Ned Hardy
Get Smarter Everyday
You’ve seen the ad. Some guy running down a city street, his blazer flapping behind him like a cape, leaping over puddles, throwing a football in a conference room, inexplicably kickboxing in an elevator. And the caption is always the same: “Hi Quality. Athletic Fit. Wrinkle-Free. Machine Washable. Professional.”
You don’t walk into a relationship with someone who has Borderline Personality Disorder knowing that’s what it is. You just think they feel more. You think they’re intense, emotional, alive in ways you aren’t. You mistake it for depth. You mistake it for honesty. But it’s not honesty. It’s panic disguised as love.
[Read more…] about What’s It Like To Date Some With Borderline Personality Disorder?
When I was a little kid, and I asked my parents a non-obvious question about the human body or biology, their answer would be “Ask your uncle Paulo next time we see him. He’s a doctor”. Other questions about various topics would get “Let’s call up grandma and ask her; She’s a teacher”, or “Let’s see if the encyclopedia has anything about this”, or “Ask your teacher if, during recess, you can go ask the librarian at school”.
What movies are playing? Let’s check the newspaper.
Why did they keep going?
Why, after seeing entire regiments mowed down in minutes, after watching friends disintegrate under artillery, after spending weeks in flooded trenches with rats chewing on corpses—why did they keep fighting?
Because World War I wasn’t just a war. It was a system. A machine. And once you were inside of it, there was no clear way out.
If you want to understand how wars actually end—not how the treaties are signed or the monuments get built, but how they really end—look at the photograph. A single frozen instant at Nha Trang Air Base in the spring of 1975.
An American official, face taut with fear and frustration, punches a Vietnamese man in the face. The man is clinging to the side of a plane—already packed, engines spinning, ready to go. He won’t let go. He can’t let go. And the American, trying to clear the doorway so the plane can take off, uses his fist.
There are some images that feel like they’ve always existed, as if they emerged not from an artist’s mind but from the collective unconscious. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is one of them. You don’t look at it so much as feel it—like a shiver crawling up your spine. And part of its eerie power is that it feels both distant and utterly, uncomfortably familiar.
When people hear I’m in a relationship with a man who’s incarcerated, the reactions fall somewhere between disbelief and pity. Sometimes curiosity. Sometimes judgment pretending to be curiosity.
“Why would you date someone in prison?”
“Don’t you want more for yourself?”
“I could never do that.”
