Life Of Brian

1992

Senior

(A person who is a specified number of years older than someone else).

Nineteen Ninety-Two.  My last year of school, period.  I would never sit inside a classroom again.  A couple of training seminars yes.  A few weeks in the Sheriff's Academy, that too.  But I would never actually sit in a classroom with a teacher at the helm trying to further my education.  I was done!  School was not important to me.  I did have memorable moments.  Also had moments when I actually learned stuff.  Graduation day was the happiest day out of all others.  There was freedom.  The whole world was in front of me.  I could get a job (even though I'd already had a few), I could travel, I could just simply do whatever I wanted to.  It's both a great, and scary feeling.  You all know what I'm talking about, I'm sure.  Knowing that you don't have to go back to school the following winter is one of the best feelings out there.  I had a truck, a girlfriend, an awesome family, and my whole life ahead of me.  Who knows where it would take me. (I still live in Ojai 31 years later)

My senior year was the best out of all my years of school except maybe early elementary school.  As long as I passed Government, and Econ, I was good to go.  Putting this ultimatum on us made me pay special attention in those two classes.  There is no way I was going to screw that up.  My senior year started out with me getting dumped by my grocery store girlfriend.  As I mentioned last year, she would simply ignore me.  I got over that fairly quickly.  I'd go hiking with my friends, drive to the beach, we'd start having BBQ's together.  Most of my classes were very easy.  Drafting would become a bore.  I'd finish the year in this class, leaving it with no desire to continue on with it.  Somewhere in the second semester, I'd meet my future wife.  We were both aids in the front office.  I was a studly front office aid, she was just a councilors aid.  She was also a Junior.  We started dating sometime in that second semester.  I cheated though.  I happened to know she liked me before asking her out on a date.  My mom worked for her good friends' parents.  Her friend told my mom that she liked me.  So, I had the upper hand when deciding to ask her out.  She said yes, and we've been married for like a hundred years now.  I made it on to the varsity football team.  I'd attend a few summer weightlifting sessions and then I quit before the actual real practices began with pads and hitting drills.  Not before taking place in the Lift A Thon, however.  I weighed 135 pounds my senior year, so I was in the smallest players group for the lift a thon.  I'd end up taking second place in my weight class with a bench press lift of 180 pounds.  There was only one other kid who lifted more than me and he was an absolute muscular stud.  I think he pushed up 195.  No one could believe I had benched 180 pounds.  There were some kids who were in the 175-pound class that lifted less than me.  That was hard for them to swallow.  I got a metal for my lift.  It's floating around my house somewhere.  My dad had purchased a weight bench from Montgomery Wards.  Pretty much all I ever did with that weight bench was the bench press.  Every single night I'd lift weights to where eventually I could bench every single weight we had to put on the thing.  I think that total came to 165 lbs.  I'd push up that weight by myself, no spotter.  One night early on, I couldn't get the bar of weights back up to the rack, so I had to roll about 140 pounds over my stomach and on to my legs to get off of the darn bench.  It didn't hurt much; I was expecting worse.

I still lived up the canyon.  Loved to fish and ride my bike around the campground.  My parents actually let us kids ride our bikes all the way down hwy 33 to Ojai during my senior year.  Or maybe we just did it without asking.  Dangerous no doubt.  Hwy 33 was a narrow road, and my dad knew all too well that there were plenty of speeders and drunks on the road.  We survived.  I actually road my bike from Ojai all the way back up to our house a couple of years later.  What a mistake that was!  Never wanted to do that again.  Living at an old fire station meant that we had a hydrant with a one-inch hose connected to it.  I recall having a water fight with my dad.  He of course got to use the one-inch fire hose with nozzle.  My sister and I were stuck using the garden hose with no nozzle.  You can guess who won that one.  My parents would help me co-sign for a brand-new Nissan p/u at some point towards graduation.  I worked at Dahls market and was able to make my payments plus pay for insurance.  It wasn't a base model truck either.  It had larger wheels and rims and a nice bedliner.  A cool first car indeed.  It did not have a very robust bumper like the LTD, so Brian and I had to retire from staging fender benders at intersections.  On my very first date with my future wife, my friend would crash his car on the way to Bates beach.  I think his tire blew or came off which flipped his car.  He had another friend in the car who had his arm out the window.  When the car flipped, his hand was dragged across the pavement, and he was left with a fairly serious injury to his hand.  He had to be taken to the hospital and I think he may have needed some skin grafts to fix his hand injury.  The beach trip was cancelled, but Brian and I who were in completely separate cars, ended up going to the movies that night with our girlfriends.  The title of the movie was Bennie and June starring Johnny Depp.  My decision to quit the J.V. basketball team before the season ended would all but guarantee I wasn't making the team my senior year.  No basketball for me.  This is really the only reason I regret quitting the year prior.  But you know what, I didn't miss anything really.  I wouldn't have been a starter by any means.  I would have ridden the bench all year.  So, I did better things with my time.  I just can't remember what those things were.  I'd pass both mandatory classes.  I think I graduated with a 2.23 gpa.  Of course, I had a full year of office aid under my belt, so I was very appealing to all those scouts out looking for dead beat teenagers.  Circle K sent an agent to talk to my agent.  Only problem was my agent was the same guy that had screwed up my sick call that led me to getting fired at Double J Market.  Funny story, I worked as a box boy at Dahls Market, my girlfriend's aunt would come into the store to see what kind of person I was, I guess.  I had not really met her yet and had no idea what she looked like.  She'd report back to my girlfriend's mother.  I must have passed the test.  Her mom worked at Nordhoff.  I really never ate in the cafeteria, but the one time I did go through the line, my girlfriend's mom would ring me out.  She was so nervous to meet me or something that she messed up my change.   My girlfriend's dad was a truck driver, and he would only be home for a few days every two to three weeks.  So, a lot of nights over at their house was just myself, my girlfriend, and her mother.  A cousin of mine would wander into Dahls one day and offer me a job at the machine shop where I had drilled metal castings over the previous summers.  She was a supervisor of one of the departments.  I'd get hired by her department and worked there for many years to follow after my graduation.  My graduation was actually in 93.  My years of working jobs would not end until the year 2015.  I'll talk about my various jobs as we go along.  Some were quite interesting.  

