Moving On Up!

...to a deluxe apartment, in the sky!

OK not really hehe. But I am moving the blog over to Wordpress. It took me over an hour yesterday to upload the photos for the Halloween article, and I had all I can stands, I can't stands no more! Perhaps if Google spent more of its money on improving their servers, and less on bankrolling the American Totalitarian Party (GOP), things would work better here. And fyi, Blogger will almost certainly crash on US election night, Tuesday November 7...so plan accordingly. Firedoglake and Daily Kos are not Blogger-based, so should be up for election news.

New blog is here. See ya over there!

Happy Halloween!

I don't know why people enjoy being scared so much, but Halloween is that time of year when we collectively embrace this. As I've mentioned earlier in the blog here, I loved Halloween as a child. And not the watered down "let's show scary things as harmless cute things" that you see so much of, I genuinely loved the scary...and the scarier the better. As also mentioned earlier, as kids we often put together little haunted houses, which consisted of creating a little path through the apartment, or later the house, and placing creepy things along the path that the people would take. One year we set it up in the laundry and storage room area of our complex, which had the added creepiness of no natural light getting into there, as it was underground, though the landlord had a fit and that was the last year of that. The scariest "haunted house" we put on though, was years later, when I was in my teens. We set it up in the finished basement of our house, and the horror started when people would come down the steps. My mom had taken me to a little magic and prop store the week before, and I had gotten a bunch of new little items, and coupled with some old things I had collected over the years, made some cool little displays. There was the ceramic human skull I had gotten on vacation one year...but it was hollow in the back, and I hooked up a blinking red light in there, so that red light would blink out of its eyes. This scared the littlest kids so much they ran up the stairs and back into the living room hehe. We also had one of my step-sisters just writhing on the ground in the back of the basement, with a soundtrack of moaning and groaning playing. This freaked out grandma hehe. I ended up getting one of those fake butcher knifes, and attached it to my head so it looked like I had been stabbed with it...and fake blood completed the look. This freaked out ironically my mom, who had been in the store when I bought the prop! hehe. We had other things like a ghost we operated from the second floor of the house, so that it banged up against the window in the back, and other scary things like that.

But the surprise hit in the scary department was the Tarot Reading. We had one room in the basement which we had no idea what to do with. It completely messed up the traffic flow of the haunted house, as the room was small, and people coming and going would bump each other in the doorway in the dark. That wasn't scary that was just annoying! So I got the brilliant idea of setting up a card table in there, and doing tarot readings for people. I had gotten the deck from the magic prop store, and had gotten a book from the library about reading the cards. It was waaaay more involved than I had imagined when I had thought the idea up, and there was no way I was going to be able to learn how to read them correctly. So I just ended up selecting the creepy looking cards, and placing them in the order I wanted beforehand, and of course the "outcome" of the reading was the Death card hehe. This creeped out the first few people, but then my oldest step-sister came in and sat down. She had spent the whole tour of our haunted house saying how not-scary everything was, and lookig bored. I did my little fake reading for her, and she declared it to be fake and not-scary, and then completely mixed up the deck of cards! Now what did I do hehe. She demanded I read the cards again. I tried to worm my way out of it, but ended up complying, just so the line of people wouldn't back up and ruin the fun for everyone.

I pulled out the book and started giving the meanings of the cards that had come up for my rotten sister hehe. She got this really freaked out look on her face, and ran from the room. I don't remember what I said at this point, as this was decades ago, but it took a while for her father to calm her down. At this point everyone was saying, "Me next!" hehe. I had no idea what I was doing, I was just dealing out the cards as they came out at this point, and reading the meanings from the book. But it was freaking some people out, while others were saying things like, "Yeah, yeah, that's so true!" At first I thought people were just feeling sorry for the event being thrown into chaos by the idiot sister, but nope, everyone confirmed later that the readings were "accurate". Now I hadn't bought the cards because I took them seriously, I was just looking for something fun to do during Halloween, but everyone's reaction to them was quite surprising and unexpected. We had around 50 people at the party that year, and typically we brought them through the haunted house in the basement in twos and threes, but word was percolating around upstairs that this year's was really scary! Finally we got through the last of the people, and my step-father told us kids that next year, no tarot reading would be allowed, as it had upset too many of the adults. Though our immediate neighbors had all said it was great fun afterwards.

