We don't need another hero

I’m so frustrated by friends who are idolizing Greta Thunberg. They’re creating memes and talking about how she gives them hope and how cute she is. They say that the young people are going to save us.

If I keep gnashing my teeth like this, I’m going to need implants.

This is the same Greta who said “Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you.”

This is the same Greta who said “Don’t listen to me. Listen to the scientists.”

This is the same Greta who said "You aren't trying hard enough."

I see this over and again among my friends. They want a hero. They idolize Molly Ivins. They brag about that time they hung out with Ann Richards. They post bodice-ripping selfies with Beto. They say "We need another Barbara Jordan; no one can equal her." 

But just tell them “we need volunteers for an event this weekend,” or “can you donate $5 to help refugees?” or “will you commit to reducing your fuel consumption?” and listen to the crickets.

Venerating others as heroes is cowardly and lazy. We're not supposed to put people on pedestals. We're supposed to take them as role models and extend their work into the world. We’re supposed to take their words as inspiration for our perspiration. 

Remember, Jesus never said “meme me.” He never said "post selfies with me and gain the kingdom of heaven." He said “get off your ass and do the work.” But nobody remembers that either. They'd rather write songs about him and pray to him for salvation.

But you have to save yourself. There is no other way. There never was and never will be.

Endless war?

Since 9/11, America has been at war in the Middle East constantly. Big, public wars like our attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, and quieter wars like our participation in (and escalation of) the civil wars in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.

None of these wars had any honest relationship to the safety and security of the United States. None of these nations was an aggressor towards us or remotely dangerous to our well-being. Some folks will point out that it’s really not our fault we got embroiled in war with Iraq – Bush lied to us so it’s all his fault. But I was a young mother with absolutely no political involvement outside of voting at the time, and I was distinctly aware that Bush was full of crap and had no real basis for the invasion, so Congress certainly should have known better.

The cost of these wars in human lives has been enormous. The US military and media purposefully underestimate body counts, but well-researched estimates total 6+ million, broken down as follows:

Iraq – 2.4 million

Afghanistan/Pakistan – 1.2 million

Libya – 250,000

Syria – 1.5 million

Somalia – 650,000

Yemen – 175,000

Besides the human cost of these unnecessary wars, we have spent over $6 trillion dollars waging them. That’s an incomprehensible number. $6,000,000,000,000. A huge percentage of that money goes to the companies that provide hardware, logistical support, ammunition, and fuel to the military.

It’s pretty obvious that the only purpose these wars serve is to provide a constant source of income to a few disgustingly wealthy and greedy individuals. Subservient or weak governments in the Middle East make it easier for us to control oil supplies. Supplying our enormous military moves money very efficiently from the public coffers into the hands of corporations.

Meanwhile, the media reports on the latest scary bombing without mentioning that the bombs were made in America or dropped from American planes, feeding the racist narrative that the Muslim world is inherently dangerous and unstable. And because only a small percentage of Americans are actually negatively affected, the lie is easily sustained.

It’s past time for Americans to wake up to the fact that they live in a rogue, aggressor nation; that we rain murder and mayhem on poor people around the world who have done us no harm and are powerless to resist our military juggernaut. It’s past time for the young men and women who serve our country to refuse to participate in these illegal wars. It’s past time for the media to stop playing along.

Just yesterday, I was accused of not “supporting the troops” as though I had committed the most horrific sin imaginable. Which is kind of funny considering that I’m a veteran. But the cult of “love our soldiers” is inherently dangerous. An army which complies with its mandate to protect its country needs no PR blitz. There is no need to coerce the people of a peaceful and righteous nation to feel love and pride for their institutions.

Yes, I joined the Army when I was 18. I don’t think I had any illusions about saving the world from communism, even though it was Cold War days. What I learned during my service informs my activism today. One of the things I learned was that all of the history I was taught in school was mythology; huge pieces of reality were simply left out to paint the U.S. in the glorious colors of freedom and democracy. Another thing I learned was how incredibly important the actions of individuals are. History has literally pivoted over and over again on the deeds of a single human being.

