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No Respect? Join 'Neurotic Man'

Richard Georges takes a playful jab at our anxiety-ridden world—and he could use a little help getting his latest fictional project off the ground.

Bullied bus monitor Karen Klein continues to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in unsolicited donations from well-wishers around the world on Indiegogo.com. That project—which went viral last month—is among the thousands of ventures competing for monies via online funding platforms.

Richard Georges hasn’t been as fortunate. To date, his Neurotic Man Project has generated 0 backers and 0 pledges toward his $5,500 goal on Kickstarter.com with just a few days to go until the July 6 deadline.

He views his failure as a success in that it’s proven his point:

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“Why spend months getting your hopes up when you’ll only get rejected anyway?” he reasons.

Such advice represents the essence of the Neurotic Man Project.

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Once a 1960s activist, Georges was only 15 when he began organizing marches in support of Cesar Chavez and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

He started out at San Francisco State University as a film student, and then became interested in holocaust literature and creative writing. In the end, practicality prevailed and he earned a B.A. in accountancy with graduate work in taxes.

After graduation Georges developed a solid client base, offering bookkeeping, tax consulting and business proposal writing services in San Francisco’s Castro District.

“Ninety percent of my business was gay,” he recalled. “Then they all started dying. It was incredibly sad and I needed to get away.”

In 1986 Georges and his wife moved to the laid-back beach community of Encinitas to raise their two children. As his son and daughter reached adulthood, Georges grew restless.

“I didn’t want to organize anymore,” he said. “But I had a passion and desire to try to promote fairness and equality, and a strong sense of what is right and wrong.”

A prolific writer, Georges developed what today he boasts as, “one of the biggest libraries of unpublished works.”

On Aug. 13, 2010 he launched a blog at pulpdiddyspermutations.com to share his knowledge of political and social issues and offer user-friendly explanations about the dynamics of the economy.

“The first few months I had 40 hits a day,” he explained. “Now I have 4,500 hits a day which translates into about 30,000 hits a week. . .I have no idea how this happened.”

The success of the blog gave birth to the Neurotic Man Project, which taps in to free-floating anxiety shared by many in the world today.

“We’ve managed to muck up the planet,” he said. “The air is bad, and the oceans are dying. It’s happening as the years go by. We used to store nuclear radiation in airtight, concrete-and-steel canisters. Now, we don’t know what we are going to do with them.”

Georges says corrupt business leaders and hyperpartisanship in Washington leave Americans overwhelmed with cynicism and despair.

“There is so much you are bombarded with, even if we don’t want to acknowledge it, we are more neurotic than we used to be, and are quick to take offense. There is extreme anxiety over something and it could be anything.”

Georges explains his point by sharing a favorite line from the 1948 movie, Adventures of Don Juan.

“Errol Flynn would say, ‘There’s a little bit of Don Juan in everyone but, because I’m Don Juan, there’s a whole bunch in me.’”

He continues, “I’m like that: There’s a little bit of Neurotic Man in everyone but, because I’m Neurotic Man, there’s a whole bunch in me.”

Regardless how neurotic Georges says he is, therapist Laurie Lehman, LCSW, gives him kudos for dealing with anxiety in a healthy manner.
 
“When we get anxious or depressed we feel overwhelmed with our circumstances and they become too big for us,” she explained. “By using humor, Richard is starting to look at it in a lighter way—and it seems more manageable. 
 
“He winks and takes it to the extreme. Instead of talking himself down, he goes off in the other direction and does it with humor. That is a healthy way to frame it because the reality of the situation may not be as dire as how it feels to him.”

When funded, the Neurotic Man Project will culminate in a book of vignettes he penned along with specialty items such as t-shirts, baseball caps and pocket protectors.

 “If we replace polo and alligator logos with a logo of Neurotic Man, maybe there is hope for humanity,” he said, smiling.

For more information visit kickstarter.com, pulpdiddyspermutations.com or email pulpdiddy@gmail.com.

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