I will now leave you with a link to one of the scariest short stories I have ever read. Put on your creepy Halloween music, turn off the lights, and read it alone and by candle-light for the best effect. HP Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep.

And if you don't wake up in the morning, don't come over and haunt me!!

Exile in San Angelo, Part 4

The Church - Under the Milky Way

So now it was 1986, and I was back in San Angelo. It had gotten quite cold with Winter, and after being spoiled in California, I wasn't caring for it much at all. One thing that was really cool though, was how many stars you could see in the sky at night. And when I was on the night shift, we had plenty of time to stare up at the Milky Way while in formation, and enjoy the view. I grew up in a big city, and the light pollution was such that you really could only see the brightest stars. But here in the middle of nowhere, it was like a totally different sky. It almost made freezing my ass off out there to see it worth it hehe. In January, we were back to Day Shift though. So we had less night sky, slightly less cold, and assloads more of military bureaucracy to deal with. January was the month though where the unthinkable happened. I failed one of my courses! Just barely, but still I failed. I wasn't the only one, many of us did, including my friend Rob. I was freaked out about it, but Rob didn't seem too concerned. Nothing terribly horrible happened, only we had to repeat that course, which added another month onto our stays in freakin San Angelo. Sigh. So we stayed in the same barracks and everything, but we ended up being moved into a new classroom, with people who had been there a month less, and with a new teacher. I had a mandatory "study hall" until I passed that course section...but all study hall was you had to go in your off time into a vault in the secure area, and study the same material you did in class on your own. Yawnerific hehe. I passed the course with no problem this time, and had no further problems.



Yes - I've Seen All Good People



Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart (Complete Video)



Dire Straits - Skateaway

In February we were on swing shift again, and then we had a mandatory "field exercise" before we could graduate from AIT. Field exercises is codespeak for playing army. In other words, the military has dedicated people who are infantry people, or tank people, etc...these are professionally trained killers essentially. They were trained to shoot people in other armies. We on the other hand were linguists. While we had been given basic weapons training, it was intended mainly as a self defense thing. If a war had ever broken out, we would have been far behind the lines in relative safety, doing translations and stuff. So these going into the field things were more a way for people to pretend they were hard-core soldiers and not really admin people :) Many people took it very seriously though. So here we were, in sub-zero temperatures, forced to go out into the boonies...in San Angelo that wasn't saying much!...and had to sleep in tents, and pretend to guard empty things and whatnot. Had it not been so damn cold, it might have been fun. As it was I shivered the whole time, and didn't enjoy it much. And this was of course where we found out how deadly the cactus were hehe. We spent the whole 3 or 4 days pulling the needles out of our legs, out of our boots, etc. Some of the needles were several inches long, and hurt like you wouldn't believe. But others were tiny little splinter-sized things, and while they didn't hurt, the moment you tried to remove one, you ended up pushing it in further, and it became annoying, itchy, and eventually painful. One poor guy dove onto the ground to "hit the dirt", when playing during the simulated exercise, and ended up with a face and hand filled with cactus needles. They had to take him to the base hospital to get them out.



Fleetwood Mac - Sara



Blondie - Hanging on the Telephone



Trio - Da Da Da

Since our days were filled with music, I'll tell you about the local music store. Unlike Monterey, where the store was modern, filled with the latest music, and staffed by people who also loved music, the store in San Angelo was a depressing little hole in the wall. There was a large used music section though, and because of all of the soldiers at the base, it had a fairly interesting selection of used...read cheap...vinyl records you could buy. The owner of the store was the only staff in there, and he hated his customers. I'm guessing he hated his life lol too. He was openly hostile to any military folks in there looking at records, and the one time I went there, he did nothing but bitch and moan about the fact that I had nothing but used records to ring up. I tried politely pointing out that his new music selection sucked in comparison to what was used, but this only made him more of an ass. Had I not found a hard to find Martha and the Muffins album there, I would have told him to shove his records. That's the only thing I remember getting, other than a Yes album, and 2 David Bowie albums...though I had a stack of like a dozen. A lot of the things I was listening to here were a therefore a little older. Like Blondie, which had already officially broken up by then. I've sprinkled a selection of videos through here that were typical listening of the time.



