Once upon a time (11-08-66) and place (dallas, tX) Byron Hawk was born (that's me).

My earliest memory, I must've been around three, is a scene I'll never forget. I was playing on the floor of my parents bedroom (with what I don't remember, toy cars maybe). My parents were watching television. They told me to look at the TV because something important was going on. While I didn't conceptually understand the full relevance and implications of what I saw on the screen, I understood that this was the first time in history we had gone to the moon. I knew it was up in the sky and far away. I remember seeing the rocket ship, the astronauts inside, the grey desolate landscape and surroundings. I guess it takes something of that magnitude to become your first memory.

"Early in my youth, when I was young, just a little kid, wantin' to have fun" (Dead Horse).

Fun early on was art and sports. In elementary school I loved to draw and color. I don't really remember why, it just seemed like the thing to do. As I got into junior high I became disillusioned with art. I didn't think I was very good. I had a fetish for realism and didn't feel like I could produce realistic work. GOD why didn't I get over that one!? Oh well. I had already decided I was good at sports and that diverted my attention away from art. I played all the basic stuff at one time or another: football, baseball, soccer, track, BMX racing, and basketball.

By my teenage years I discovered music. Jocks were jerks and musicians were much cooler. Not that this was always the case, but what do teenagers know? I got tired of ignorant coaches telling me what to do, and saw music as a way to have control over what I was doing. (What can I say? I was a control freak.) Prior to that I thought I didn't have an ounce of musical talent. I remember my sixth grade music class was total frustration. I just couldn't make that stupid plastic flute sound worth a crap. Later in life my mom told me she remembered talking to my music teacher. The teacher thought I understood music incredibly well for my age. Funny, I hadn't remembered that I made all As in the class. I understood all the theory, but all I remembered was that I couldn't make the sounds the way I thought they should sound. I think it was that realism fetish coming back to haunt me. I could only focus on "the negative."

When I decided to play guitar, I found out I actually had a knack for music. I think I picked up the guitar so easily because it was centered on structure and vision. It only took me six months before I got into my first band. Not that it was any good, but hey I was sixteen. By the time I had been playing a year I got in my first decent band and we began to play gigs. I was hooked from the get go.

By the time I started college I was full-on into music. In high school I was basically bored to death and sort of went to college because it was generally the thing to do (as far as my dad was concerned anyway). To my surprise college was at least interesting. I remember taking my first philosophy class and wondering why in the hell they couldn't teach us stuff like that in high school. In my senior english class they were still trying to teach people subject/verb/predicate for the ten billionth time. I probably could've gotten in honors classes, but let's face it, I was just too uninvested in school. But even though college was more interesting, I still didn't try as hard as I should have. I had terrible study habits from high school. I was too used to making As and Bs without studying. Besides, all I wanted to do was play music anyway. And that is basically what I did as an undergraduate.

It didn't take long for me to become disillusioned with the "real world" after graduation. I had always hated business. Mostly because I didn't like being told what to do by people who I thought had no right to do so—that authority thing again. After many years of experience in the music scene I found out the music "business" was one of the worst offenders. Had to get out of that. After working for two years I found myself going to book stores at lunch and buying books to read—mainly to hold boredom at bay. Ultimately, I decided I should go back to school, since at least it was interesting and creative, and actually try this time.

As an undergrad I got an interdisciplinary studies degree: philosophy, music, art history. I remember one of my philosophy professors making fun of interdisciplinary studies majors because they didn't know what they wanted to do. It annoyed me but it was partly true. It wasn't just that I didn't know, I simply had no interest in pinning myself down to one thing. I just wanted to study whatever was interesting. This carried over into grad school. I got into an interdisciplinary MA program and studied philosophy and anthropology. In retrospect I can see that I was looking for a cultural studies program all along. While I found philosophy interesting, I never really found it compelling. Analytical philosophy just wasn't going to do it for me. I was really interested in the scholarly study of pop culture because I just wanted to understand the world around me. It was in the MA program that I was intoduced to rhetoric. By the time I was done with the MA I knew I wanted to continue and "turn" toward rhetoric. I signed up for the PhD and got a TA spot.

A few years later I'm sitting here trying to revise this project while trying not to bore you to death. But that's OK. No one else is really going to be reading this. Ulmer's mystory was never intended as a readerly genre. It's meant to situate the writer's specificity with a field of study. It's meant for invention.