractive college aged woman that populated this restaurant couldn't compete with her for my attention.
And you know what? I don't think that this hallucinatory fantasy of Monica was at all detrimental in getting with any of these women. I managed to work there a year without any woman there taking any kind of romantic interest in me, and to this day I could not care less.
It wasn't just my place of employment either. I had a reasonably viable social circle back then with a veritable pool of attractive women reasonably close to my age, and I found myself continually getting passed over in favor of other men. It's not as if I went on at length about how great Monica was. The only way anyone could even know about her was when I showed people my drawings and talked about my experiences, both real and otherworldly, as they looked over the drawings.
Things turned around greatly when I took another dishwashing job in 1998. Several woman took something of an interest in me over the year-plus period of my employment there, and my drawings from ...psycho memoir only seemed to enhance my standing in their eyes.
I met a girl named Celeste through that job in the Spring of 1999. A girl named Julie competed with Celeste for my attention, though. Richy Vegas Comics issue #4: "Anita, You're the Reason I'm Not In Prison" illustrates the negative consequences of my inability at the time to distinguish between a viable woman with a genuine interest in me and an attractive yet unavailable woman.
In the years that followed the events of "Anita..." Celeste only served to replace Monica as the One That Got Away. I would compare woman to Celeste and they would come up way short in those right combinations of looking good, being nice, and also having an interest in me.
It's only been in the past few years that I've forced myself to remove Celeste from this pedestal. She sure did have rather rigid, orthodox, and puritanical beliefs on the depiction of the female form in Western art from the Renaissance through the Baroque. I made such a good impression on her in the first place because I countered her arguments that the depiction of the sensual possibilities of the female form by male artists from these periods constituted "objectification" with stuff like, "Fine, then Michelangelo objectified men, if you want to take that tack." She tried to come back with how she didn't mean "objectification" in a bad way....I countered with the example of Bernini's sculpture of "The Annunciation." In Bernini's "Annunciation," the Virgin Mary is not demurely, passively knealing, right hand raised in acknowledgment that,yes, she's got it, as the angel tells her she will give birth to the Christ; Bernini depicts her as having an orgasm. Here's the deal though: she is fully draped, you only really see her head and hands, maybe her feet, I don't know, and that her body is collapsed in ecstasy before the angel as he hovers before her. She's not nude, her body is generously draped, she's the Virgin Mary, does this count as the objectification of women in Baroque art?
She thought me a genius and all that, but really, how long could I expect to put up with someone that wouldn't even allow themselves to look at a Robert Williams stripper-hot-rod-Devil-Girl painting; someone whose stated ambition was to teach art history from her tired, flatulent Feminist perspective? The one teacher I had in college who tried to teach The Canterbury Tales through that kind of a lens came off as a total asshole whom I suspected of trying to do a Feminist Deconstruction of me.
In the first post of this year I talked about this GirlPop Diva that came up for consideration for me for the dumbest fucking reason: I got a bag of coffee and her CD from Amazon even though I didn't order them. I live in a pretty affluent neighborhood now, and people get free magazines and other shit all the time, I suspect.
So now it looks as if this GirlPop Diva is this year's Monica. Boy, it's been a long time since I've had to contend with one of those! I'd be interested to see if I actually turn down opportunities to get to know reasonably viable women better in some misguided effort to save myself for this woman. I don't remember one single incident in the years that I fixated on Monica where that kind of thing actually happened. The first time viable women actually took an interest in me, Monica dissipated like a mist. Looking back it all seems pretty harmless, and these fantastical thoughts about this one seem pretty harmless too.
The real woman that inspires this vision will most likely, like I said, probably wind up being seen, before too long, with boy band phenom Joey Jerkoff or up and coming leading-man-type Ryan Analwarts at the hottest places to see and be seen on either coast. Maybe I'll meet someone before she does? Yeah right, as if she could keep THAT on ice long enough for that to happen.
I get out quite a lot these days. I go to open mikes, go see friends' bands, go see other bands with friends. I just don't pressure myself at all to meet women when I am out, and I think that helps me to get out a lot more than I used to.
I just looked up the Bernini sculpture. It's actually The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa and the Angel. Ain't that a bitch.