You must resist the path towards fascism that the U.S. is galloping down. Teachers. Soldiers. Engineers. Everyone. Business as usual isn’t an option anymore. Business as usual is what got us here. Refuse to get on that troop carrier. Refuse to make the gun or the software that guides it. Refuse to teach the lies. You could be the one who saves the world, or destroys it.

It's time to evolve

I’m old enough, just, to remember something of the feminism of the 70s. Reproductive rights, long hair, burnt bras, sisterhood, rock and roll. Movies and TV shows featured single young women with jobs and their own apartments and love lives! And while there were plenty of men who opposed all this modern independence for ladies, some of them were neutral or even intrigued. After all, a woman with the pill in her purse, money in her pocket, and a halter top on is pretty darned sexy. A nature girl with long hair and a guitar and her own set of wheels is pretty sexy too.

Photo by Nathan Cowley

Friends say “Republicans used to be more reasonable” or “Texas used to be a lot more live and let live; I don’t know what happened.” But w­­­­­hen conservatives were reasonable, women didn’t have the right to their own credit card. They didn’t have the right to play sports in school. They didn’t have the right to a legal abortion. They didn’t have the right to refuse sex with their husbands. They didn’t have the right to a harassment-free workplace. The faces of NASA, of science, of medicine, of law enforcement, of business, of sport, were all male. I grew up in a world where none of the people doing things I wanted to do looked like me.

The gains that my mother’s generation made opened a crack in that monolithic man’s world, and women squeezed through that crack and pushed it open wider so that more women could rush in. Progress has been uneven and painful; our gains have been hard won, but the numbers reveal the changes that I have seen in my lifetime, and they are significant.

• 60% of doctors under the age of 35 are women
• 25% of US senators are women
• 23% of US representatives are women
• 18% of state governors are women
• 29% of state legislators are women
• 22% of Fortune 500 board members are women
• 30% of university presidents are women
• 34% of NASA astronauts are women
• 26% of computer scientists are women
• 32% of professional project managers are women
• 49% of college professors are women
• 14% of active duty soldiers are women
• 39% of private companies are woman owned

You know why conservative men seem suddenly so angry and unreasonable? Because they don’t want to have to compete with women on a level playing field. They want our feminism to be sexy. They want it to be about them. And it really isn’t any more. It’s not just that we’re getting the degrees and the jobs and winning the elections. The numbers above show phenomenal success but mostly not equality, after all. It’s also the side-effects of all this education and success and power now in women’s hands. We’re wearing what we want. We’re eschewing makeup and picking a trip to the gym over a trip to the salon. We’re getting married later or not at all. We’re not deferring to our fathers, brothers, preachers or husbands any more. We’re raising families without men. We’re fixing our own plumbing and tuning up our own bikes and going backpacking and touring Europe without men. So men aren’t just having to compete with us in the conference room; they’ve also discovered that we no longer need them. The social and economic structures that bound us to husband and hearth are disintegrating. Now we mate and marry only because we want to and when. We don’t need to be taken care of and we don’t want to take care of a man either. We want him to take care of himself, and to meet us as an equal in freedom, not in obligation or dependency. Many (most?) of the women I know have chosen the single life. Not because they don’t love men and sex, but because it’s just not worth it. Maybe they had an abusive partner, or an unfaithful one.  I’ve had more than one friend tell me that they just didn’t like being married because it felt like they were losing themselves. It’s good to pay your own bills, make your decisions, to go and do as you like, eat what you like, stay up late with a book and a cat and a cup of tea or get up before dawn and head to Zumba before work and never have to explain yourself, justify yourself, subsume yourself. In a patriarchal society, maybe a mating of true equals is simply impossible. More women are unwilling to make the compromises and sacrifices that traditional marriage demands.

Men don’t seem to be adjusting to this new reality. It’s not just that they have to compete with women in every field of public endeavor. They are adrift in relationship to women personally as well. I think a lot of men have been taught, by family and church and peers and the media, that if they are good men, women will want them and they’ll find a happily ever after. Being a good man is a complicated and pretty much unattainable goal. It seems to include physical and/or intellectual prowess, mastery of all of the manly arts, some impossible mixture of emotional strength and reserve and gentle tenderness. And of course, superior sexual prowess. If the ads on the radio are anything to go by, there are a lot of men who doubt their sexual prowess.