Yello - I Love You



Martha and the Muffins - Danseparc



Hazel O'Connor - Eighth Day (clip from Breaking Glass)

There were a few other things going on during the San Angelo sojourn, but I'll save them for later, to cover them in more depth. In March though the last of us officially graduated, and were allowed to move on to the next assignment. For Rob, since he was in the Reserves, that meant he got to go home to Michigan. For a few, like my old roommate John, it meant they got to go to another base for a little more training. For me, it meant I got to go on to my permanent assignment, at Fort Hood...also in Texas...but first I got another little vacation. So I ended up flying back to Baltimore.

Exile in San Angelo, Part 3

I suppose there was a lot of stress for us in San Angelo. The combination of being far from civilization, the weird schedules, the in your face security...it had weird effects on people. For me it was just dull, and picking up another book to read cured my problem. For others, it brought out all manner of bizarre behavior. For instance, there was the guy who kept trying to commit suicide. He looked ordinary enough. But one day something just snapped, and he tried slitting a wrist. I don't remember the details, but he was found in time by a roommate or whoever, and got taken the hospital and bandaged up. My friend Rob said that anyone who tried to commit suicide and failed didn't really want to die, they just wanted attention. The ones that really want to die manage to pull it off successfully. I don't know if that is true or not, but it sounded plausible to me at the time. And this guy was either an idiot, or just wanted the attention...because a few days later he tried the same thing again, but this time with the other wrist. Again he was found by someone, and stitched up. By this time his clearance was revoked of course, so his career in Intelligence was over. If he was lucky, he'd end up with a desk job somewhere...if unlucky, he'd get something more icky, or dangerous, like being a cook, or artillery-piece cleaner or something. But this poor guy, he just moped around the company area, doing cleaning and stuff. I'd see him before classes in the morning, when he'd be pushing a vacuum cleaner around with his two bandaged wrists, looking all sad. The third time he tried to go after the first wrist again, once again being found and stitched up in time. And this time another soldier was assigned to follow him around 24 hours a day, and not him out of his sight. The suicide guy looked more depressed than ever. The guy assigned to watch him looked bored, pissed off, depressed...all at the same time. I imagined back then that one day we'd find both of them trying to slash their wrists simultaneously, and then what would happen?! But alas, it was not to be. They shipped suicide guy right out of the army instead. I never did hear what became of him. I hope he turned out ok. (Images in this article are again found from the Internet, they were not taken by me.)

Then there were the gays. This was 1985, and before even the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Being found to be gay meant pretty much immediate dismissal from the military. And if they caught someone in flagrante delicto, so to speak hehe...there could be criminal charges brought against them as well, depending on the laws in place in the state where the soldier was caught doing the deed. There was gayness breaking out left and right in San Angelo. Now admittedly people could have been declaring themselves to be gay just to get out of the military. Certainly it would have been less messy than Suicide Guy's method. But I think these folks were genuinely gay. The first guy ended up being in the room right next to mine, in our little "apartment" like barracks room. Supposedly he was caught in bed with another guy. Which I can't even imagine, since my room was right next door, and I never heard a thing. Not any sex going on, and not any commotion from a guy being suddenly screamed at by other soldiers, etc. So the mechanics of how he actually got caught were suspicious to say the least. But I do think he was gay. He went from being just another pale skinny soldier to being the (almost) most melodramatic queen I would ever meet, in about 3 days. It was bizarre. They moved him out of our apartment and into his own room somewhere else a week later, took away his clearance, etc. I guess they were afraid he would convert the rest of us somehow hehe. He would be hoovering instead of Suicide Guy in the mornings some days. And he started with all of these odd feminine affectations, like putting on makeup, and wearing a frilly shawl over his uniform. I tried being nice to him, since we had been flat-mates for a few weeks, but he was just hostile to everyone. I ended up moving into his now abandoned room, since my roommate at the time was this creepy little guy with a creepy, hideously unattractive fiancée who were always trying to get busy in our room. And when I opened my new locker, I found Shawl Guy's gay porn stash. I had never seen any gay porn before, and I had to admit I was a little curious hehe. For the record, he was into big muscle-daddies :) I must have let out a little gasp or something, because soon I was surrounded by the other flat-mates, who then also proceeded to check out the porn. I tried to return it to Shawl Guy, by telling him about it the next time I saw him, but he just screamed something like, "Oh God, just throw it all away!!" He was there through til Christmas break, glaring at everyone every day, and then was gone when we got back. Then there was a guy I had been in Basic Training with, but hadn't seen since then. He was a short little latin guy, and had been a Spanish linguist who had done his language training in San Francisco instead of Monterey. And wow, had he changed. He had been just another army guy in Basic, but now he had turned into a flaming queen. I don't know what it is about gay latin guys, but man when they come out, they come out! Carlos Mencia does a funny little comedy bit about this topic hehe. And talking to him was surreal, since he acted like a completely different person now. He had also now had his clearance revoked, and had apparently been caught in bed with someone, but we never heard any details about it. And the whole while, I kept thinking about the hypocrisy and injustice of persecuting these guys. I mean this is the same army that was perfectly fine with my troll roommate and his troglodyte girlfriend shagging into the night, yet these guys had to be driven out of the military.

