To All the Girls and Blogs I’ve Loved Before

 

Big-Joe-Radio

 

To All the Girls and Blogs I’ve Loved Before

 

To all the girls I have loved before. When I listen to that song I realize that I’m just as much of a human being as Willie Nelson. By that I mean that it is ok to have gone through life experiencing relationships that did not last for one reason or another. I understand that there are also a list of people who come into our lives. Some people are there to teach us. So are there to comfort us. Some are there to bring pain which will become a tool for learning as well. Some will give us a gift of memory. To me this is what that song means.

I believe relationships are also a mirror for what we learn about ourselves as well. I never thought I would write over 100 blogs for this thing called Big-Joe-Radio. She came into my life when I needed her to comfort me. She was there for me to write down my thoughts and to let my inner voice be heard. She became such a mirror to me that taught me after so many years. I learned that it is only that inner voice that we need to follow and trust. Worrying about other people’s thoughts is a huge trap that only hold us back in life and brings us to a point where we are no longer going forward in life because of fear.

The most important truth about relationships to me is this; the thing that attracted you to a person, whether it is male or female, will be the exact thing that will repel you away from that person when it ends. Consider when a man meets a woman. She is attracted to him physically, mentally and maybe even spiritually. She will likely play hard to get to get him to chase her. She wants to know that he will fight to get what he wants. Even if that means fighting her rejection, even if only those rejections are behind a mask of true acceptance. If he truly wants her, he will call her, maybe even do things that are not always socially acceptable. He may monitor her and even follow her because a man does crazy things like that.

So why does the woman allow these sort of things in the beginning? It’s about the chase and woman love aggression to a point. Yet when that relationship ends, him chasing her or following her now becomes stalking. We all know the story. Before you know it courts get involved and the guy has to remain more than 500 feet from the woman he once chased to win her affection.

My point is that just as relationships end, so do all things. I am so tired of blogging. I love writing but I have had such a hard time figuring out other creative avenues to write in. I’m tired of talking about myself. I’m tired of sounding so academically perfect like I did in some of my old blogs. I feel like I am my own person again. I am no longer under the school “Daze”. By that I mean that it is time to move on in my relationship with writing. Big-Joe-Radio is getting dumped as I have been secretly spending time with another woman. This woman is another vehicle for writing creativity.

For my next blog site, I want to do this; I want to do historical research on any topic that I like. Let’s say I study the battle of Stalingrad. I can look up all the historical facts and data. I absolutely love history anyways. I will then create my own characters in these scenes. I will also change the outcomes to fit the story line. I am still working on the “blue-print” if you will. I will use true events and people in my life to insert into the story line as well. Great stories are not made by great plots. Great stories are made by great characters facing a real problem that we are all too familiar with.

As such I’d like to finish Big-Joe-Radio with this here Dear John Letter. What I will do is write my own personal love story that I had with a young woman. She is one of 3 or 4 woman that I truly loved. This one is #1. So enjoy this Dear John letter that is actually a tale of love for a woman named, Loren.

I met Loren at a gas station. That doesn’t sound very romantic, yet people meet woman in seedy bars every night of the week. I think that is even more sketchy but it is the popular way to meet people. Loren was beautiful. She was driving a black car. Her eyes were just as dark as the car she was driving. I was living in Wheat Ridge at the time. I was just over 30 at the time. I would come to find out that she was only 21. No big deal.

What attracted me to her was not only her eyes, but also her very large breasts. She was also dressed in a black dress with nylons and heels. She was one of those woman that if I had not approached her, I knew I would be killing myself over it mentally later at home. So I did what any man of character should do…I began some conversation with her. I succeeded not only with getting a conversation going, but I also got her number.

I’d say it took about 2 or 3 weeks to finally get her to go on a date with me. She kept blowing me off or making excuses not to see me. Loren had family in Colorado so she was living here for a while. But Loren was a Texas girl, through and through. She grew up in Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas. She had a huge Texas heart. She was wild but full of so much character. When she finally did give me the time of day, my life and my heart was consumed by her.

I didn’t have much at the time. I definitely did not have my shit together. I lived in a shit apartment off of Kipling. It was white trash central and I was the mayor. I was in and out of bars all the time picking up nasty bar flies so I could have meaningless physical relationships with. As far as relationships went, I was going nowhere with them. Loren was just beautiful and I loved her heart. I think what also attracted me to her was that she was wild. She was also an open book to me about her life and her sexuality, yet she demanded my respect and devotion to her. She was a Christian as I was, yet we both loved our sexual prowess that we had inside ourselves, and we were not ashamed of it. We had sex all the time, every day, in every kind of setting.

Loren was also my friend. We talked about everything. Our past, our families, our dreams, and we enjoyed doing a lot of things together. She was my angel. To this day I still have a picture of her that I keep hidden away. I only look at it once in a while. It is proof that I experienced what felt like the most pure love imaginable, next to the love I have for my kids. We dated for about a year until the major conflict of this story arrived.