So what is a man to do, who has trained all his life for the wrong race? No matter where on this continuum of masculinity he falls, it’s largely irrelevant to modern women. Some men with intelligence and emotional maturity adjust. They are learning to navigate a changed world and learning to define themselves as something other than “the opposite of a woman.” They are finding freedom in shedding restrictive gender roles and growing into equal relationships.

And then there are the other guys. The ones brought up in strictly conservative families. The ones who were starved of physical and emotional affection as children. The ones of lower than average intelligence who crave structure and authority and predictability. The ones who were abused. The ones who were never allowed to cry. The ones who were always compared to their peers and found lacking. They are adult men but bent or broken, unable to rise to the emotional demands of adulthood but expecting all of the rewards of adulthood nonetheless. They could be angry at the parents and society that failed them. They could seek growth and healing. But that’s really difficult to do. Not everyone can even reach the first rung on the ladder of self-actualization. They may not even see that the ladder is there. It’s easier to blame themselves, to fall into self-loathing and rage and despair. I’ve never yet met a violent man who wasn’t a very weak, hollow man, a shell of a man. I’ve faced down plenty of them. Some of these hollow men seek roles that give them hierarchical status. Some of them manipulate social systems to skew the odds in their favor, with the added benefit of causing harm to others. Some of them turn to outright violence to attempt to subdue and control the world. All of them take personal, real pleasure at one-upping or harming others. It provides a temporary high that dulls the aching void inside. But like any drug, the results are ephemeral. We call these hollow men narcissists and act as though narcissism is the exception to the rule. I don’t find that to be true. In a patriarchy, narcissism is the default setting for men. We only remark upon it when it manifests in the toxic, self-destructive virulence that we see in Trump or in Epstein or in mass murderers.

In a twisted way, the manifestos of violent men and the toxic spew of incels are correct. Women, on our journey to equality and freedom and joy, have turned the basket of patriarchy upside down and shaken everything lose. We won’t crawl back into that basket and we don’t owe men comfort or healing or sex or praise. On the other hand, one only has to read to realize that the self-destructive legacy of patriarchal masculinity has been with us a very long time. At some point, I hope men stop raging and start evolving. It would be a lot more fun.

One night in Silicon Valley

Some years ago, I was a project manager for a regional real estate company in Houston. I was mostly managing Internet projects, which I really enjoyed because at the time it was kind of edgy and creative. The company decided that they wanted to build an intranet. Since they didn’t have one and didn’t really know where to start, they decided to send me and my product manager, Sandra, to an educational event in California. It wasn’t really a conference nor yet a class. Some tech companies that wanted to improve their street cred hosted a “tour” of their intranets presented on-site by their web teams. Ah, those heady 90's when employers thought nothing of paying for such fluffy junkets in the search for the elusive “new media” magic.

Since Sandra’s parents lived in the Bay Area, she proposed that we stay at her family home to save on travel expenses. I’m always down for getting to know people better so I agreed. She waxed poetic about her old neighborhood and jogging in the California hills. Our company travel agent booked our plane tickets. I packed the usual khakis and blouses and shoved running shoes into the corner of my bag.

Flying was uneventful then. TSA hadn’t been invented yet. We arrived, grabbed our bags, got a rental car, and headed for her family bungalow. It was a typical middle-class California neighborhood with long, low houses trimmed in pink or green or blue, eucalyptus trees and bougainvillea and irrigated lawns. In those days they were probably about a quarter million dollars each.

Her parents were gracious but unobtrusive hosts. Her mom showed me to my room, chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, and then left us to our own devices. As the long summer evening faded to night, we popped the cork on a bottle of chilled California wine and curled up on the couch to flip through all the cable channels, mocking the bad cable porn, and telling tales about boyfriends and husbands, childbirth and jobs, heartbreak and loss.

After the second glass of wine she casually confided “When I was about 10, we went to visit my grandparents. My uncle came into my bedroom and felt me up. I told my mother about it, and after that she stayed in the room with me until we left. She told me not to tell my dad about it because it would upset him.”

