Life of Brian

1998

Nineteen ninety-eight.  A year of moving.  Sarah and I moved into an apartment in Ventura.  These were single story units.  They were made out of cinder block and about six or seven units were attached to one another down a row side to side, not end to end.  I don't recall being able to hear our neighbors so the noise insulation must have been decent.  In total I think there were no more than twenty-five units.  I liked this particular complex.  It was much nicer than our second-floor apartment in Stockton.  I was working nights at iti at the time.  My shifts were from 3p.m. to 11 p.m.  This left me plenty of time to sleep and also plenty of time to play golf with my dad and uncle Raymond in the mornings.  At some point, iti would move its company from Ojai to Oxnard in 98.  They had a state-of-the-art building built down on Wooley St. in Oxnard.  There were mixed feelings about this.  The owner's son had taken over the company a few years prior and he had made the decision.  Many of iti's employees lived in Ojai.  They were not too happy about the commute to the new facility.  I didn't mind it at all.  The new building was huge in comparison and everything in it, besides all the old machinery the company brought with it, was shiny and new.  It had a big break room with lots of windows.  In Ojai our breakroom didn't have a single window.  The square footage was probably triple the size of the Ojai shop.  Sad thing is, once this big move was made the company really began to go downhill.  But that didn't occur for several years after.  I would ride share with a buddy of mine.  His name was Guy.  He and I got along very well.  He was a funny individual.  

Prior to the big move of our company, I had volunteered to work graveyards for about two months.  Our department was incredibly busy making diamond cutting blades and my supervisor decided that we needed a third shift for a two-month span.  Myself and one other dept. 600 employee would work from 11p.m. to 7a.m.  I was all excited at first!  I'd never worked a graveyard shift.  Being young, I was very naive.  It was not fun at all.  We were tasked with operating surface grinders for the entire shift.  Once you set the grinder up there wasn't much else to do so the down time was lengthy.  This meant your brain was left to wander.  At 3 in the morning, the only trail your brain wants to follow is the great trail of sleep!  Those of you that know, know!  Additionally, my co-worker and I discovered that we could each run two machines at a time.  The company was only expecting the workload of each of us running one machine at a time.  This little discovery meant that one of us could go back into the resin lab and sleep for about three hours.  This was brilliant.  We thought we had it made.  Lo and behold our supervisor was either tipped off by someone from another department, or she just had the inkling that she should probably check up on the building because she busted a guy sleeping in another dept!  Luckily, we heard about this before she ever caught on to us.  The guy she caught sleeping in dept. 500 was suspended for a day.  Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't believe she ever suspected us because our workload was always on par with her expectations.  She probably thought there was no way we could be sleeping and complete all the blades that we did.  This was before the age of cameras everywhere too, so we had it easy.  

Guy and I became friends very quickly.  He was a goof ball and was always in a good mood and making jokes.  He and I would go camping together up at Marian Campground in the Los Padres.  He bought the alcohol for the trip, and I bought the food.  His choice of alcohol ... the cheapest he could find!  Anyone ever drank Yukon Jack whiskey?  You're lucky if you haven't!  You could remove the paint from your car with that stuff.  We didn't care, down the gullet it went chasing down multiple Keystone beers.  Now Keystone beer is not bad, it's really bad.  But the two soon became just like the finest wine in all of Italy before the night was over.  At one point, we were in his Toyota 4x4 truck driving up the 4x4 routes out of camp.  I seem to recall Guy tried to run over a small tree.  This of course ended in failure.  Everything was all fine and dandy until the next morning.  What I did not know, was that Guy was consuming a third product in which I was not made privy to.  He was taking some sort of medication that in all actuality should not have been mixed with alcohol.  Especially rot gut alcohol!  He was up early in the morning and needing to puke his brains out.  He walked over to a big sturdy pine tree out of my sight, which was very polite of him.  Just as the combination of Yukon Hack, Keystone sudds, hot dogs and chili beans, and stomach bile began shooting out of him like he was the Exorcist, a jeep approached from a dirt road right in front of Guy.  A father had decided to take his son out for a nice early morning offroad adventure, and his son was treated to the sight of a 5'6" man expulsing the insides of his stomach!  Good times those were.  And I bet that was the first thing that little boy told his mother when he got home that day.

