About

Apologies, this is going to be very long, very pointless, and very stream-of-consciousness. I don't expect anyone to actually read it, so I thought it might be a good place to perform some intensive introspection.

I have been asked to write an /about/ page. I am aware that I write for readers about whom I know nothing, but also that they too have probably never had the slightest opportunity to know anything about me.

In this preface they will most likely expect me to say something conventional, that I'm a husband and a father and an engineer, but first I would like to say something about myself and the experiences by which I arrived at my political and spiritual and physical position.

I was born in Martin, Kentucky, in 1980 to John and Linda (née Neeley) Hardwick.

My father was a Vietnam veteran. He had curly hair and a beard and kept tins of strong smelling mints. Sometimes the tins contained some kind of plant matter, which smelled interesting but I didn't appreciate at the time. He smoked occasionally, drank occasionally, and was a quiet, caring man who enjoyed a number of good, if perhaps not incredibly close, friendships. I never saw him out of control, or terribly angry.

My mother was a large woman, not tall except to me. She was boisterous and intelligent, funny. She did not differentiate between a person begging for change on a street and a policeman or doctor or the manager of a department store (which is about as far up the social ladder as we ever got). She was equally honest, generous, compassionate, and direct with each.

She was a recent convert to Judaism. She had a prayerbook and would pray before each journey for a safe return, even if we were just going to the store. When I asked about God, she explained that different people had different beliefs but nobody really knew. I remember her mentioning Buddhism and Hinduism and Judaism and Christianity. I don't remember the details, but I believe she gave a fair accounting of each.

I have a sister, technically a half-sister, who is older than me by eight and a third years, fathered by a different man. That man was black, so my sister is biracial. I did not find out that my sister was not my biological sister until I was... perhaps ten or eleven. She had known (she was six or so when my parents met), but I guess everyone agreed it was not worth mentioning.

My father never, as far as I remember, treated her as anything but his own child, and I don't believe anyone who knew him has ever or would ever suggest such a thing. It was not a problem for me either. This might have been when I first realized that biology was not a good model for how anyone should feel or behave.

We lived in a small town named Betsy Layne, outside of Prestonsburg. We were very, very poor. My dad was working as a surveyor, I'm not sure how consistently or how long. My mom was raising me and going to school to get a degree in education so she could teach.

When my mom graduated, we moved to New Mexico. My dad had apparently lived in or passed through Belen at some point and really liked it, and my mom was offered a job teaching English at the high school in Tohatchi, New Mexico. That's on the Navajo Reservation; we lived in a "teacherage," properties built to house teachers, since non-natives are not permitted to own property.

While we were out there, my family did a decent amount of traveling around, trying to find a longterm place to call home. My dad got a longterm teaching gig at Twin Lakes elementary, which was a little down the road. I was in the second grade at the time and going to Tohatchi elementary. Several things happened there that led to me being referred to as a "misfit."

One of these incidents was bringing a toy skeleton to school, which is taboo. I did get in trouble a few times, sometimes with neighbors, sometimes with the school. I was whipped a lot, by hand, by switch, by leather belt. I didn't understand the morality of the things I had done, really... little or no concept of causality and consequence and impacts.

The end result was that I transferred to Twin Lakes elementary, where my dad was teaching, in the middle of my second grade year. I took a placement test and the school decided that I would go to the third grade for reading. The older kids were cooler. Their art was better. Their speech was more fluid. They were just obviously a notch upward in the progression of age that mattered so much then.

I seemed to do better at that school. I was the only white kid at the school. I only remember a single instance of being bullied on racial lines, and that was interrupted by an older boy standing up for me... it was moving and heroic. A janitor taught me a few words of Navajo, which sadly I don't remember. He gave me a traditional Navajo shirt... with the ribbons.

My dad's job went away at the end of the year. I think the job was conditioned on him getting a teaching license, but he didn't get the license and so lost his job.

My dad, my sister, and I moved out to Springerville, Arizona, while my mom stayed behind in Tohatchi. My dad was substituting and looking for work, and my mom was trying to get a job in the local school system. Someone - a neighbor - said that she'd never get in as a non-Morman, which the community was, heavily. I don't know if the neighbor was Morman. I don't know if the district was actually prejudiced against Jews or in favor of Mormons. I don't recall being treated poorly by anyone there at any time.

My sister graduated from high school in Springerville, and went off to the University of Arizona. After this, she is a deeply loving and deeply loved but intermittent presence in my life.

We moved back to New Mexico, this time to Gallup, where my mother resumed teaching and my dad worked as a substitute, mostly. I lived on the north side of town, which was predominately Hispanic, close to the old Armory. I didn't really fit in, in the sense that I had much in common with the other kids my age, but they were friendly enough with me.

After a year or so, my parents bought a trailer about forty-five miles away, in Bluewater Lake. I didn't want to move and start over again with new friends, and my mom just ended up driving from Bluewater Lake to Gallup, then over to my bus stop to drop me off, then would pick me up at the old Armory after school. The high school was across town, but it wasn't a significant difference in time or driving.

My father died shortly after I turned 11, of a heart attack. I was in the fifth grade. My mother and I were devastated. We now lived alone together, forty-five minutes from any of my friends.

Without my father's income, we were very, very poor. My mother couldn't bear to live in the trailer without my father, and was afraid to live in such a remote area with only an eleven-year-old boy, so she decided to buy a house. She couldn't afford any in Gallup, but after some time, settled on a house in Milan... which was 60 miles away from my school.

I made a new friend, S. F. He was intensely intelligent, very practical, very sharp. As I learned when we shared a computing class together, he had good engineering skill already, by which I mean to say that he had good attention to detail and a great ability to decompose problems into smaller problems and solve them.

I was not like that. I was more interested in experimentation, with trial and error. I was starting to have issues with mathematics, with functioning in class. I would miss things, and then not have any idea how to do the homework, and not have anyone I could ask (and, frankly, not an overwhelming abundance of desire to figure it out myself).

To be continued...