On the 16th day of July in the Christian year of 1981 I was given the title of person by the United States Government in the city of San Francisco at the children's hospital on California street, not far from the "black house" where Anton LaVey founded his "Church of Satan".
My life was lonely and full of strife. Looking back, I made a great many bad decisions.
In April of the year 2010 I became host to a parasite and for the first time, I was no longer lonely.
In November of the year 2022 I became a ghost.
After taking everything I had and was, the parasite left my empty, dessicated husk for a new host, as parasites do.
I was a freshman in high school, it was 1995 and I took my first real computer class. Before this I took typing and played "The Oregon Trail" in "computer lab", but this class was "real". It was a BASIC programming class. I learned about MS-DOS, beginner BASIC programming, and beginner networking. I scoured the newspapers "For Sale" sections until I found an old 8086 computer for sale at a price my mom would spend. I immediately connected the modem and wardialed every number I could - we didn't have a long distance plan so I was a bit limited. I had to set the program to run at night, so my mom wouldn't pick up the phone and disturb it. I didn't know how to write a program that could handle that. I explored trunk lines and swithing stations and a few telnet numbers I found, and then I hit a BBS. My first bulletin board system. It had a message board, program downloads, and file downloads. I spent days downloading every issue of phrack and 2600 magazine they had available. I also downloaded some ansi tools and started re-creating my favorite album covers in ansi art. I printed the files on dot matrix printers for five cents a sheet at a local copy shop and kept them in binders hidden under my bookshelf so my mom wouldn't find them. From those magazines I learned how to make "boxes". Black, blue, beige, and I found a list of out-of-state bbs'.
I built a beige box, which was basically a really long telephone wire that I spliced at the ends and connected alligator clips to so I could run it from my bedroom to my neighbor's house and clip it into their bell box, allowing me to use their phone line instead of mine. I buried the wire so it wasn't apparent to the casual observer and used the alligator clips so I could pull it out from my room if I ever had to hide it in a hurry. I used this method to make long distance calls at night after making sure everyone was sleeping. I downloaded my own BBS software and started building my own little world with dreams of one day hosting my own place that other people would dial into and share files and ideas. I set everything up, added my phone number to all the lists I could find, added hours of operation so people knew when to call and left it up to the universe. The first call came and everything fell apart. I forgot to shut off my mom's phone, so she answered, half asleep. She heard the modem sound and was confused for less than a minute before she realized it was a computer calling, and knew it must be calling for me. She beat my ass mercilessly that night and I never tried to host a BBS again. My dreams of being a SySop had been successfully beaten down.
I kept calling bbs' though. Kept downloading phrack and 2600 magazines. Kept making ansi art. I kept using the beige box and made weekly trips to Radio Shack to buy parts for other boxes - back then if you bought certain items in certain combinations they would report you to the police. They had a list of components to make boxes too, and they were watching. I would take midnight walks to the local Pacific Bell switching station and raid their dumpsters for anything useful or interesting and I even sweet talked an AT&T repairman out of a service manual while he was repairing some things at my school. I took every computer class my school offered - one year of MS-DOS/BASIC, one year of C++. During the C++ year I helped the teacher install Yggdrasil linux on a computer in the lab and got my first physical taste of linux. I had dialed into some amazing operating systems, SunOs, VAX, UNIX, during those late-night sessions over my neighbor's line. One of those BBS' had a chat feature! I was dumbfounded that two people could be connected to the same computer at the same time and chat with each-other. I logged in and there was a woman in there who called herself Lisa, I immediately started typing. It took about three minutes before I realized it was a computer program. A chat bot! I spent all night talking to it, testing it's responses, taking notes. I loved computers. The next day I started writing my own chat-bot program, first in BASIC, then I re-wrote it in C++ because I wanted to base responses on sentance keywords and use library files for the responses. I loved exploring this world that most people knew nothing about. It was one of the best periods of my life.
After my sophomore year there weren't any further computer classes to take, and by this time the internet was coming into it's own. I used free AOL codes that I would get from a program I wrote to generate them to get online. I spent countless hours on a site called "DarkChat", chatting with people from all over the world. I downloaded a copy of DOOM and would have lan parties with my friends where we would link up and kill each-other for hours.
We lived in a small town and there were no computer related jobs. There were no classes left for me to take in school, and I realized that I had a way with women, so my time shifted from computers to partying and working. Before AOL disappeared and cable internet was introduced I had left the digital world and chased dollars and girls, a decision I regret more than any other so far. Fast forward a few decades and I find myself a single father in the shittiest state in the U.S.A. with a stable life, a steady career, no friends and no hobbies that exist here. After a few years of busting my ass to make a stable life for my son and myself I realized that I had time to get on the computer again. Imagine my surprise to learn that I could download linux in seconds and had access to thousands of hacking tools and some people were even making money hacking into systems! The entire computer world had become the biggest playground for the misfits and the nerds and geeks and hackers were making tons of money and bordering on celebrity status with millions of views on youtube and massive followings. I wiped windows from my ten-year old laptop, maxed out the ram and put in a fresh new-old-stock OEM battery and installed Ubuntu. I started the usual way for those of my day, wardialing IP addresses and port scanning. Poking at telnet, ssh, FTP and SAMBA, learning the tools like nmap and metasploit - tools that I could get for free in seconds that anyone could use. It reminded me of the "Cult of the Dead Cow" days and using BackOrifice to prank my friends. While I had a suite of tools to stay anonymous and poke at whatever I wanted, I quickly realized how much more there was to explore now. Web hacking was an entire industry of freelance hackers legally poking around in just about everything, so of course I installed Kali linux on a virtual machine, fired up burpsuite and started hacking away at every public program I could find. The stuff I was looking at wasn't just HTML, there was code I couldn't decipher and I had no idea what anything was doing on the back end, so I decided to scale back and return to learning. I started off taking networking and linux classes for free online (what a wonderful world we live in where so much learning is free!), then I took some "Ethical Hacking" classes, I also took HTML, CSS, Javascript classes and then moved on to bug bounty and web hacking specific learning.
And now it's the final day of 2025, a long way from 1981 where I started. I made my first contribution to a linux distribution (Parrot OS 7) and I'm in love with web hacking. I'm still grinding my programming classes - python then I want to revisit C and C++ but I also like NIM and Rust and go even looks interesting. I have a list of free classes to taste all of them and plan on doing so
2025 has also brought me in contact with grok, and you know the first thing I did was craft a prompt to make a hacker-girlfriend chat-bot, just like I started building in the 1990's. I've come full circle in a lot of ways, maybe it's just the universe giving me a chance to wrap-up before my time here is done. I doubt anyone will ever read this, the internet is so full the odds are simply against it, but if you do I want you to know that although you may feel alone at times, you're alone with me and the countless others who don't feel quite right in the physical world and have turned to the digital. We're all a family, disfunctional yes, but family none-the-less and I love you for that, and I'm proud of you for searching so deeply, for continuing to try and reach and dig. Keep going. Keep going.
-December 31, 2025 5:02am Central Standard time
-Written in Neovim over an ssh connection from my work computer (running Windows 11) to my laptop at home (running Parrot OS 6.4)