If he does get stared at and followed in stores, I'm convinced it's because he looks exceptional, and staff are wondering if he's going to need help (or potentially cause trouble) because he doesn't have a wrangler present. Nobody sees a cool guy in a suit when Russell's around, and scarcely anybody knows what Moebius is or could identify somebody who has it on sight. So they see Russell, with his dishevelled Dad's castoff wardrobe, shitty posture, and poor grooming, and they see a drooling reetard--simple as that. Which I'd feel bad about for anyone else with Moebius, as that's a genuine problem that makes their life harder than it ought to be, but since it's Russell? Fuck, no.
I can't see Russell bothering with salad, either. If he's putting Ranch dressing on food, I imagine it's going on pizza, fries, or other crapfood.
Because he's from a blue-collar town, and a religion where the most respected people are all men in white-collar jobs, so he wanted the same kind of social status. I suspect he latched onto the legal profession after his brush with the law over his high school boys' room "kill list," when an attorney helped get him off with minimal consequences. And maybe his awareness of anti-discrimination laws, and that he might have to rely on them to stand up for his rights, had something to do with it. But obviously, he sees the law as a tool to force people, businesses, and government to give him whatever he wants. He's proven to be spectacularly incompetent at wielding that tool, but that hasn't stopped him.
And as for why he chose to be a paralegal rather than an actual attorney? From his perspective, it was the lowest-effort route to a legal career. (From my perspective, he's just too dumb to get through a four-year college, into law school, through law school, and then pass the bar exam.) For a guy who goes on about putting in "100%" effort into whatever he does, he's really one lazy, half-assing motherfucker.
No. And he's never written anything that wasn't calculated to get a female celebrity's attention. If he ever came to the realization that composing shitty songs was never going to get him what he wanted, he'd probably stop making music entirely. But I suspect that playing piano and being "musical" got him plenty of good-boy asspats in childhood (despite his ineptitude), so he's incorporated "musician" and "songwriter" into his identity because they're things he believes will impress other people. But finding real joy in making music for its own sake? I don't see that in him.
I don't think it's denial, because that would imply that he knows damned well why he's getting mocked on the internet and his life is spiralling into the shitter, yet chooses to turn a blind eye to his own failings and blame someone or something else for it.
I think he's so narcissistically delusional that he honestly believes he's doing everything absolutely right, and that it's everybody and everything else that is hellbent on thwarting him. He cannot admit to any wrongdoing because he can't even see how anything he's done was wrongdoing in the first place.
He doesn't merely want to be noticed; he wants to be respected, celebrated, envied, elevated, desired, adored. He wants to be seen as an inspirational figure who others look up to. That he has done nothing particularly inspiring, or anywhere near worthy of all the adulation he craves is absolutely lost on him because he really, truly does not understand how other people think, and thus how they perceive him, and why they respond to him as negatively as they do.
It's like he learned a few formulas for getting praise and attention as a kid ("wear a suit; get told how nice and grown-up you look"; "play the piano; get told how talented you are"; "claim you're being picked on; adults will punish the kids who don't like you"), and he keeps trying unsuccessfully to use variations of them as an adult. But he doesn't understand why those formulas don't work any more--because he never understood why they worked in the first place, only that they did work.
Well, judging by the current state of his life--marginally employed in menial jobs; a pariah in the career field he trained for; constantly having to move from one rented room to another because his roommates quickly find him intolerable; virtually friendless; estranged from his family; excommunicated from a religious community that has a real soft spot for those born with disabilities; an internet laughingstock; unable to get laid in a whorehouse--he isn't surviving very well at all. And as time goes by, his ability to keep surviving is only going to get worse.
The one thing that has kept him functioning so far (and is perhaps his sole redeeming quality) is that he does at least have a solid work ethic. He'll work shitty, low-status jobs he hates just to keep money coming in and a roof over his head; unlike a lot of cows here he hasn't ever resorted to internet beggary to subsidize his existence. But he burns through those jobs in short order because he's Russell, with all of his incompetence and glaring personal failings.
I suspect the reason he's still able to get jobs (or housing) at all is because he's got a disability, lives in a Mormon-dominated area, and, as I mentioned above, Mormons tend to have a soft spot for people born with disabilities (it's seen as evidence of acts of spiritual valor in the pre-existence, IIRC). But eventually, he will have burned too many bridges, and his resumé will be far too spotty. And if an employer or potential roommate googles him? He's fucked.
Over the past two or three years he's really gone downhill, at every level of his existence, and due to his low intelligence and obvious personality disorder he's incapable of turning things around. I expect he'll spent the next two or three years getting ever more marginal jobs, and living in progressively less-desirable housing, until something finally snaps and he's unable to get one or the other, and thus loses both. Eventually, he's either going to end up living under a bridge, or maybe his parents will let him come back to Evanston and live in his childhood bedroom under the condition that he not file any more lawsuits, make any brothel visits, or discuss either Taylor Swift or legalizing prostitution. Whatever happens, it's not going to end well for him. But given how thoroughly shitty a human he is, I can't say I feel too terrible about that.