I'd be lying if I told you I didn't sort of miss my days working at Drain Patrol in Stockton.  As I said, Eddie my training partner was a heck of nice guy.  The last call out he and I worked together was at an apartment complex.  There were a lot of Asian and Vietnamese people in Stockton.  This apartment complex was comprised totally with people of this ethnicity.  The reason I mention this is because these people loved to eat rice and chilies.  The chilies were the little red kind, possibly serrano, but I could be mistaken.  They'd come tied up in long spires or clusters.  The apartment dwellers would bring the chili's outside, and I guess wash them or dry them, I'm not certain.  Because of the amount of rice consumed, the apartments main line was terribly impacted and they had major back up issues.  This would become a weeklong job for Eddie.  Before we were able to finish this job, I was given my own route and was sent off on my own to complete my own jobs.  I remember Eddie telling me back at the shop one evening that he had pulled his truck into the parking lot of the apartments one day and completely destroyed a wok full of those red little chilies'.  He said it was a chili murder scene after he was done moving his truck and the residents were very angry with him!  I'd soon run into the angry lady I mentioned in an earlier post who yelled at me for a poor toilet install and I ended up quitting, but not before some success stories of happy customers of jobs that I completed on my own.  I wonder if Eddie is still alive.  And is he still cleaning drains.  Getting back to present day, one of my biggest challenges in 98 was fixing my slice on the golf course.  I had gotten my dad into golfing.  We would go down to the Saticoy golf course when he was just starting out.  We only had one set of clubs, and Saticoy was kind of a crappy nine-hole course.  On one particular outing, we were paired up with a couple of older ladies.  Around the ninth hole, the two old ladies disappeared, and we soon discovered that they had gone to the clubhouse to rat us out.  Seems each player was supposed to have their own set of golf clubs, and we did not.  We'd been called out and we had to leave the course early.  We waited for the two old hags in the parking lot and when they finished the back nine and returned to their vehicle, we jumped on them and gave them a what for and told them to never show their faces again at the Saticoy golf course!  lol, not really.  We were surprised that they ratted us, and my dad soon purchased his own set of clubs.

Headlines around the nation included the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  "I did not have sexual relations with that woman".  - POTUS Bill Clinton. The movie Titanic, which was released in 97, was the first movie to gross a billion dollars!  I saw that movie more than once!  Why didn't it come up when I searched for it last blog!  lol.  The Columbine High School shooting happened.  To this day, the powers that be are still arguing over gun control when they could have been focusing on how to make schools safer for the students within them!  Shameful.  Google was founded in 98 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.  Linda McCartney died of breast cancer.  The U.S. and China would sign a historic trade agreement.  Currently, China is thought to have caused one of the worst viruses since influenza in the 1500's.  Covid is still taking the lives of a few citizens in every country to this day.  China is also threatening Tawain whom the U.S. is acting bodyguard for.  Mr. Bill Clinton would be impeached for his little fling with Ms. Lewinsky.  The MP3 player was introduced in 98.  

A couple of movies that came out in 98 were titles such as Saving Private Ryan, Armageddon, There's Something About Mary and The Waterboy.  I did see all of those movies.  With the exception of Armageddon, they were all fairly good.  Elton John's song "Candle in the Wind" was at the top of the charts along with "How do I Live" by LeAnn Rimes, and "You're Still the One" by Shania Twain.

I must not have watched much T.V. at the age of 23.  I do not recognize any of the shows listed.  Probably because I worked nights, and I sure as hell wasn't watching soap operas during the day!  At some point in 98 I would apply to the Sheriff's Department.  I had also become a volunteer with the Upper Ojai Search and Rescue team.  Being a member of the SAR team was a blast, and an eye opener.  I have quite a few stories from our callouts.  Most aren't funny, but this one is:  We would train quite frequently covering situations such as rescues over the side of a cliff.  There was a nice little rock cliff on Thacher's property where we would practice repelling.  One of our repelling trainings took place up Santa Paula Cyn.  The entire team was flown up to some cliffs overlooking the creek.  These particular cliffs weren't simply straight up and down.  They had shelves to them.  I had never encountered a shelf whilst repelling and my brain kind of froze.  I could not figure out how to lower myself beyond the shelf without face planting into the cliff face.  While my brain was reviewing the issue, I simply let go of my brake hand and descended roughly ten feet down to the bottom of the cliff in a matter of seconds!  To everyone around watching me, it looked as though I simply knew what I was doing and had just fast repelled over the shelf.  Little did they know that I had fallen those ten feet and luckily landed on my two legs without breaking or tweaking anything!  Every time we practiced repelling after this incident I was scared out of my mind!  In fact, the first training session back at the easy wall at Thacher, I had to have a team member pull me back up over the edge because I was locked in fear.  I was able to overcome this, but it took quite a few more repels to do so.  I have a lot of good content coming up in the next decade.  Things are about to get spicy up in this blog!  Stay tuned.

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries."

Monty Python's The Holy Grail

-French Soldier