The conflict was an Iraq deployment and my responsibility to the military. I was not gone very long, but it was coinciding around the same time that she was missing her other relatives in Texas. She had her mother, father, brother, and a couple other members down and around the Plano part of Texas.

In a lot of ways the military is like a prison without bars. Members of the military are bound by an extra set of rules that most civilians are not even aware of. Those rules are the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Those federal laws determine what I can say, do, and overall the way I behave in public and in front of the enemy. At the same time, our military is an all-volunteer force. No one held a gun to my head, or threatened me with prison time if I didn’t join.

That being said, I followed through with my obligation of deploying while Loren went down to Texas to be with her family. I missed her very much. We wrote all the time and I would call her when I could. To my dismay, as the time drew closer for me to come home, I realized that Loren was not wanting to move back to Colorado. She was very close to her family there and the family she had in Colorado was not being all too kind to her.

So my deployment ends and I come home to Colorado but with no Loren. This is devastating to me. I stayed in Colorado long enough to get over my jet lag from the 3 day flight from Iraq that included multiple stops. Loren had been begging me to begin a life with her down in Texas. So that’s what I attempted to do.

I drove down to Texas right away. I met her family whom I also got along with very well. In fact I accepted them as my new family. People down in Texas love their military. They thought I was an honorable man. I was not down in Texas very long until I took Loren to a courthouse and married her. I thought I was the happiest man in the world. There was just one huge problem. I absolutely hated Texas and Loren hated Colorado. She thought the people in Colorado were very mean spirited. Texas people just have big hearts. I can hardly blame her.

I did not like the job market down in Texas. Loren also wanted to move to Dallas and I felt that Dallas was not my style. I also felt like it was a huge Police-State. If you were a black man in Dallas, your odds of having done time or going to do time in the prison system was astronomically high. Because of this fact, the crime in Dallas was very high. Social unrest is an almost guarantee when you have unrelenting government control on a group or certain groups of people. I understand that I am white, but for some reason I was highly sensitive to this fact. Can you imagine that I would later in life go on to major in a social science such as economics.

I was young, dumb and in love. I did not know how to correctly deal with this problem. I did not want to live in Texas. So I convinced Loren to come to Denver where I could better support the two of us. Her family was dead set against the idea. They wanted us down there. I just had this horrible gut feeling telling me that I did not belong in Texas. So I convinced Loren to pack the car with the stuff she needed and I drove us back to Colorado. I did all this without her family knowing. In essence I stole my wife from her family and I didn’t care at the time.

We stayed in Denver for maybe a month before all I could hear was Loren’s heartbreak over leaving Texas. Not only that but her brother was having issues with his children that Loren wanted to be back home for so she could help them. I could not handle it anymore and I bought her a ticket to Texas thinking I would see her again. The last time I ever saw her was at the Denver International Airport. I told her I loved her and would call her to see if she made it alright. This was just at the security screening point.

Well I called her that night. In fact I called her every night for about two months. I begged her to come back home as I would later come to realize that she was not coming back. Our biggest fight on the phone happened on the day she was supposed to be on a return flight, and I was to go to bed by myself. I don’t think I have ever been as heartbroken. She wanted me to move to Dallas, and I just couldn’t do it. It sucked being a Colorado boy in love with a Texas girl and we both loved our homes and did not want to leave.

Well…that’s about it. It took about six months for me to realize that the relationship was indeed over. I signed the annulment paperwork that Loren sent me in the mail. The annulment basically stated that our marriage was almost as if it never happened. I think to get over that pain I started dating again. I was young like I said. I was tired of going to sleep in tears because here I thought I was a man being punished for loving a woman. And then I couldn’t have that woman.

Looking back on it now, I realize that things happen for a reason. If I would have moved down to Texas, I might not have gotten my shit together. I would not have had my son whom I love dearly and life would be totally different. There are different spiritual or religious beliefs out there that could sum it up by saying that my destiny was somewhere else. Now having a different perspective on things, I don’t regret loving Loren in the first place. She shared a journey with me and I was part of hers. She is still with the man that she eventually moved on to after me. That tells me that he not only makes her happy, but perhaps she is exactly where she is supposed to be too.

Thank you for reading my love story. I close this blog out with this story to illustrate that it is also time to stop bloging under the name that you have come to know as Big-Joe-Radio. I hope you have enjoyed some of the blogs as much as I have enjoyed writing and posting them. Most of them were academic papers I wrote a long time ago. The things that attracted me to Big-Joe-Radio, now repel me. I can’t stand writing in an academic theme anymore. I want to take the spot light off of me now.

Until later….I hope to be a flicker of light during the dark paths we find ourselves on sometimes.

---Big-Joe-Radio