In April of 1995 I finally got on a new medication that helped with these symptoms. I took a job at a restaurant that Summer and held it for a year. The restaurant routinely hired attractive young women as waitstaff and at other positions. The idea that Monica was the One That Got Away meant that the usual snotnosed, attractive college aged woman that populated this restaurant couldn't compete with her for my attention.
And you know what? I don't think that this hallucinatory fantasy of Monica was at all detrimental in getting with any of these women. I managed to work there a year without any woman there taking any kind of romantic interest in me, and to this day I could not care less.
It wasn't just my place of employment either. I had a reasonably viable social circle back then with a veritable pool of attractive women reasonably close to my age, and I found myself continually getting passed over in favor of other men. It's not as if I went on at length about how great Monica was. The only way anyone could even know about her was when I showed people my drawings and talked about my experiences, both real and otherworldly, as they looked over the drawings.
Things turned around greatly when I took another dishwashing job in 1998. Several woman took something of an interest in me over the year-plus period of my employment there, and my drawings from ...psycho memoir only seemed to enhance my standing in their eyes.
I met a girl named Celeste through that job in the Spring of 1999. A girl named Julie competed with Celeste for my attention, though. Richy Vegas Comics issue #4: "Anita, You're the Reason I'm Not In Prison" illustrates the negative consequences of my inability at the time to distinguish between a viable woman with a genuine interest in me and an attractive yet unavailable woman.
In the years that followed the events of "Anita..." Celeste only served to replace Monica as the One That Got Away. I would compare woman to Celeste and they would come up way short in those right combinations of looking good, being nice, and also having an interest in me.
It's only been in the past few years that I've forced myself to remove Celeste from this pedestal. She sure did have rather rigid, orthodox, and puritanical beliefs on the depiction of the female form in Western art from the Renaissance through the Baroque. I made such a good impression on her in the first place because I countered her arguments that the depiction of the sensual possibilities of the female form by male artists from these periods constituted "objectification" with stuff like, "Fine, then Michelangelo objectified men, if you want to take that tack." She tried to come back with how she didn't mean "objectification" in a bad way....I countered with the example of Bernini's sculpture of "The Annunciation." In Bernini's "Annunciation," the Virgin Mary is not demurely, passively knealing, right hand raised in acknowledgment that,yes, she's got it, as the angel tells her she will give birth to the Christ; Bernini depicts her as having an orgasm. Here's the deal though: she is fully draped, you only really see her head and hands, maybe her feet, I don't know, and that her body is collapsed in ecstasy before the angel as he hovers before her. She's not nude, her body is generously draped, she's the Virgin Mary, does this count as the objectification of women in Baroque art?
She thought me a genius and all that, but really, how long could I expect to put up with someone that wouldn't even allow themselves to look at a Robert Williams stripper-hot-rod-Devil-Girl painting; someone whose stated ambition was to teach art history from her tired, flatulent Feminist perspective? The one teacher I had in college who tried to teach The Canterbury Tales through that kind of a lens came off as a total asshole whom I suspected of trying to do a Feminist Deconstruction of me.
In the first post of this year I talked about this GirlPop Diva that came up for consideration for me for the dumbest fucking reason: I got a bag of coffee and her CD from Amazon even though I didn't order them. I live in a pretty affluent neighborhood now, and people get free magazines and other shit all the time, I suspect.
So now it looks as if this GirlPop Diva is this year's Monica. Boy, it's been a long time since I've had to contend with one of those! I'd be interested to see if I actually turn down opportunities to get to know reasonably viable women better in some misguided effort to save myself for this woman. I don't remember one single incident in the years that I fixated on Monica where that kind of thing actually happened. The first time viable women actually took an interest in me, Monica dissipated like a mist. Looking back it all seems pretty harmless, and these fantastical thoughts about this one seem pretty harmless too.
The real woman that inspires this vision will most likely, like I said, probably wind up being seen, before too long, with boy band phenom Joey Jerkoff or up and coming leading-man-type Ryan Analwarts at the hottest places to see and be seen on either coast. Maybe I'll meet someone before she does? Yeah right, as if she could keep THAT on ice long enough for that to happen.
I get out quite a lot these days. I go to open mikes, go see friends' bands, go see other bands with friends. I just don't pressure myself at all to meet women when I am out, and I think that helps me to get out a lot more than I used to.
I just looked up the Bernini sculpture. It's actually The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa and the Angel. Ain't that a bitch.
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