Hyper's got competition.


We've got some great stories on ACF. We should make a movie.

 

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So, back to LA (well, Anaheim, anyway).


Got yet another delivery job, though this one paid pretty well. Working for a company that distributed industrial electrical supplies, my territory was pretty much everything between Simi Valley, San Bernadino, and San Ysidro. Was boring and sometimes labor intensive (some of that crap is heavy!), but I became one hell of a good driver in the process. Got fired from that job, but the guy who fired me later got fired himself for firing so damn many good employees.


Ended up at a place that did maintenance and PCB decontamination on high voltage transformers. Worked mostly on military bases at oil refineries. One April morning, while painting a transformer we'd previously done repairs and decontamination on, a co-worker got too close to a capacitor mounted on the wall, and it discharged into his butt. The room was filled with vapors (mostly xylene) which exploded in this huge fireball. Killed power to half of the secure area of Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Lights, sirens, blood, millions of investigators asking billions of questions.... The next day, I'm up at like 3am, and drive from Anaheim to Monterey and back to pick up a transformer for repair. Get home at like 4am, fall into bed. About 9:30, the wife pokes me in the ribs, "I'm in labor." 12 hours or so later, my daughter is born! Huzzah! She's beautiful! But those three days seemed like one really freaking long one.


More jobs, but still doing the same gig, just for different companies. I'm starting to write songs now, and have also gone back to writing short stories, something I'd wanted to do like forever.


Things are not going well with the wife, she's become a bad alcoholic, and has taken to saying things like "I'm not a good parent, and I'm okay with that, because I just wasn't meant to be a parent." Ugh.


So by now I've fallen in with the local cable company, mostly because I'd learned how to operate a bucket truck when I was doing transformer stuff. And now the wife is working swing shift, and starting and ending each day wiht all the beer she can consume. I've pretty much become a single parent.


I picked up a secondhand electric guitar, and start jamming and writing songs with a guy I met through an old friend from HS, the two of them are building a recording studio, which became known as Low Ceiling Audio (it might even still be there). Dreams of musicianship ensue once again.


Damn. Woulldn't you know it, that didn't work out either. Old friend gets all weird, and I get pushed out of the studio project, though the other guy and I do some more stuff together--we write a couple screenplays.


I also picked up a 4 track and a 16 bit drum machine around then, and started working on recording stuff entirely on my own.


So, my marriage is pretty much disintegrated. But, silly me, I'd made this promise to myself, growing up without a father in my life, that if I had children, they'd never grow up without a father. This is sucking a lot.


We make friends with a cuple that lived in the next apartment, and one day I'm sitting in my living room, smo...er, drinking a beer with her, and suddenly it hits me--OMFG, she's the girl I saw in this weird vision I had when I was hypnotized back in HS!!!!!!eleven!!


Exit wife #1.


(end part 3, ca. 1991)

 

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I'm curious as to what Ozy was 'drinking'. Also, what 'hypnotized' him.


Hyper and Ozy should have a Story-off.

 

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tag

Nice to meet you Ozy!

 

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Ozy!


More please more!

This is awesome. Keep it coming!

 

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(It was a hypnotist that hypnotized me. She was also an English teacher. Oh yeah, and people called her a witch. NO comment on the drinking thing, but I'll bet Hyper's stories are better. Anyway.)


Moving on.


Messy, messy divorce. Bitter custody battle, which I do not fare well in. Oh, yeah, and the new wife to be has two sons already, aged 4 and 1, both of whom I've fallen in love with.


Stormy relationship, but the good parts a far and away the best things I've ever experienced in my life; I just become more and more determined to stay with this woman, and I can be a stubborn S.O.B.


Unemployment strikes again, and now the wife to be is pregnant! What to do, what to do....


Well, employment has always sucked in the bizarre little burg of Porterville, so I head to WA, leaving the woman and kids behind.


I get lucky (by my standards), and get in with a contractor firm that's working on rebuilding the cable tv systems in Seattle. Good money, and all the work I can eat. February of '94, my son is born! Huzzah again! Wow, he looks just like me--like carbon copy, can't tell the childhood pics apart.


Come summer, I get a monster UHaul truck and move the woman and kids up to Kent, WA, and we get married.


(oh yeah, since you asked, somehwere in there I'd gotten a tattoo of a vampire bite on my neck. )


Keep doing the contractor thing, though with different companies. Making good money--paid for production, most days I can bring home $150, but some days it's more like 3 or 4 times that.


Sadly, the marriage falls apart after about a year and a half, and the wife and kids move to Tacoma.


I still get to see them every weekend (later becomign every other weekend for everyone's convenience), and this is like the model of amicable divorces. Though I still pine for her, the greatest love I have ever known.


Somehow, the seemingly endless cable rebuild ends. So, being ever multi-talented, I start a very brief career installing water heaters! The work sucks. The hours sucks. Hey, the pay sucks too, let's go do something else.


Back to cable tv, only this time with a system--TCI. The pay's not even close, but the work is guaranteed, so I'll live with it, I figure. Then one fine day, I'm drivng my little cable truck down the road, only I drive it right into somebody else's car. Big back owie. Lotsa doctors and therapy and hey, let's take pictures, too. Umm, what's that in this picture? Oooh, it's a tumor (schwannoma), growing right on the nerve sheath very close to my spine. Cut the bastard out!


Ozy's spine before surgery:





Ozy's spine after surgery:





Note the slight structural difference?


Anyway, between that, the long and colorful history of major back injuries, and throw in degenerrative disc disease, and it looks like our hero may be down for the count. But wait, there's more! Let's take the lifelong history of depression, add in enough manic episodes to make it evident that it's bipolar disorder, and throw in some psychotic features just for fun! Now how much would you pay? *snicker*


(off to run some errands, conclusion still to come)


Really, I swear I'm trying to make this short.

 

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tag to finish reading Ozy's story later

jesus ozy.


you are a story writer arn't you

 

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