I went back to Maryland for Christmas. Me, my friend Dan from DLI, and another guy whose name I forget now, who were all from Maryland, decided to rent a car and drive back together, instead of flying. It was around 30 hours of straight driving. We'd take turns, each driving 4 or 5 hours, and then we'd take turns sleeping in the back seat. At first we were going to stop at motels on the way, but then just decided to drive the whole way through, and have an extra day or two back home. The drive was uneventful, but fascinating for me. I had never been in any of the states between Texas and Maryland before, I had only ever flown over them. So I had trouble sleeping, I wanted to see everything hehe. I ended up doing the driving through most of Tennessee, and even in late December, it was very pretty. Driving across the Mississippi river the first time was amazing. And at the time I was amazed, at how little country music there was on the FM radio when we drove through Nashville. AM was all Country Music, but FM was mostly rock and pop...and pretty good rock music at that. Virginia however, was horrible. The music I mean. Though the scenery wasn't much to look at either. We did end up driving around lost in West Virginia for a bit, in that little part where West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland meet. The other 2 guys were certain there was some shortcut there, but they had trouble finding it in the dark. We finally made to Guy Whose Name I forget's parents' house in Frederick. They gave us a little breakfast, chatted us up a bit, and then we drove to my parents' house and dropped me off. They then dropped of Dan outside of DC, and Guy went back to Frederick. Even though I still thought of this house as "home", it no longer felt like home at all. It felt like my parents' house, not like mine. San Angelo certainly never felt like home. At some point California had started being "home" to me, and I never even realized it until I had left.

We had our usual family Christmas stuff. Some old friends from high school called and dragged me out for dinner one night after Christmas, we talked late into the night, and I told them what I had been up to in both California and Texas. I told them about Rocky Horror hehe. They had seen it too! It played nearby right in town! We made plans to see it on the coming Saturday. They dropped me off back home, and my step-father was bitching and moaning about how late I had been out. I think I got home around 11pm. I laughed and told him I usually stayed up until 7am just working, and didn't even go to be until noon! God he was an idiot. He was even madder when we went out on Saturday to see the midnight showing of RHPS and I didn't get home until 2am. He and my mom weren't even home, they had gone away for the weekend! One of the neighbors had actually reported to him the time I got home. What was with these Maryland people! What the heck were they doing up at 2am anyway if they found 2am so offensive?! I wasn't the only person having trouble with relatives. Neal called me at home a few days before New Year's Eve, and told me his parents were driving him crazy too, and said we should do something fun for New Years. I mentioned that there was some laser light show and fireworks planned for the Baltimore Inner Harbor, and he said that would be great. He then showed up at my house an hour later hehe. He had assumed I would say yes, and had already driven all the way down to Delaware. (He was from New Hampshire remember). I invited him to crash with us, and oh lord, the drama from my step-father. We had a spare room, in addition to mine, with empty beds in it, but he pitched a fit anyway. I suggested that Neal and I could just rent a hotel room if it was a problem, and my mom used her glare of death powers and shut the step-father up lol. So Neal spent an uneasy few days with us. The next day we went and saw some movie in the theater...some Star Trek movie I think, I can't remember. Then Neal drove around and I showed him all of the places where I had been near our house when growing up. Including the inner city neighborhood that freaked him out a little hehe.