The average cost of a home in the LA area was at $201,134.00.  Minimum wage was at $4.25 per hour.  When I landed the job at iti incorporated, a machine shop, I was making almost $6.00 per hour.  I was rich!  New cars cost around $16,000.00.  My truck cost me $8600.00 brand new.  A gallon of milk was just $2.09.  My girlfriend and I could go out to a nice restaurant and pay around fifty bucks for a really nice dinner.  Gasoline was .93 cents a gallon!

Mariah carry was at the top of the charts with Dream Lover.  Soul Asylum was close behind with Runaway Train.  Still like that song.  Whitney Houston was constantly in the top ten.  My mom and I would go see a movie she was in with Kevin Costner called, Bodyguard.  I enjoyed it.  Total chick flick though.  Ace of Base sang All That She Wants.

Movies included Jurassic Park.  I think I went and saw that multiple times the summer after graduation.  I seem to recall falling asleep in the movie theater the day after graduation watching this movie in the Ojai theater.  Other movies included Basic Instinct, The Pelican Brief, Malice, and Perfect World.  We didn't go to the movies all too often.  

I hear my kids talk about voting on where their class went for grad night.  We didn't have that luxury.  If there was a vote, I never heard about it, and most certainly didn't participate.  My grad night absolutely sucked.  Nordhoff doesn't even hold grad night on the same night as graduation anymore.  But mine was that same night.  After all family members left the graduation ceremony, our entire class was filed into the cafeteria.  We then watched a hypnotist do their thing for what seemed like two hours!  He'd put kids into a deep spell, and then ask them questions.  I was hoping he'd pick me so I could call his bluff, alas this never happened.  When the hypnotist was done, somewhere close to nine o clock at night, we all got on busses and were ferried down to Long Beach harbor.  There, we'd get on to a boat and circle around the harbor, in the dark of night until roughly four a.m. in the morning!  All we had to do was play blackjack for fake money, and dance.  BORING!  I ended up walking about seventeen miles around the outer decks looking at basically nothing.  Then, to cap it all off, we got back on to busses and made our way back to McGrath Beach where one of the Government teachers made pancakes.  Pancakes with a special layer of beach sand in them.  I do not believe I ate any.  It's the thought that counts though, right?  I was soo glad to be done with school, it didn't really matter.  My Prom a month early was much better than the previous year.  My date actually wanted to interact with me.  I remember I borrowed my middle sisters Nissan pick-up and drove myself and my date down to the old theater off of main street in Ventura.  It was a fun night, capped off with dessert at carrows.  No Limo, and no scowls, lol.  I'm not sure of the specific dates of this event, but my buddy Brian and I decided to do an overnight back packing trip somewhere soon after graduation.  It was my first experience, and quite possibly his as well.  We would spend one night in the Sespe.  Our starting point was Mutah Flats.  My dad would drop us off and wish us good luck.  We had no cell phones, and all I had was a forest service map with little, tiny red lines depicting the trail.  Brian and I were in good shape still.  My dad had told me he'd hiked this very same route as a younger man and that Johnson Ridge was the only trail or hike that had ever given him blisters on his feet.  This included Vietnam!  So of course we had to try it.  I had a 1-liter bottle of water!  This was for two days mind you!  We had been hiking for about forty minutes and came to a bush that had a black rag or ripped up shirt seemingly tied to the bushes.  It didn't look like a trail junction at all, so, we kept on walking straight.  After about thirty minutes, my intuition was telling me that something wasn't right.  We should've made it to our junction by then.  I decided we needed to turn around and it was a good thing too because had we gone straight, we'd have been in the completely wrong area, miles upon miles from where we were supposed to meet my dad the following day.  This would have prompted a search and rescue I believe, but we turned around and sure enough, the black shirt in the bushes was indeed the marker for the Johnson Ridge trail.  Hiking down to the Sespe proved to be very challenging and very warm.  I was out of my one liter of water before we even got to Hot Springs canyon.  No biggie you might be thinking.  Well, Brian and I only had about 18 more miles to walk to get back to civilization!  I made a very prompt decision to drink directly from the creek.  I didn't care about any illnesses.  Having an illness was far better than being dead, so the decision really was an easy one.  I'd fill my water bottle up with that delicious H20.  I had started to shiver just prior to drinking creek water.  I definitely made the correct choice.  We'd camp on the same sand bar that my dad had used.  Now that I'm recalling this trip, I was at least 21 years old because I bought a little bottle of Kesslers whiskey to take on this trip.  Put the bottle in the cold creek when we got to camp.  Worst whiskey I've ever had!  lol.  It was absolutely rot gut.  The next day we woke up and made our way back to Lions Camp.  I'd end up trailing far behind Brian.  My feet were in bad shape.  My twenty dollar running shoes weren't the best decision.  By the time we got to Lions Camp, I was exhausted!  My shoulders were bruised from the pack, I was only able to walk on the sides of my feet.  I vowed to never do that hike again, and as of today, I never have.  My dad, seeing how beat up we looked, made us get up from where we sat, and walk another twenty yards!  Yep, he's a keeper that one.  We had been tested in more ways than one and come out safe and sound.  It was kind of a rites of passage in a way.  1992/93 was a milestone for sure. 

"Being President is like running a cemetery:  you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening."

- President Bill Clinton, 1993