The grind continued all through September. I took a week off work to spend ten straight days daygaming, ten sets a day minimum. There’d been too much half-assing it, so I wanted massive action. Mental pressure was willing me out because deep in my gut was a sickening dread at being blown out by a procession of girls and perhaps peering into the abyss—that I’d never get good at this. Eugenia had inadvertently knocked my confidence. So every day that week I followed the same ritual, trying to impose the illusion of control onto the scenario.

I’d go to a Caffè Nero and sit on the big brown leather sofa watching the Blueprint Decoded instructional videos on my laptop until my sexual desire/desperation overcame my anxiety/avoidance. For example, the first day:

Monday 14th September. My mind was full of big plans and motivational self-talk. No excuses, I was going to turbocharge my stats on approaches. It didn’t matter how I felt, or if my wings were busy, I’d go solo and just plow through. Received wisdom in the community is you are a noob until you’ve completed one thousand sets. I was at about four hundred and very impatient to improve. Having a full-time job restricted my daygame to weekends so the solution seemed obvious— take time off work.

I’d spend the first hour in Caffè Nero reading. It was still not quite lunch time and Covent Garden was deserted so I didn’t feel like I was descending into avoidance. Finally, I stepped outside and straight into a hot Belgian dancer. I opened weakly, but she stopped and chatted. She was in a hurry to get to the Pineapple Studio for a dance class. I knew something about that stuff so I rambled on about dance, contemporary dance, how my dancer-ex had a careless grace in her movements from all the dancing. Blah, blah, blah. She was not interested, and my attempt to take her number led to an awkward refusal.

It only took a few minutes to shrug that off, and I saw a dusky Mediterranean girl walking through the market. She stopped briefly but either didn’t speak English or was seriously unimpressed. She smiled, waved her hand dismissively, and disappeared without a word. Next was an English girl carrying shopping boxes. She didn’t stop, but smiled, thanked me, and said she was late getting back to work. One more open got me a stop but nothing doing.

Damn. My forehead actually felt tight, such was my poor state. It was like the skin was too tight for the size of my skull. I’ve since learned that is how to recognise when I’m pulling the “creepy face” caused by poor state.

I persevered. On Shaftesbury Avenue just past Forbidden Planet an Asian girl came towards me. She was young, and had just started her first day as an intern in a fashion magazine. We chatted a bit. I was too talky and too outcome dependent, but she didn’t seem to care. She checked the text she was writing as I approached, so I told her off for not paying attention. She giggled and twirled her hair. I made a mental note to self–set arbitrary boundaries and playfully tell a girl off for breaching them. She gave me her number but never replied to my texts.

I got myself blown out a few more times on Oxford Street before a hot English girl gave me her Facebook. It was weird because the whole time I was thinking she was wanting to get away, and I was struggling and just talking into the space, yet it was five minutes or more in conversation and after getting her Facebook I kept her another few minutes talking about her Geography Uni course she was about to start her second year in. It didn’t go anywhere. It’s common for beginners to think the length of the interaction is directly related to how strong the resulting contact details will be. This isn’t correct. Ultimately, you’re trying to create a particular emotional impression upon the girl while also ticking off checkboxes marking particular signals she needs to give you to show she is available and into you. If you accomplish that in two minutes the number will be stronger than if you dither around chatting for twenty minutes but fail to accomplish it. So while advanced day gamers can quickly take solid numbers (or eject when it’s not forthcoming) it’s common to see beginners getting dragged into over-long conversations that go nowhere.

The last approach of the day was a pleasant failure. I opened a hot Lithuanian in Carnaby Street. She was ambling around aimlessly, which I took as a generalised approach invitation. My forehead was really tight, and I was having a tough time. My vibe was horrible, but I was determined to just press on and grind out the sets. She stopped, smiled, hair twirled, and indulged me for ten minutes. I could almost visualise a hologram of a graph between us showing a downward slant as I continued to lose my confidence throughout the whole thing. I tried to take her number and she was very explicit: “I don’t want to exchange details”. Fair enough, on that performance she really shouldn’t have.

The first day of my daygame “vacation” resulted in talking to ten girls, taking one number, and one Facebook. Neither of those two girls replied to me. At the end of each day I’d analyse the work and write a blogpost of my learning points. Self-diagnosis is a crucial skill for seducers because no-one else is going to help you. Quoting my blog, this is what I felt I’d learned:

• I felt crap but took right action anyway. Good work.
• Even with shit state I still had good enough fundamentals to get one decent number.
• I didn’t worry too much opening sets. The poor state was once in-set. Only a few months ago I wouldn’t even open five sets when in good state.
• While in set I knew consciously all the mistakes I was making, even as I couldn’t stop making them. The biggest one was outcome dependence. I really wanted to get numbers and was worried the girls would walk away and leave me feeling shit.

Lesson learned. Back out tomorrow.

It was also this week that I went to an LSS talk at London Bridge on “game for men over 35” organised by a guy called Curran. It seemed perfectly pitched to me, but I was so lacking in entitlement that I worried I’d be refused entry because at the time I was thirty-four. I actually emailed Curran a few days before to ask if it was okay. As if they’d check my passport and throw me out!

The event was unremarkable, held in an upstairs function room of a pub by Tower Bridge. About thirty older gentleman packed the pews while a short ginger guy called London Playboy gave a talk, then Curran and then a lanky Scotsman with the online pseudonym of Skeletor. His real name is Colin and, though neither of us knew it then, he’d become a major figure in my journey. At the time I was very impressed with his presentation about identity and how to change it. I tried to get pally with him afterwards on his smoke-break but there was a ring of eager older gents two-deep around him that I couldn’t penetrate.