Life of Brian

1990

Only twenty-four years ago!  What's twenty-four years amongst friends.  Nineteen ninety was my second year of high school.  What are sophomores good for anyways?  My confidence levels would peak this year.  I tried out for the football team and made it on!  Well, they pretty much took anybody so not such a great feat.  Football practice started over the summer prior to the school year.  It would turn out to be a fairly warm summer.  The school had made a watering trough of sorts for the players.  Basically, a pvc pipe contraption with about twenty holes poked in it for twenty mouths to hover over and suck down some delicious hose water.  Did Gatorade exist in 1990?  If it did, I don't recall ever drinking any.  Of all the sports I ever played, and that equals three, football would make me sore in places I didn't even know I could get sore.  The arches of my feet for instance.  I was in really good shape from the daily activities of living in the mountains.  So conditioning wasn't too bad.  It was the hitting drills and wearing spikes for hours on end that made it special.  The day I got all my shoulder pads I remember coming home and trying them on.  My dad and I would test them out by him rapping on them with his monadnock about half strength.  My Dad was good for that kind of stuff.  I remember when he started carrying pepper spray, I excitedly volunteered to have some rubbed under my eye to see how well it worked.  This was actually called Mace, and it was the predecessor of pepper spray.  It worked well for sure.  When your eye closes tight without you even thinking about it and doesn't re-open until you rinse with copious amounts of water, I'd call that irrefutable evidence that it did what it was intended for.  Back to football.  As I mentioned before, I'd never played organized tackle football.  Only yard tackle where your biggest obstacle was not landing in a huge pile of dog shit when you got tackled.  Dog poop wreaks doesn't it.  When it came time for hitting drills, I was a total dummy.  There was a drill called 'Alleys'.  One player would run the ball, another would try to tackle said player.  The ball runner would choose one of three alleys to run between.  In this case the alleys were made up with cones.  The first day running this drill I would end up with a third elbow.  The guy on the other side of me hit me so hard that I flew up in the air and backwards.  It was a beautiful wakeup call not to run straight up and down while playing the game of football.  My elbow would swell just above my elbow and create another elbow!  If that makes sense.  I would also get this bruise that consisted of about six or seven little purple dots.  Definitely got my ass whooped that day, but never again would I let that happen.  My twin elbows would be sore for a long time.  Every time we did hitting drills for the next week or so, it would hurt tremendously.  Another drill was to lie helmet to helmet on our backs.  When the whistle was blown, both players got up and tackled one another.  My first round I got hit in my newly developed, purple polka dotted elbow by a kid's helmet.  It really hurt and I was seriously angry.  When I laid down helmet to helmet again with the next guy in line, I wanted to hurt him.  The other guy ended up being the smallest guy on our team height wise.  I got up so fast, spun around and hit this kid as hard as I possibly could.  Teeth gritting, full bore rage took over and I knocked this kid up in the air and backwards.  He was shocked and I'm sure it didn't feel good.  I didn't care.  Our coach could see I was mad and even said this out loud.  Little purple bruises are a bad thing.  I've never had that type of bruising again.  Second string quarter back and second-string free safety were my positions.  I'd complete one pass for the season, and I'd make a couple of tackles that made the highlight reels for our banquet.  I'd also get completely steam rolled on more than one occasion.  If you've never had some kids knee, who was running full speed, totally punch you square in the stomach with that knee, then you just haven't lived.  Only reason I ended up tackling that kid was because he tripped over my falling body as all the air in my lungs quickly shot out into the stadium.  Too bad we lose the ability to just bounce back from trauma as we get older.  Some point late in the season I would break my left ring finger at practice doing you guessed it, hitting drills.  I stuck my finger in the belt of the other guy's pad rig, and he proceeded to twist to get away from me.  My finger went along for the ride and was sticking out the complete opposite direction of all of my other fingers.  It was badly broken, and I ended up in the emergency room to get it fixed.  Dr. Menninger gave me pain shots in my finger and then twisted it back straight.  He then told me to make a fist.  As long as my finger didn't turn north again while making the fist, determined whether or not I'd need a pin inserted between the two bones.  It held tight.  I'd spend the rest of football season in a cast up to my elbow.  I'd spend the first few weeks of basketball season wearing a metal splint.  I can't even imagine what it cost my parents, but this was well before the Affordable Health Care Act, so it was probably pretty reasonable.  