In these unguarded private moments, women share their pain just like this. Every woman carries the weight of her friends’ grief as well as her own, and every story that has ever been shared with us is as sharp in our memory as the moment we heard it. In my mind, that cheerful California living room, that white leather couch, Sandra, tall and confident with her hair perfectly straightened and her dark red fingernails, successful career woman and wife of an astronaut, one bare foot tucked under the opposite leg as she sipped her wine and casually shared the darkest moment of her childhood, will live forever frozen in time. And that is how we tell our stories; we deliver them, without drama or fanfare, because our stories have to be told, but lightly lest our shared burden become too heavy to bear.

We spent the next day at Cisco and Silicon Graphics, ate a catered lunch and admired the latest whiz-bang technology and listened to enthusiastic presentations and met teams of women who were paid a lot more than we were to do the same job we were doing. I don’t remember much about it really. I thought Cisco had a weird vibe and their conference room looked like it had been furnished from the second-hand store, but Silicon Graphics was all glass and chrome and rotating holograms and excitement. At the end of the tour, we had a better understanding of how far we had to go than how we were going to get there. We did go home to Houston and built a fledgling intranet and collaborated on several other successful projects, but after a couple of years I moved on to another job and we lost touch.

In the years since, I’ve left Houston, become an activist, met many women, and heard many stories, some far more horrific. I’ve become stronger and sadder. And I want to let you know, dear Sandra, wherever life has taken you in the intervening years, that I still hold space for you in my heart. What happened to you was a crime, and you deserved justice far more than your father deserved to have his peace of mind preserved. I’ll keep working for the day when no child experiences what you endured.

How it really works....

 

 

Cleaning up the mess

Anyone who spends time on the back roads of the oil patch has seen them, the rusting hulks of old pumpjacks and tank batteries moldering in the middle of a cow pasture. Whenever I see one, I can’t help wondering how many there are and what the impact of them is, besides just pure ugliness.

Abandoned Wells are Bad News

Americans have been drilling for oil since 1859. There are over 1 million active oil wells today. By law, oil well operators are required to plug wells and remediate sites when the well outlives its life-span, but if an operator goes out of business, wells are simply abandoned. Also, many older wells (pre-1950s) may be inadequately plugged or simply forgotten due to poor or lost documentation. How many abandoned wells are there? Nobody really knows, but estimates are maybe as many as a million in the U.S.

Besides aesthetics, are these abandoned oil wells a problem? After all, cattle graze next to them. People plant gardens around them. They are a common part of the landscape in many states. Some of the impacts of abandoned wells:

• Groundwater contamination – oil, gas, or saltwater contamination of aquifers.
• Methane emissions – approximately 40% of abandoned wells leak methane. Methane is a significant contributor to global warming and can be very dangerous locally, even causing explosions.
• Surface environment/surface water – old, rusting equipment and site debris can pose a risk to wildlife and people; oil, gas, saltwater, or drilling mud ooze to the surface and contaminate surface water and soil. For example, in Imperial, Texas, a “lake” of salty, sulfurous water created by effluence from abandoned wells literally kills all vegetation within 30 feet.
• Abandoned wells in fracking zones – fracking fluids can be pushed into abandoned wells, compromising the fracking well and even resulting in toxic geysers.

Fixing the Problem

So, what’s to be done about it? Well site remediation costs an average of $65,200 per site. Costs vary widely depending on the depth and type of well. Site remediation on land generally includes:

• Plugging the well. Wells must be plugged to prevent the oil and gas reservoir fluids from migrating uphole over time and possibly contaminating other formations and aquifers. A well is plugged by setting mechanical or cement plugs in the wellbore at specific intervals to prevent fluid flow.
• Removing or burying lease roads and location pads.
• Removing equipment, concrete, trash, and debris.
• Repairing erosion and salt scars on the land.

The states basically struggle with the problem individually, some more effectively than others. While the cost of remediation has grown due to more stringent regulations and more complex sites, the amount levied to finance remediation hasn’t increased significantly in years. Let’s compare how Texas and Oklahoma deal with their abandoned wells.

Texas

According to the Railroad Commission, which is responsible for regulating the oil business in Texas, there are currently 186,841 producing wells in Texas, 78,807 inactive wells, and 33,402 injection wells. This does not include plugged or abandoned wells. Estimates are there are approximately 10,000 abandoned wells in Texas in need of remediation. The Railroad Commission is able to remediate about 1,000 sites a year, which is approximately equal to the rate of abandonment, meaning that the total inventory of abandoned sites remains pretty constant. This site remediation is financed by a 5/8^th cent surcharge on top of the state’s 4.6% tax on oil production.

Oklahoma

The Oklahoma Energy Resources Board (OERB) is the state agency that oversees oil well site remediation. It is funded by voluntary contributions from oil producers and royalty owners which total about 0.1% of oil and gas sales in the state. To date, the OERB, which has been in existence since 1993, has remediated approximately 16,000 abandoned wells across the state at a total cost of $119 million. The OERB reports 800 abandoned wells that have not been “claimed” by landowners, thus preventing remediation from commencing.

The OERB also serves an educational function which provides for “public and student education to teach all Oklahomans about the positive impact of the petroleum industry,” which probably makes that voluntary tax a lot more palatable to the oil industry. Very few companies claw back their contribution.

In Conclusion

In 2015-16, about 50 oil and gas producers in Texas went belly-up, leaving debt, unemployment, and abandoned wells behind them.  Texans are intimately familiar with the boom-and-bust nature of the oil business. Right now, times are good, and new wells are being drilled every day. But, as innovation drives green energy prices down and governments around the world move to mitigate climate change by reducing or eliminating fossil fuel usage, how long will the good times last? And who’s going to clean up the mess left behind in the Permian Basin, the Barnett Shale, and elsewhere around our state? Environmental activists would love to see those wells stop pumping, but that’s not the end of the story. We’re already struggling to clean up the detritus of the oil business – how will we do it when that oil production tax money dries up?

Sources:

https://www.mrt.com/business/energy/article/Old-oil-wells-pose-problem-for-Pecos-County-7413749.php

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920410518309173

https://medium.com/westwise/new-analysis-taxpayers-could-be-on-the-hook-for-billions-to-clean-up-abandoned-oil-and-gas-wells-b0e1e28d20c2

http://www.oerb.com/

http://www.americangeosciences.org/

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2018/07/09/why-orphan-oil-and-gas-wells-are-a-growing-problem-for-states

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-dark-bounty-of-texas-oil

Why doesn't Agile work?

In the course of my political activism, I’ve encountered a lot of angry men. The past three years have been interesting, depressing, and eye-opening, as the hidden misogyny of liberal men has been revealed and the blatant misogyny of conservative men has been enabled. I’ve witnessed how sexism can lose elections, tear up political parties, and drive destructive public policy.

As I look at the workplace through the lens of politics, distinct patterns form. It’s interesting (and depressing) that problems I once thought were endemic to business are actually just expressions of the toxic masculinity that has defined American business culture. I’ll explore this is multiple blog posts because it’s a big topic. I’ll start with a subject that is near to my heart, the weird world of Information Technology.

As an IT consultant, I’ve spent years working with clients who claim to be “Agile” or “going Agile” or some such nonsense. Agile is a really great idea. I even teach Agile Product Owner classes and give presentations on Agile techniques. But I’ve yet to see it actually work. I thought “Agile is hard in big companies.” I thought “Agile transformation doesn’t happen overnight. Give it time.” I thought, “Once everyone is trained, it will get better.” I thought a lot of bullshit.

I talk to other practitioners at conferences, events, happy hours. Same story. There are books and YouTube channels and conferences and non-profits and consultancies and training programs and this elegant, compelling philosophy and absolutely no one I’ve talked to has actually pulled it off.

The core of Agile is the concept of a self-organizing, autonomous team. Without the Agile team, no scrums or backlogs or stand-ups or sprints or anything else are going to effectively convert an organization to Agile. And American business absolutely will not, cannot give their employees the autonomy to actually make Agile effective.

American businesses are filled with people who have spent years crawling through the layers of hierarchy at their organizations so that they can have a little more authority and money. This process is accompanied by the fantasy that having rank somehow conveys legitimacy. No one, having bought into this, ever willingly relinquishes their right to tell other people what to do. It is, literally, the only thing they have. So, since no team is ever permitted to be self-directed, they never develop the relationships and commitment needed to make Agile work.

Agile teams are therefore filled with disillusioned technologists producing little increments of code under the direction of team leaders who have forgotten, if they ever knew, that their role is supposed to be facilitator, not manager. When disagreements break out between teams over some aspect of technical design or functionality, all hell breaks loose in the cube farm as people fight to defend their turf and force their opinions onto the organization.

In the happy dream Agile organization, a project would go kind of like this: business leadership decides they need a new sales application because their old application is slow and built on obsolete technology. They get a couple of Agile teams together and tell them “We need a new sales application. It should be faster, easier to use, and scalable. Here are some actual sales people who sell our actual stuff; they’re going to be your stakeholders. Let’s see what we can get done in 4 months. Go!”

Here’s what really happens: business leadership calls a manager into the room and says “We need a new sales application. It has to have these 30 features, work on a laptop or a phone, and be able to process cash or credit sales. You have 6 months and two teams, but you still have to support the existing system. Jan the sales manager can answer questions for you, but you can’t spend time with actual sales people because we can’t afford to take them off of their accounts. If you don’t get this done, we’ll probably fire you. Go!”

Why, when we know that the first approach works so well, is it always the second that happens? Are people really just not smart enough to figure out Agile? Why can American management not relinquish control over their employees and let them be the awesome, creative professionals that they hired? I would argue that without a hierarchical structure of power and control, most Americans are deeply uncomfortable. Even entrepreneurs who jump ship to start their own company are motivated by the desire to shortcut to the top of the hierarchy and be their own boss much more than by the desire to create a really amazing new product or create an empowering company culture. As soon as their new company grows a little, the same power structures are re-created. Ping pong tables and concrete floors are just window dressing for the same old game. Which is probably why their job postings are almost identical.

I wonder if a cooperative would be able to master Agile. Or an all-woman company? Not a lot of either to study, in technology or any other industry. That’s another topic to explore on another day.

He knows exactly what he's doing

Sometimes, when I’m feeling generous, I think guys don’t realize the thousands of annoying or downright toxic, sexist things they do every day. Sometimes (like at about 8pm on a Thursday) I think that they know exactly what they’re doing.

Seriously, a guy pinged me today on IM to ask me about some test cases, and said, “have a great day.” Which was nice enough. Then he added “keep on smiling that great smile.” It’s a good thing he was about 9500 miles away because I would have gladly smacked him. But that’s an obvious example. Too easy. The every day shit is usually a lot more subtle.

He’s the guy who’s your junior offering to help you with a task while implying that he could do it better.

He’s the colleague who asks you insanely detailed questions in a meeting just to try to trip you up in public.

He’s the manager who says things like “I know you’re new to this role” when you have in fact trained hundreds of people to do this job.

He’s the team mate who’s never rude to you but never responds to your inquiries while replying instantly to your male colleague.

He’s the guy who constantly interrupts you in meetings until you have to be quite publicly rude to make yourself heard.

He’s the guy who gets in your space in the office, pushing his stuff onto your desk, standing too close in the hallway, putting his cell phone and coffee next to your computer in the meeting.

He’s the manager who always hires women of one particular type.

He’s the stakeholder who, even though you have successfully managed dozens of big projects, refuses to believe that you can manage this one.

They’re the guys who, during the break, all huddle together to talk earnestly and importantly, away from the women in the group.

When you read another article bemoaning the lack of women in tech, realize that after years of dealing with the constant negativity of sexism, women just get sick of it. Literally sick. Not just frustrated, but waking up in the morning nauseated with stress and dreading another day doing the work that they once loved.

We’re good at what we do. Woman-led projects are less likely to be abandoned, more likely to be completed on time, on budget, and meeting or exceeding expectations. Woman-built code is more likely to be accepted by customers. Woman bosses are preferred by employees and have higher levels of employee engagement.

This in spite of the constant barrage of disrespect.

I have yet to work for a company that had any kind of training to address sexism in the workplace.

Do better.

The city by the bay

I was in a reminiscing sort of mood today, and telling one of my tales to my kids got me to thinking about San Francisco. I lived there for one short year in the 1980s.

It was different then. Real fog horns. Punk rock. Bedraggled vestiges of a psychedelic past. People obviously dying of AIDS like walking skeletons on the streets. And Presidio was still a military base – that’s where I was stationed.

It’s a long story. In basic training, I and a few other young women bound for the Defense Language Institute formed friendships and hung out together. But the personnel clerks just couldn’t believe that we were supposed to go to language school straight out of basic, so they changed our orders and sent us to AIT at Goodfellow AFB instead. We TOLD them they were wrong, but what does a dumb private know? So we graduated and got on a plane to Texas. At Goodfellow they took one look at our orders and said “what the hell are you doing here?” and took us back to the airport, bound for Monterey.

I don’t remember much of Monterey. I was there long enough to buy a pink bikini, get slightly drunk,  dance my ass off at the NCO club, go see the Rocky Horror Picture Show, play tonsil hockey with a complete stranger, and narrowly avoid arrest. The next day, the army stuck me and two of my pals on a Greyhound bus to San Francisco, where an overflow branch of the language school taught German and Korean classes.

Lori and Killer and I arrived at the bus station in downtown San Francisco in the middle of the night. It was…gritty. But hey, when you’re travelling with a woman named Killer, you fear nothing. We grabbed a taxi. On the edge of the Presidio, far away from the rest of the base, was an old hospital building that had been casually converted to a language school. When we arrived in the big, ugly lobby and dragged our luggage to the CQ desk, a perky young man popped out of one of the chairs.

“Hi girls! I’m Bob,” he announced. Turns out sitting up half the night, watching TV and greeting all the newcomers, was his odd habit. He cheerfully showed us up to our rooms after the CQ gave us our keys. I think he was hoping to meet a girlfriend this way. It never worked.

Ever slept in a hospital? Imagine living in one. The wide hallways with plain white floors. Exam rooms still equipped with cabinets, sinks, and black countertops converted to bedrooms. My first room was actually a former supply/medicine closet. There was still a morgue in the building. I’ll always wonder if that’s where the commander’s office was. I hope so.

But the city! The long trek to the Geary street bus stop, past stylish homes, flower stands, the bodega on the corner where I’d buy a yogurt and a Martinelli’s because the chow hall food was awful. Bicycling up and down the hills, trying to beat the bus downtown. The crumbling old movie theaters with their tattered velvet and dusty chandeliers, showing cult film double features for a dollar. The dive bar where I slam danced while Black Flag played, until Killer tapped me on the shoulder and said “We have to leave. I’m allergic to marijuana.” Starting at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge to run my PT test along the beach. Dodging pigeons on my bicycle to go hang out at Ghirardelli square, watching street performers, or grabbing a bread bowl of clam chowder on the wharf. The green trees wreathed in cold fog outside my window, with the haunting sound of the fog horns ever present. Sitting on a rock at Ocean Beach, watching the seals and the spray. And always, always the smell of the ocean.

But what I remember most about my time in San Francisco was freedom. I’d left a dysfunctional family and a controlling boyfriend to join the army. For the first time in my life I was my own woman. It’s hard to imagine army life feeling like freedom, but outside of the classroom and the PT formation, I could go where I pleased, do as I pleased, love (or not) whom I pleased, wear what I pleased. I was 19 years old, at the top of my class, ridiculously fit, and all out of fucks to give.

Years later, I went back to San Francisco for a work project. At a big white marble bank. In the financial district. Everything had changed. I walked the streets after work and ate alone in little pubs and bistros and climbed Telegraph hill looking for the parrots. But nothing was the same. Certainly not me. Because every day missing my daughters was a hollow ache, and every night falling asleep in my swank hotel, I longed for the open window of my barracks room and the long-silenced sound of fog horns. I don’t want to go back again.

“The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.”

I was sitting on the edge of my bed this evening, sipping a cooling mug of tea and polishing my old black cowboy boots when I was hit by a flood of memories. So many Friday nights, when my friends were partying or relaxing, I stayed at home carefully starching and pressing my BDUs and polishing my boots for drill weekend. So many Saturday mornings when normal folks were sleeping late, I slid into my car before dawn so that I could call my platoon to attention in the drill center parking lot at 7:30am.

