Redneck Bowling

Chrissie asked How did you meet your current (or most recent) significant other?
I’m surprised I haven’t blogged about it yet – it’s a good story with lots of lies and deceit and fictitious names and crappy bowling.

So you’re probably wondering, “what is this Redneck Bowling of which you speak?”. Unfortunately, this post really isn’t about Redneck Bowling. Don’t get me wrong, I plan to tell you all about Redneck Bowling, it’s just, that’s not the point. The point is to tell you how I met my wife, got married, bought a home and had lots of babies – OK, I may have jumped the gun on that last one, we don’t have any children yet, but we hope to. Anyway, so back to the story.

I moved from Phoenix to San Diego (My Blue Heaven) back in the summer of ’02. It was not such a good time in my life. Several parts of my life had suddenly come crashing down in a burning wreck of failures and disappointment. Needless to say, I was a little depressed. Turns out, I was a lot depressed, which is part of what contributed to my miserable state of being but that’s more for another story. Despite my struggles, I did manage to find a good job with a great company that, among other benefits, included mental health benefits. It was through this process that I began to understand the depths of my problems and started to address the root causes of my depression. Primarily, fear. Fear of failure (I know, ironic isn’t it). So it was through this paradigm shifting (without a clutch) that led to what came next.

A co-worker of mine invited me to join him and some friends to go bowling. Normally, I’d decline because of my fear of disapproval, but as I said, I was becoming a new man and accepted his challenge, offer. What I didn’t know, was what was to come.

One of the special aspects of this event was the theme – Redneck Bowling. “Redneck Bowling” is not as complicated (or redundant) as it may seem. The idea is, you bowl like you would any other time only this time, you wear the tackiest shirts you can find, wear name patches like mechanics have with names as strange and unusual as you can find. The local swap meet is a good place to find all of these items. Your favorite thrift shop is also a good place to look. So there you are, wearing silly shirts, playing under crazy names and having a regular good time – that is, if it wasn’t for the fact that you were tricked! Da-da-da-dummmmm….

Let’s back up a moment here. You may recall my co-worker invited me to join him and some “friends” for Redneck Bowling. Well, it turns out all his “friends” are from church! It’s an ambush! Run, hide, protect the children. OK, so it wasn’t that bad. In all fairness, it was supposed to be more people, not all of whom attended church. It just turns out my co-worker was the only one who managed to bring a non-church friend. You also have to understand that the church was only about 12 people strong so it was kind of easy to do things with all your church friends. But that’s not what this is about. It’s about my wife.

You see, one of those “church friends” was PhotoJulia and that co-worker – well, he was the best man at our wedding. Want to know what happen next? You’ll just have to wait. I only promised to tell you how we met, not how we courted. I will tell you this – we wrote our own vows. And just so you’re not left feeling cheated…you can read about how I proposed to PhotoJulia.