I decided that I wanted to re-read the VAH handbook and it has made all the difference in my progress. When I was in San Diego a few weeks ago I was talking to Blitz, Mystery’s wingman, about some techniques and game. He picked right up on the deficiencies in my game and asked me when the last time I read the Mystery Method. It has been at least a year and he said he was always amazed that aspiring PUA’s have all the basics in the book and yet only read it once.

I guess he is right though, as since I have started reading it again it has opened my eyes to everything I haven’t been doing or have just forgot. I also have noticed the more time that had elapsed between readings the less and less I was actually pushing myself to open sets. I was taking the easy way out and after so much effort that was not going to be acceptable.

This past weekend was just incredible. It started on Wednesday and ended early this Monday morning. Yeah I’m tired and my throat is sore from all the yelling, I’m hung over and not feeling very motivated today but there is something else going on too. Normally a day that I am beat and feeling it I would have dreaded going anywhere. Maybe through on some shorts and a T-shirt and a hat and off to StarBucks not really caring about appearances, or even worse just staying home.

Not this time! Oddly enough I was yearning to get out, even though I am super tired and not feeling very social I still busted out the ironing board, pressing even my shorts. Avatar is who I am and I am ALPHA and as an ALPHA I am confident and am always aware of whats around me.

So how does this all tie into reading the VAH book again? It’s really simple. I’ve been relearning the skills that brought me so much success and with those skills come responsibility. Not so much to anyone else, but more to myself. First impressions start with myself and as such they start internally. This internalization has caused a spark inside me to ignite the inner fire of challenge. You see I believe that theory is only power if we can transpose it to application and application can only take us as far as we are willing to push the envelope.

Last night I closed an HB9 and I’ll say that she was easily that because she had drive that makes me want to be around her. Sure she is a Beer Goddess at the Beale Street Flying Saucer and yeah the more she flirts and talks the more tip she gets. The difference is just how far I was willing to challenge her to be a challenge to me. I set myself up, not as a customer, but as a fun guy who made her laugh and cry and feel frustrations, heat, sadness, love and many other emotions each time she came around. She didn’t know what to expect of me every time she came by.

I watched her interact with many other tables last night and every guy was just falling over themselves to appease the babe. They made it a point to thank her and tip her and ask her “normal” questions. SteveO challenged her to serve him better than any of the other waitresses there. Be something different than the typical customer, make an impression. The only way you get better at something is when you push things to the extreme even at the risk of failing. After all is it failing if we learn and can then push further next time?

I watched as every guy watched mine and her interaction and for the first time in my life I heard a guy call me an asshole to his buddy. He said I wouldn’t get anywhere with her, or something to that matter. Funny thing was that guy was me many years ago. The nice guy, the follower, abiding by the rules, but always alone.

Our table was the wildest and the drinks and conversation were flowing. Pictures were flashing, our loudness was the loudest and all my lair friends were working the room. At the end of the night everyone knew us and some dude hater snickered to his friend on what an asshole I was. When I came back from the bathroom Jennifer had taken my unsigned charge slip and gave it to a friend. I called her a punk ass and stared her down until she smiled. I smiled and caught dude hater looking in awe as I said I like your style kid. Write down your info for me. I watched as every guy in the room stood in awe as Jennifer, the hottest one in their without question, took a beer coaster and wrote the info down. With a big smile she hands it off and I grab the pen from her and say I’m keeping this as ransom. She smiles and tells me she is going to get her pen back and that she guarantees it. I say deal and walk off. When I passed the table of dude hater I say loud for him to hear it,”Yep I’m an asshole.”

None of this would have happened if I didn’t challenge myself to challenge myself in everything I do.

I had a revelation the other day and it will make you mad. It’s not the type of blog post today that is racist, political, religious or anything else that would typically make so many normal people angry when they read it. It affects us all and I know that most of my readers are going to disagree with what I have to say. In fact it’s the beauty of the subject I speak of and it gets right down to our core identity and in doing so it tears us apart inside leaving a gaping hole exposed for everyone else to see.