Basketball season would go fairly well.  Our team could never quite get it all put together to come up with more than just a couple of wins.  But it was fun, nonetheless.  During practice the varsity coach thought it would be fun to let some of the varsity team members practice against us.  Well, of course these guys knew they were studs compared to us, so this one particular player started messing around.  I didn't like this for some reason and so when he was passed the ball, I ran up and practiced my football hitting drill skills on him.  My shoulder firmly planted on his chest, driving his jaw downward and his two very buck front teeth sunk into my shoulder like a victim in a Count Dracula movie!  I still have the scars to this day.  That kid didn't feel so studly anymore after that.  He never did anything to me either.  There is some good that comes from violence after all! (girls if you are reading this, NO THERE ISN'T!)  This is the incident that I now feel bad about.  He didn't deserve that, and I'm sure it hurt pretty badly.  I think he became a Dentist, so really, he owes me a thank you.  The last sport I'd play this year, would be baseball.  I still really kinda sucked at baseball because I was totally afraid of the ball.  There was a kid on the team whose mom used to love nothing more than to supply the team with endless donuts, punch, big league chewing gum and candy during our games.  Those of us that sat on the bench took full advantage of this!  One game the umpire actually stopped the game and reminded our coach that "This was a baseball game! Not a picnic!"  Our coach was a tad embarrassed.  We didn't get in any real trouble though, and I learned that Big League Chew-ing gum doesn't go well with donuts.  To my surprise, one of the kids I mentioned being in P.E. was on my team.  He was a pitcher.  This kid could have passed as a thirty-year-old.  He was big and muscular and had long curly blonde hair.  He led the season in hit batters, and you could almost see the joy in his face every time he hit a batter.  This included practices!  I'm telling you, bad apples those ones.

I do not recall if we traveled anywhere this year.  I don't think we did.  The house up the canyon continued to be a dream come true for me.  Hiking and biking and fishing continued.  My younger sister would begin driving.  She owned a car she bought from some old guy.  It was a total boat.  She'd sail down or driveway one day and discover that her brakes decided not to work!  WHAM!  Lucky for her my dad's car was parked in the driveway that day and stopped her nicely.  That poor car of my parents would take a beating over the years.  Wait until he reads what I used to do in it, in the next few posts!  HaHa.  My mom still cleaned houses.  My Dad was still adjusting people's bad decisions.  I think my oldest sister was attending Cal Poly.  My younger sister was managing to stay out of juvie hall, lol.  My cousin would continue taking me on trips riding quads etc.  My uncle took me on a few ocean fishing trips.  My aunt who loved horses would take us on horseback rides when there were stables down on Hermosa rd.  Now there's a million-dollar house that rich people can rent out.  I'd get in a hum dinger of a fight with my youngest sister.  She was in trouble over the summer and wasn't supposed to be using the phone.  Our phone was the style that you could disconnect the receiver from the base.  When she ignored my parents rule not to use the phone, I took matters in my own hands and disconnected the receiver and then promptly barricaded myself in my room.  After much banging on my door, and after many a threat, I decided to open my door whereupon she took the receiver from me and promptly hit me in the head with it.  This absolutely flipped my switch to destroy mode and I would chase her into the living room and pin her down, fist inches away from her face explaining that I could kill her if I wanted to!  We both ended up with some really nice scratches.  These would not go unnoticed by my dad who eventually asked what the heck had happened.  After explaining WHAT had happened, he just simply asked who had won.  lol.  Wasn't the only time I'd fight with my sisters.  After all, they thought they were my mother's when I was younger, I begged to differ and used my fists to do my talking.  You can only be called Tattoo so many times before words will never be enough retaliation.

Average home prices in Ca were around $194,300.00.  Rent amounts hovered around $500 a month.  Gasoline was less than .80 cents a gallon!  Found this on the internet: "The index for all items less food and energy rose 5.2 % in 1990."  "This following a 4.4 % increase in 1989".  "The 1990 price reflects the larger increases in prices of apparel commodities, up 5.0 % in 90 compared to 0.7 % in 89."  Yearly incomes averaged in the high fifties to low sixty thousand for California.  It cost an adult 31 dollars to get into Disneyland for a day.  Children were $25.  Movie tickets ran you around $3.60.  The Honda Accord was the most popular car in 1990.  Ford made the Fiesta and the Escort.  Lincoln Town cars were voted car of the year.  

I've seen all of the top movies listed for that year.  Titles like Dances with Wolves, Total Recall, Ghost, and Die Hard 2.  Ghost actually took the number one spot for highest grossing movie of the year.  T.V. shows included Blossum, Northern Exposure, Wings, Twin Peaks, and The Flash.  I remember watching Twin Peaks.  It was very odd for that day in age.  

I would discover the power of magnets this year, as far as placing them really closely to the T.V. screen.  Oddly enough, if you do this, it draws all color to one spot on the screen where you were holding the magnet.  My dad wasn't too thrilled over this.  Our T.V. luckily reverted back to normal after a few hours.  Could have been days, I don't really recall.  I still didn't care one bit about clothing.  My mom would cut my hair and it always looked fabulous.  I really didn't have any interest in girls yet, but I did start paying more attention to the Cheerleaders.  Next year I'd be enrolled in drivers training at my high school.  I think this may have been the last year the school offered this class to any students.  I was about to become a young driver.  Good stories ahead for sure.

Anyone catch the math error?  lol

"The nineties were a fertile period for the self-indulgent genius."

- Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties