Señor Hezi

The kid

I'm the fourth of six. We grew up in the DMV, and my parents ran the house on three ideas: don't worry about money, respect other people's universe, and love the person in the mirror. Individuality was allowed. Nobody was trying to make six kids into one kid.

Our extended family was spread out, so my parents built a bigger one. Their friends became uncles and aunties. Their kids became our cousins. Nobody sat us down and explained that family could be something you build instead of something you're issued. It was just how the house worked.

Family was something you built, not only something you were issued.

What I didn't understand yet

As a kid I read some of it wrong. There were stretches where it felt like my mother couldn't give me the attention I wanted, and I took that personally. My father worked a lot, and to a kid that can just look like absence.

It took getting older to see it differently: raising six kids well takes an enormous amount of sacrifice, and a lot of that sacrifice is invisible from inside it. What looked like distance to me as a kid looked like responsibility once I was old enough to carry some of my own. My relationship with both of them changed once I understood what they'd actually been doing.

That's part of why the People's Archive on this site isn't going to be a wall of trophies. People are complicated, and you don't usually understand somebody's choices until you understand what they were carrying when they made them.

The athlete

Before any of the rest of this, there was football and track. I had a real idea of a future built around sport. Heart surgery ended that plan faster than I was ready for.

What sport left me with mattered more than the plan did: teamwork, knowing your role, competing without making it about ego, trusting people you can't fully control. Brokehella isn't supposed to run on one person doing everything. That idea comes from a locker room, not a boardroom.

New York, seventeen

My oldest sister took me from Maryland to New York as a graduation present and treated me like royalty for a week — restaurants, the city, and a night at Broadway to see The Lion King.

I'd thought art was for other people — a "weird" hobby, not a serious thing to care about. Watching that production, I saw music, architecture, choreography, lighting and costume working as one machine, and it clicked that none of it was frivolous. It was engineering with a soul in it.

Maybe being weird was the point.

The experimenter

After New York I just started trying things. Painting. Guitar. Building small devices and half-working robots. I wasn't chasing a title like "artist" — I was trying to figure out what I was actually supposed to be doing with my hands and my time.

My mother had her own creative instincts and her own ideas she didn't always get the room to chase, because she was raising six kids. Seeing that shaped what I wanted out of art. Not "look what I made," but something closer to: what could we build if everybody actually got a shot at their idea? That question is most of what Brokehella still is.

The builder

I studied computer science. My working life since has spanned cybersecurity, technology consulting and computer systems work — including projects I describe as touching NASA and technical infrastructure around political environments. I'm stating that the way it should be stated on a page like this: as my own account, not a credential with paperwork attached to it yet.

Being close to that kind of infrastructure got me thinking about where automation was actually headed — not as science fiction, but as something arriving on a schedule. That's part of why Brokehella treats technology as something that should disappear into the background, not something to perform.

The question underneath the others

I had the technical background. I had the analytical habits. And I still kept circling one question I couldn't fully answer: what actually makes people happy? Not as a mood — as something you could trace cause and effect through, the way I'd trace a system.

"Just follow your feelings" never satisfied me. I wanted to understand why people isolate, why people connect, why some rooms full of strangers feel like nothing and other rooms feel like everything.

EDC

My brother talked me into going. I didn't want to spend the money and I wasn't expecting much. I was wrong on both counts.

The music, the people, the visuals, the way strangers treated each other — it felt like getting handed back a version of myself I hadn't been allowed to be in a long time. I cried. Not because it was a good party. Because I'd found something I didn't know I'd been looking for.

It felt like getting handed back a kid I hadn't been allowed to be in a long time.

The realization

I went looking for that feeling again. More events, more nights, more crowds. It took a while to understand that the thing I was actually chasing wasn't the music. It was community — and a stage full of ten thousand people is not automatically a community. A later show, by Rufus Du Sol, made that distinction sharper: you can gather a crowd in one room and still leave without knowing a single name in it.

PLUR gave the feeling a name. But I didn't want it to stay a word on a shirt. I wanted to know how you'd actually build for it — what infrastructure peace, love, unity and respect would need if you took them as design requirements instead of a slogan.

The problem in Miami

I wanted more people to get what I'd gotten. Then I looked at what it actually cost to get it: inflated tickets, $12 water, ropes that separate people by how much they spent, fees stacked on fees. People were paying more every year to feel less connected.

So the questions turned practical. Why can't the people actually going decide what gets built? Why can't the economics be shown instead of hidden? Why is exclusion the default instead of something you'd have to choose on purpose?

Brokehella

That's where the name comes from. Broke isn't a complaint — it's a decision about what actually matters when you take the money out of the equation. A penny is worth almost nothing by itself. Enough of them, and you've built something. Copper oxidizes. It ages, and the age is the point, not a flaw to hide.

I'm not trying to sound like I have this figured out. Sports didn't work out the way I planned. Art wasn't obvious to me at first. A career in technology wasn't the final answer either. What was underneath all of it, every time, was people — and Brokehella is the attempt to build a place for that on purpose, instead of hoping it happens by accident the way it did for me at one show, one time.

Why don't we build it ourselves?

That's the whole thesis. Everything else on this site — the Pledge, the Standard, the Receipts, the Bench, Ditch Plans — is that question, worked out into something you can actually walk through.