My cowboy boots are old and ragged. They’ve been through dust and mud and more than a few encounters with horse hooves. They’re beyond repair but I’ll polish them and wear them to a fancy bistro tomorrow because this is Texas and I can. My combat boots, which I no longer have, were almost as worn. They carried a few cactus needles in the toes and the scars of many marches and wrestling matches with razor wire.

I’ve been taking my daughter to jog at Camp Mabry lately. She prefers that track, which is not crowded, to the mob on Lady Bird Lake trail. We run and walk at her pace, and when we’re walking, I’ll tell her tales. How I used to run my PT test on that trail, when it was still gravel. How we used to go out into the woods to do our common skills training. How I spent Saturday afternoons in the motor pool touching up the camo paint job on my deuce and a half and topping off the water in the battery. How Bo twitched the laterals and crashed the 577 into the side of a Volkswagen in the parking lot. But I’ve never driven her back to the building where we used to drill, or try to sneak in to see what it looks like now. Some ghosts are best left slumbering. Everything is so different now. The Army. The world. Me. It was such a huge part of me and there’s nothing left but dusty fragments of memories.

Every year we have a reunion. I’ve gone to a couple of them. I’m younger than most who attend. Some that I remember in their arrogant and beautiful prime are dead now. Most are a lot fatter and a lot more conservative than I remember. Did we really drink and laugh and play cards and throw each other into the pool and then get up the next morning and drive a convoy across Texas and set up a field SCIF in 100 degree weather sweating until our boots were white with salt and even the musty warm water in our canteens tasted good? Did we really hang laminated maps on the walls of the tent and mark them with grease pencils and then encrypt our reports with a code-book before radioing them in? Am I really that old? I look at the faces of my former comrades at arms and feel oddly disconnected from them and from my own past. In a lot of important ways I haven’t changed. But so much has happened since then. Love. Loss. Careers. Parenthood. Politics.

Many of them stayed in the military until retirement. There’s a comfortable continuity to that. Being part of a enduring community. Having a consistent identity. Polishing the same pair of boots on Friday night, year after year. I cut ties with my past when I joined the Army, and cut them again when I left. I’ve reinvented myself over and over again. And I’m making plans to do it again. It seems to be the way I’m made. I wonder if at some point, I’ll decide, nope, this is where I stop. I’ve gone far enough. I rather doubt it.

I glance at my daughter’s flushed face as we jog and the past falls away. She sprints ahead and I push forward, trying to keep up. Her red braid swings like a pendulum and I laugh out loud. Together we race into the cold wind.

Bots, bots everywhere

Hi all, today I’d like to present a lesson called “how to spot trolls and bots.” Let's look at today's encounter on Hillary's Twitter. This gentleman’s profile is mostly non-political. It’s all about sports, very low key. Nothing to raise suspicion, really.

Notice his first comment on Hillary’s post. An occasional misspelling on Twitter is inevitable, but this contains multiple linguistic oddities. That attracts my notice immediately. When I challenge him, he claims allegiance to a democratic identity. (Hey we’re on the same side here. It’s an attempt to create a perception of unity AGAINST Hillary.) However, most folks who follow politicians and politics on Twitter actually post about politics or have a political allegiance noted in their profile. 

To give the benefit of the doubt, I don't go down the "more liberal than thou" black hole. I just point out that sexism crosses party lines. His next step is sealioning. “Cite your sources” is a ludicrous response to what I said but 100% consistent with a bot script. I call him on it. He doesn’t quite know how to handle that; again his response is somewhat nonsensical. He’s trying to deflect my critique, but he either doesn’t know what sealioning is or just doesn’t have a script for that.

He resorts to emojis. I could play with him longer, but it's not really worth any more of my time, so I block him here.

Bots are not always obviously fake profiles with 5 followers and no pictures. This guy COULD be real. His profile includes sportsy pictures. His profile even links to a youth sports organization that has a couple hundred followers. But reading through that profile, it seems to be mostly retweets of other organizations and a few funny sports videos. It lacks presence, personality, identity. On the surface, it all seems perfectly normal and real.

It makes you wonder, are the obvious bots out there just to be laughably obvious in comparison to profiles like this? 48 million Twitter profiles are likely fake, according to a USC 2017 study. I block A LOT.

Eve's Gift