* Somewhere, somehow a Hill Person will take this title as a misogynistic attack on Hillary. If only I kid....

Well, so this is Caucus99Percent. Clearly based on your basic drupal platform, with standard templates. And you know? There ain't nothing wrong with that.

So far, it looks like the people here are mostly either people who ran into this site independently, but if I were to hazard a guess a great many of us came here after Markos posted his ban hammer ultimatum about how March 15 was the end of the democratic primaries. I admit, when TomP said that there might be hope, I decided to wait a bit. But the satire of the Lord of the Rings as metaphor for that whole "we must coalesce" around the chosen one (though, as the primaries are NOT over, chosen by whom??) was the final blow.

Okay, I have to admit the bizarre DK5 format likely didn't help. But even with severe ADHD I can adapt to change if it's worth the effort. That I made that effort for that site kinda annoys me now, but hey... I really didn't see it coming.

So the the hell is Yohannon?

First, the name is one I picked up back in 1992 at a Pagan Festival at (sniff) Harbin Hot Springs. I was annoyed that every time someone yelled "HEY JOHN!!" about a dozen people would pop out of tents and look around, confused.

A lovely woman I was walking back from the tubs with (eh, terrible sentence... I promise the essays will be better edited) suggested I come up with a "temporary" craft name (basically a religious nickname) based on my "real" name, but from another language. I think I responded along the lines of "What, like Jacque or Juan??"

She thought a moment, and said "Well, in ancient aramaic your name would be Yohannon".

(Note that is not the correct spelling, as I would learn many years later -- but at the time that's what it sounded like, and I "wrote it down" mentally in the phonetic way I heard it).

I thought it sounded really cool. I was 29, already an established geek in silicon valley, so I decided I would try it out.

I was a big user of bulletin board systems at the time (message boards like this one you could only reach by dial-up, over insanely slow modems!). The following week I was logging into a pagan BBS for the first time, and when I came to the registration screen, it asked me for a nickname. Back then, nicknames were limited to 8 characters.

By sheer luck, my spelling put the name at exactly 8 characters.

By the time the Web started to become a Thing (for me it was '94... when you could read the web. ALL OF IT.) I had been using the name on a dozen boards, and (eventually) various usenet groups, IRC channels, and so on.

When I first began logging in (1986... OMG, I've been doing this for 30 years now??) I had fun being different "people" through my nicks, changing personalities as needed based on the name I chose. In many respects using Yohannon online and off was the beginning of what would become a merged personality -- my online and "real life" personas began to merge. Someone recently asked for my real name, and I noted my birth name as John... but my friends, family and tribe call me Yo.

So yeah, it's not exactly a secret. By the mid-nineties I was so "out" in terms of who I was, when people (thinking I was "hiding" behind a nick) would threaten me with exposure (basically a poor man's doxing :P) I could laugh openly and "out" myself... and then show them what a geek could do with message headers.

But that's just scratching the surface. Eventually, I will explain, but it is too much, I sum up (thank you, Inigo!):

I'm a >170 IQ genius who constantly doubts it, because I'm endlessly baffled by human nature. I tend to overly empathize, and if you need a devil's advocate to get a sense of what "the other side" thinks I can do a fairly scary good job of it. I've been writing as long as I could hold a pencil, and was reading at a collegiate level by the age of 8, doing so well I actually had had to teach myself what the rules of grammar and punctuation were (people assumed I wrote so well because I must already know them. Thank the gods for school house rock, and The Oatmeal has been a secret source of illumination for me). I'm bisexual, polyamorous, a father of a scary smart 10 year old (and somehow I'm NOT screwing it up like my own father did).

Growing up I was the victim of abuse socially, physically, psychologically and (thankfully no where near as horrible as some of the tales of terror I've heard) sexually. The medical and psychological profession had no idea what my problems were, so my developing years are even more of a mess than someone who went from middle class to dirt poor occasionally starving Long Island "white trash" would already have had to process.

I've endured the "Regan Revolution" from it's beginnings during the Reagan/Ford battles, to what I hope is the beginning of it's bitter end. I first logged onto the internet in 1978 thanks to a VERY progressive school that had terminals and a 110 baud acoustic coupler style modem (like in War Games, kids!), and I knew somehow that would be my future. As it turned out, that future led to me being a part of a wild ride that included working with Guy Kawasaki (ask an Apple fan), meeting both Steves (Jobs was as scary as people say he was, and Woz was amazingly nice and open... talk about opposites). I've met my heroes, and (to my surprise) they turned out to be incredibly cool people, for the most part. I did the internet startup thing, survived the dot.bomb, worked at NASA, became an Mac Genius, and now save very smart people from themselves in high end technical support.

Aside from being completely true, that summation doesn't touch all of the very real, wild, and completely bizarre and wonderful things that have happened to me. There are stories I tell that, when I'm telling them, sound like bullshit someone makes up to make themselves feel better about themselves. So I tend not to tell them.

But then I remember it all really happened, for good or bad. And, unlike Tolkien's assertion that the best stories are what you would have said or did at the time if you had thought of saying and doing them at the time, and not some time after, I don't need to embellish.

I look forward to sharing some of those here.