Finally on New Year's Eve I told the parents we were going down to the Harbor, and I thought my step-father was going to have a stroke. "You're not taking my car down there!", he bellowed. Umm, we're taking Neal's, but thanks for caring. "How can you go out on New Year's Eve, it's dangerous! There are drunk people! You better not be drunk and driving!", he blathered. No, we don't even want to drink, we don't like to drink, we haven't ever drunk anything even in the army. We'll be careful. Buh Bye! Here was the man who was always trying to get me to stop reading books and go outside, having a fit when I wanted to go outside and go to a party! It boggled the mind. We went and saw the laser light show, which back then was new-fangled and cool hehe. Then got lost repeatedly trying to get out of the city, but finally made it home. Step-father was still waiting up for us! And he had to work early the next day, how dare we go out and have fun! I thought my mom was going to die laughing at him hehe. Neal left the next day, to drive back up to New England. He was still stationed in Massachussetts for a while, and then would go wherever they were sending him next. He declared my family to be even more deranged than I had portrayed them to my friends at DLI, and vowed to never stop in Maryland again if he could avode it :) I of course had to go back to San Angelo. The guys picked me up as agreed, and we all drove back to Texas. The trip was again uneventful, but long. And even though I wasn't looking forward to more of Texas, I was more than ready to have a vacation from my family!

Exile in San Angelo, Part 2

OMG, San Angelo was so freaking boring! I hadn't realized how much time in Monterey we had spent just wandering around checking out the sights...until we had all of this new-found free time, since there was nothing worth looking at where we were in Texas. I would take a walk around the base near the barracks, with the wild wind blowing and moaning around me, and there was literally nothing to walk to. I take that back. There was a depressingly small rec center, that was smaller than my current apartment. It had board games! Yawn. Getting off base was a problem, since the only real way to do it for us carless folks was to call a cab, and wait for it to get from town all the way to the base. We'd usually get a big group of us together, and pile into a cab, to go into town, and then split the rather high fare cost. But there wasn't anything to do in town either. San Angelo today has around 88 thousand people living in it. Back then I'm guessing it was lower. There was a pizza place we went to a few times, that served edible pizza. But by California standards that we were used to, where you could order anything imaginable on your pizza, and get it in any style known to man, this place was just sad. You could get pepperoni. Or sausage. Or you could mix the two and be daring. They had the standard vegetable toppings too, but nothing interesting, like my favorite, pineapple and Canadian bacon! The waitresses would just look at us like we were crazy when we asked for stuff like that hehe. We also went to the local mall 2 or 3 times, but there was nothing to buy there. Correction...there was nothing to buy there that we would actually use. The clothing shops were selling things that had gone out of style sometime when Nixon was President. Unless you wanted standard Levi's jeans, they didn't have anything you would want to wear.

I was saving my money for a car. Neal ended up buying a personal computer, he was so bored. And thank god for that, because it gave us something to do while hanging out in his room. Personal computers were a relatively new thing. There was no clear standard yet, and there were a number of different brands out there using incompatible formats. Neal got an Amiga, which was well known then for it's "advanced" graphics and games. The Commodore was also popular. Apples were used by many schools, but were otherwise kind of dull. And Microsoft/IBM? Well they were well known for putting out crappy software, so most people avoided their computers like the plague. I don't remember the exact specs of Neal's machine...by today's standards of course it was a dinosaur with pitiful power hehe...but back then it was state of the art. He got a bunch of games, which we played for hours. I forget most of them, but one of them ended up being Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a text adventure game. You can download it here, and try it out! Computers really couldn't handle fancy graphics back then, so text adventures were extremely popular. We also ended up playing Zork around this time. You can download Zork here. Hitchhiker's Guide was of course loosely based on the events in the popular Douglas Adams books. Zork was a descendant of the old Colossal Cave, or just plain Adventure. In years to come, Zork itself would spawn a whole line of games in the same genre, eventually including graphics and movies. HHGG however never had a sequel I'm aware of. In addition, the whole "Adventure" game concept would go on to spawn not only "adventure game toolkits", where the user could design their own text adventure games, but also spawned the whole genre of Adventure games played on computers.

HHGG faithfully captured the humor of Douglas Adams, and while knowing the plots of the books helped a little, it didn't help much. It really made you think to solve the puzzles. And like most games in this genre at the time, doing the wrong thing would result in you losing immediately and the game terminating...hence the expression "Save Often!". The deaths were usually pretty humorous too hehe. We never finished any of these text adventures while in San Angelo, that's how involved they could be. Though we got close to solving Zork I. (It would be years later before I would actually beat these games on my own). We spent one rather hilarious day trying to beat HHGG's nefariously difficult Babelfish puzzle. I won't spoil the fun for the reader, but let's just say that there's a whole bunch of stuff you have to do, in the right order, and there's not enough time if you screwed it up to try again before you find yourself dead hehe. Had there been more stuff to do in San Angelo, I doubt if I would have gotten as much into these computer games as I did. But it's something that's stuck with me over time, and I continue to spend way too much time goofing off playing computer games even today :)

Repeatedly voted the Worst Music Video of All Time, this video by Starship was playing non-stop on MTV in 1985. Warning: May induce vomiting, seizures, and death!