When we are weakened by the simple truth then the adage that the truth never hurts must in turn be a lie, or at least in this instance. When I first thought of my epiphany the other day it made me furious. I argued the thought to myself and repeated over and over in my head looking for a way out. Hoping among hopes I was wrong and this time I really wanted to be wrong. If you know me you know I like to play devils advocate and argue every conceivable avenue even when I know it is utterly useless to do so and it goes against everything I stand for. Not today, not then, not ever have I been able to come up with such an idea that my very existence as a human has been challenged. Everything I stand for and believe in is topsy-turvy now and yet somehow I believe I am a better man for it.

We all experience rejection and as an aspiring Pick Up Artist we come to value it as a learning curve, or as we call it in the industry “calibration.” We need to calibrate our actions, words, whatever so that we may overcome the obstacle that is put forth and push the interaction forward. It’s a part of every aspect of life.

What if we were using excuses like she didn’t like me because I’m short, fat, balding, smelly as ways to compensate for the real issue that she didn’t like us because we are unlikable to her. These real issues could be race, religious, personality, things we hold as core parts of our identity. Therefore the issue is made up to cover our own insecurities with our own ego. We can overcome being fat by blaming it on the weight and therefore having an internal mechanism that compensate the inadequacy’s and learning to cope with that aspect.

In turn we might even create an issue like weight every time someone wants to just be friends because it would be easier to undertake to emotional damage and isolate those feelings and learn to repress those emotions over time, after time, after time rather than deal with something larger than say an actual character defect. So wouldn’t it be easier to say I’m fat and I can get over that because I know I’m a great guy and she should like me for who I am, putting forth the blame back onto her. While at the same time using that weight defect as a compensating flaw that with time can be emotionally blocked from ireperable damage all the while taking the actual defect, a flaw in ones personality or character, that which is emotionally more damaging to our ego. Therefore we chose the easier and less damaging path.

In actuality it becomes evident that by using a defect that we can overcome we “choose” to become that defect to compensate for the actual flaw, whatever it might be, because one is less painful than the other. If this is the case, and I do believe it to be, I might eat unhealthy because I am creating a persona that is less emotionally damaging to my ego than say a character defect that I don’t have control over like the look of my face.

I have an identity crisis. I think everyone at some point has an identity crisis. Most of us experience it a couple of times in our lives. Some call it puberty, when our voice starts to crack and our hormones go wild, in essence we become an adult in body, albeit our maturity has a long way to catch up. Then when we finally start to identify with ourselves and we come to grips with our lives, who we are, where we are, our job, our status, all of a sudden the “Mid-Life Crisis” comes a creeping! The stereotypical male goes out and buys a sleek fast sports car, while the female joins aerobics and gets a face lift.

Its always been amazing to me to watch my friends grow and develop as people throughout the years. I’ve had some friends who have identified with the music thing, and it dictates how they act and the very clothes they wear. Some of my friends have become computer geeks and its evident in their geeky style of clothing. Khaki pants, a polo style shirt with a logo of some software company embroidered on the front that barely covers their pudgy spare tire.

Typically the American media circus determine our stereotypes, now more than ever. Reality shows, far from any type of reality I have ever experienced, portray our lives and how we are supposed to live them. Radio and MTV plays the songs they tell us are popular, all the while the national news channels have gone 24 hours. Is Natalie Holloway really so important that even after a year we still are beleaguered with monthly updates, while Elliot Spitzer’s whore is making millions on bad music? Popularity has run amok.

We are preached to from every angle of how we are supposed to walk, what to eat, drink, when to shit, cry, sleep. TV is a mad commercial filled with advertisements for the “Wonder Cure” for every conceivable ailment ever known to man, some ailments that have not even been named yet. We are bombarded with infomercials for “Hip Hop Abs,” “LA Weight Loss,” wonder pharmaceuticals! Diets for this, creams for that, these jeans will make you a super model. Buy, buy buy, call 1-800… Identities are fast becoming not who we are, but more so who they want you to be.

I turned forty last September, and by every account I should be going through an identity crisis. It is my right and it has been bestowed upon me by the moguls of media and social hypes. I should have two kids off in college, a house and car payment, my wife and I are both overweight, but we have a health plan and are looking forward to retirement. We sit in front of TV and watch Fox News at night and cry for our troops and damn President Bush. We go to church on Sundays and live our dream, the American dream.

But that’s not me. I’m forty years old and I don’t fit into that mold, or any other that could describe me. Well maybe I am a bit overweight! I look back upon my life and I really don’t recall ever maturing, or having this epiphany where I came to grips with maturity. I’ve never had a desire to hold down a job or work a career. I have enough college credits for two degrees, yet no degree hangs on my wall. I’ve studied journalism, computer science, history, English, philosophy, psychology and a few others all as majors. I’ve written for magazines and newspapers, owned companies, served as a grunt in the US Army, but even today as I write this I have no direction, no desire to grow up to be something. Even as a child I had no goals to grow up to be a fireman, or for that matter anything else.

So when we don’t have aspirations or fit into the corporate mold or the ones standardized by television marketing where do we fit in and how do we create our identity? A student of life I seek out knowledge to help me in understanding myself and bettering my interactions with others. About three years ago I stumbled onto the “seduction community” and although I’ve made it this far without a personal avatar I realized it was an essential part of being according to most everyone.

I was walking around in life without being anyone let alone who I was. I had no clear vision of what I wanted to be or who I even thought I should be. Most people identify who they are, by what job they work. Ask someone just entering into the seduction community who they are and they will say a “Pick Up Artist.” On the other hand ask a true master of seduction in the community who they are, and they might answer “A student on the road of life.” Striking differences and who is right?

There are times when I go out and I wear my hair slicked back NYC style with lots of jell. I’ll wear my cream colored sports jacket, burgundy polo dress shirt, black slacks and $100 shoes. When it’s sunny you’ll always see me with my $300 Oakley’s on. Open collar means thousand dollar gold chain hanging round my neck. Formal: I’ll be wearing my Fosil watch for sure.

Lately I’ve been dressing a certain way to create an identity through clothes. Like I’ve said though, most people identify with their jobs when you ask them who they are. I love my job and I must, considering most weeks I work about 70 to 80 hours doing it. I work for the worlds largest pheromone producer and probably have a cooler job than most people can even dream of. But where does that lead me in identity and is it really who I am? My job does not define me as a person, it is not my core identity. By definition I cannot say I’m the rocker, or the preppy guy. What if my identity crosses the boundries of all music and cultures.

I sought out a pair of boots, the kind that are made to look distressed and they have the buckle on one side. They look like a pair of old rocker boots. I finally found a pair at the mall (rocker boots at the mall! Oxymoron?) and I decided I would next create an identity around them. I bought myself a wallet chain, some silver pinky rings with Celtic cross cutouts on them. I dyed my hair black and lately I like to wear jeans. I’ve noticed that whenever I’m out and I see someone similar in dress they nod their hello. When ever I am wearing my stylish executive level clothing I get my due respect from the other suits in the business world. Have we really become a society so dependent on identifying the person by the clothes they wear?

Funny thing though, is that most self-help books and such all tell you you have to start with being yourself. Connecting with yourself so that you can forge the bridge of emotional stability with the world. That’s where it all seems to get lost for me. You see connecting with my core identity means I can connect with just about every identity out there. I am just as comfortable wearing leather pants as I am wearing slacks from Brooks Brothers.

It makes me wonder what my core identity really is. Can I find a way by wearing clothes to identify my identity or can I walk around unidentified and by being unidentified wouldn’t that be an identity of itself? Do I really need an identity after all? Isn’t it all just marketing that tells us we need an identity so that they can better connect with us on a marketable level? Conceivable then, isn’t it possible to be invisible just be avoiding all media hype on class or would that be the rebel class and thus a marketing connection made. Do I feel like this is the Matrix?

In the seduction community there is a term called peacocking. By definition it is the guy who stands out the most by wearing outlandish clothing but being congruent with it. They are the ones who get the most attention and are looked on as brave and exciting and now most guys are doing it. So by being the guy without that identity am I the one guy who stands out in the crowd while everyone else wears glow necklaces and top hats.

I sought out a pair of boots, the kind that are made to look distressed and they have the buckle on one side. They look like a pair of old rocker boots. There about the most peacocked article I own. I created an identity around those boots, or maybe those boots created an identity around me.

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