Neal and the other Persian linguists ended up finishing their training and moving on to their next Advanced Training location, in Massachussets. No more computer games for me :( But they finally ended up moving me and a bunch of other people into a relatively new barracks building, when room opened up after previous students graduated and moved on. This new building was more like an apartment complex than a barracks. Each "apartment" had 6 rooms, with 2 beds each. And they connected to a common area with restroom, living area, microwave, and OMG Cable TV!! Rob from Monterey was there with me, but the rest of the guys were complete strangers. At first we were mesmerized by our first exposure to MTV. How cool is this, music videos! This was back when MTV actually played music all day. Of course it didn't take long to realize that most of the music was terrible pop music. We started keeping MTV on most of the time, but muted...and we would play better music on the cassette player while we watched the videos and chatted. We'd then turn off the tape and unmute MTV when they played something decent. We also had our own phone in there, which meant no more queueing up in a barracks hallway to call loved ones. You just had to deal with the volume of the tv now hehe.

Compare the following video by an earlier incarnation of the same band to the previous video...assuming you have not succumbed to the seizures or death hehe. What happened to make such a great band so horrible later in their career? We decided they should have kept doing the drugs :)



We ended up changing shifts every few weeks. Our next shift was the Swing Shift, with our day starting around 2pm and ending by 11pm. This ended up being my favorite. You ended up with a minimum of time exposed to stupid military bureaucrats, could slip in until noon if you wanted, and yet got out of class early enough to still do things at night if you wanted. The final shift which I ended up on during December, was the dreaded Night Shift. Our days went from roughly 11pm to 7am. You tried to sleep during the day, which proved to be quite difficult for me, so I was perpetually tired. And since there was no meal service in the mess hall around 3 am, our "lunch time", we ended up eating whatever junk we could find in the machines in the secure area. Plus lots and lots of coffee. The one cool thing was going for "Breakfast" while on Night Shift, which ended up being around 9pm, just before the mess hall closed. There was slim traditional breakfast food pickings available, but usually plenty of entrees...so I got in the habit of chowing down on lasagna and meatloaf and stuff like that, instead of making due with the cereal or whatever. It's a habit that has stayed with me too, I still eat dinner for breakfast from time to time even now hehe. And people still think it's just as weird now as they did then :)

Project Runway Music

Just a quick note...I know a lot of people were looking for the runway songs playing during the Bryant Park show for season 3. Blogging Project Runway has detailed news about an upcoming PR soundtrack being released here. The soundtrack will include other music from the show, in addition to the runway themes. (Short answer...it's not available yet, but will be soon). In the meantime, BPR's The Scarlett put the above video up on YouTube. The photos are of her meeting the Runway glitterati, but the music in the background is Jeffrey's runway song.

Enjoy!

Exile in San Angelo, Part 1

And so began the Exile in San Angelo(tm). It was October, 1985, and a bunch of young college aged kids were all shipped from the heavenly shores of California, to one of the more desolate, empty parts of the country, so beloved of the US military. I ended up flying into Abilene, because there were no convenient flights into San Angelo, and ended up taking a vanride the 100 or so miles down to the base. I didn't recognize anyone on my plane, but at the airport, also waiting for the van, were some guys I had gone to DLI with. The first obvious thing we all noticed was the pronounced Texas drawl of everyone in the airport. The girl at the ticket counter ended up having nothing to do, and spent some time chatting with us. Her accent was so extreme that I was continually distracted by just listening to it, rather than to the words she was saying. And it turned out she had never in her life even been outside of Texas, which was just incomprehensible to us. Though after spending some time there, it's actually quite common for the people from small town Texas to never leave.

I had of course been to San Antonio before, when I was in elementary school (see below), and just assumed that San Angelo would be similar. Boy was I wrong. San Antonio was over a 3 hour drive away, and the terrain was quite different. Everything was flat. Flat, flat, flat. I had never seen so much wide open flat before. Of course there were small little hills, and a slight incline here and there, but you could essentially see all the way to the horizon, in virtually any direction. Everything looked bleak and desolate. In a Mad Max movie kind of desolate way. And there was cactus freaking everywhere. Not those cute little cactus you see in the store, but nasty, unpleasant clumps of mean cactus. With spines that could spear you through leather army boots. Just wandering around in the brush was not a wise thing to do. It wasn't those cute tall cactus you see in road runner cartoons, but hard to see, close to the ground clumps of the stuff. And then there was the wind. A sad, mournful, howling wind that never stopped. I noticed it the first night while I was trying to sleep. I thought my friends were playing a joke on me, standing outside my room moaning or something, like a ghost...it was near Halloween after all...but nope, that noise was the wind. And then there was the water. The drinking water that came out of the taps stank like rotting eggs. It was loaded with sulphur apparently. The locals didn't seem to mind or notice it, but if I drank more than a few sips of it let's just say I suddenly became afflicted with Montezuma's Revenge hehe. I quickly learned to only drink bottled water, and only occasionally forgot that soda served by restaurants was mixed with the toxic stuff.

So for me San Angelo was several months of the most extreme form of culture shock imaginable. I imagine North Korea might be a greater shock, but I'm hard pressed to imagine anything worse hehe. The one good thing about the assignment was that it was on an Air Force base, and not an Army Base. The Air Force seemed to be the most civilized of the military branches, and back then at least seemed to have the most modern buildings, and was willing to spend money to make the soldiers more comfortable. So instead of having disgruntled army cooks cooking for us in the Mess Hall, like we had at DLI, here the Air Force had hired a civilian firm to run its Mess Hall, and it was like eating in a fancy cafeteria like they have at some malls. The food was terrific! The menu was varied, had all kinds of wonderful desserts, a breakfast bar, salad bar, and you could help yourself to most everything except the entrees...the polar opposite of an army mess hall in other words hehe. And you were not *allowed* to clean up after yourself. You had to leave your trays on the tables when you were done, unlike at DLI where you had to bus your own trays. The rest of the base though, wow what a difference from DLI! DLI was an open base. Anyone, including civilians could just drive in and drive around. In San Angelo however, the base was closed, with armed guards at the few entrances. You could not enter without a military ID or with previously arranged permission...if your name wasn't on a list at the gate, you didn't get in. Our training there was classified, and our classes were behind yet another wall of security, where they checked ID and lists again. We were told that the guards were under order to shoot to kill anyone trying to enter without permission, and I don't doubt it. Though it is hard to believe that anyone would bother trying to infiltrate a classroom complex lol!

They didn't have enough barracks room for all of us when we first got there, and they crammed us in all over the place. Neal ended up near me in the barracks for a time, though we only shared one class, and that briefly. They had crammed 3 beds into rooms that were only supposed to hold 2, and in addition had the whole base on 3 different shifts, because there wasn't enough classroom space in the secure area for everyone at once. Us newbies started on the day shift, meaning our days started around 7am, and ended around 5pm, including PT and all of that. But my other 2 roommates were on a different shift, and were always trying to sleep whenever I was awake. We all would end up dressing in the dark, and hanging out elsewhere. Fortunately for me Neal's other roommates were also on a different shift, but they were always at class when Neal was awake...so the old crew tended to hang out in Neal's room on our off time. We did the same old things here, played role playing games, listened to music, played wargames, etc.

Our first class was a Typing class, which we all had to pass in order to move on to the next class. And this is where I learned that I sucked at typing. Other people came in, sat down, took their tests and were gone, but I was in there for at least a week hehe...it was really hard for me for some reason, and I had only ever typed before on a high school term paper we had to do once. But I finally managed to barely pass...which was good, because they hinted if you didn't pass, you got reassigned to being a cook or something worse hehe. Heck no wonder army cooks were always so grumpy and cooking such lousy food! The rest of our classes were classified, and I won't go into details. But the military websites do talk about the various jobs a bit that involve languages, and the curious can read up on it there. Our old gang of friends, even though we were all linguists, had different languages and slightly different job descriptions, so our coursework varied and went on for different lengths of time. And classified doesn't mean the work was interesting...in fact it was boring as all hell...but most people seem to think classified means James Bond or something hehe.

We basically ended up settling in as best as we could, and thankfully most of us weren't scheduled to be here for more than a few months.