It has not been an easy year for me or my family. The struggle to find a path to a sustainable place of health feels harder than ever.
I am living in some type of thermodynamic hell. Everything I try comes with equally forceful reactions and I wish I could say more of them were positive.
Even when results look positive they have high costs that make me reconsider if I should have done it at all. Switching my immune suppression drug put my inflammatory markers in the best place we’ve seen them in years.
Alas it is so effective that I’ve had four major skin infections in 2025 of which four required going under the knife. And the fourth was caused by a small incision that was considered so safe and routine we almost didn’t consider antibiotics at all.
I just so badly want something to work in a way that doesn’t come with staggeringly high costs. Normally I’d link around to all the relevant posts but I just need a break so I’ll leave it as an exercise.
But can you imagine anything more depressing than having an infection on your ass? I sure can’t. I am stuck trying to keep pressure off of it while working on all the various projects of life and I am a slow healer.
I don’t even get to see if the HBOT is doing anything for my main concerns, as if it is we are only going to see it when I clear this crazy infection.
I suppose the good news is that one of the best treatments for high risk wound care is actually hyperbaric oxygen therapy so the positive and the negative are at least balanced.
They say you shouldn’t make any significant changes after a death in your family. Grieving is a process and allowing oneself to feel the range of emotions in loss is important.
You might not feel your grief if you jump into something new. Making a change could be hiding your grief from yourself. And so I am trying to sit with my grief.
I wondered about which parts of my history and my identity gave me my life. If I wanted to make changes in my future, or to broaden my horizons, what would it look like?
Somehow I am happy. I feel more love for myself as I see the ways I tried to love my father, and how he tried to love me as his child.
Being who we are, means seeing the child in ourselves who wanted to be loved for who they were, while learning as an adult that acceptance is up to us, not the generation who birthed us. The liberation of birth anew.
I hope the many experiments I’ve run with my biohacking over the last two months are helping me stay in my body during this process. I am on my 25th hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy treatment today. Which is fortunate as I am healing yet another skin issue as I try to find ways to have the strength to be myself in my very challenging body.
And so I wonder, am I the same without my father as I was with him? I am always searching for ways to become better, stronger, more informed, more capable, more successful and ultimately I fear those are all synonymous with finding ways to be more lovable to him? I couldn’t always tell.
I’ve found myself wishing to indulge a past professional calling with a side project. I’ve been writing a beauty shopping column where I go deep on my autistic special interest in skincare and the business of appearances. It’s been making me happy.
And so I ask does this count as a change? Am I jumping into something new, even if it is small, too soon?
All I know is that it feels right and like a joyful offering, even if there are parts of me that hurt. Perhaps there is a good kind of change to be had in endings with new beginnings. A personal passion once put aside, reemerges to serve others.
I think that is something my father would have liked to see me do. I have pursued so many of the things I know he wanted for me in this life. I do have a future full of technical change and a portfolio focused on the future of computing.
And yet here I am feeling freed to show that some aspect of who I am as a woman does want to serve others. If it is in the cause of helping be comfortably in your own skin that seems rather a positive thing to become after this life change.
I’m coming up on the 5-year mark of writing every single day. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long, if I’m honest with myself. When you commit to doing a basic task as a daily habit, you don’t expect it to change your life.
I’m not actually sure that writing every day has changed my life, though I think I’ve gotten better at the process of writing and the habit of finding space to think, organize, and get my thoughts together. That is a positive change.
When I first started, there were a number of goals I had in my life that seemed a lot more achievable than half a decade of writing.
Once you’ve achieved such consistency, you notice how little gets done in other areas when you regularly do things for yourself. One of my goals that I’ve had almost as long as this blog was a visa for family friends so they could travel freely to America to see me just as I see them. Pandemics and problematic presidents sure slowed that down and now I despair it will ever happy.
I honestly had no idea that the United States was so broken in its state capacity that granting a travel visas would consume more time than blogging and I’d achieve much less working to obtain a visa for years as its functionally impossible to get a legal visa.
Here I am with all of this writing (fantastic training date for an artificial intelligence) and yet I’d still have failed at obtaining a travel visa for family friends. We have so much power and yet not quite enough to get around America’s failures.
I know I can rely on my own skills, my capacity to use the hardware and software at my disposal, and that the currencies of the web will happily engage with me in trustless and transparent manners.
High trust people who display their commitment daily are worn down by this bitterly painful reality that what we put in doesn’t guarantee us all that much when the state is concerned. We move fast and keep at it. The American state department moves slow and failed at every step of the way.
Clearly this is not optimal and we should find our own Jungian stories to free us to reach our own future without the literal end of our fathers. But if one has to suffer this loss then I’ll make the best of it.
I am giving myself till the end of the day to feel the anger, pain and frustration that has come to define the grieving process I am in. I lost my father quite recently and it has been an awful experience.
After the memorial ends at 5pm today I intend to let go of what I can even though I know I don’t have full control over it. I had little to do with it at all.
I won’t lie about how much this experience has hurt. I was able to handle a few emotional body blows as I know my father and I have forgiven him a thousand times over for any pain and trauma as it got me here.
That my father struggled to forgive himself seemed a given to me and I intended to extend whatever grace was necessary to those who carried him through his final years.
In grief, whatever one has to do to the villains you have built in your head is alright by me. It hurt but I don’t think I am hurting as much as someone who would do this. I am doing what I can to not become inflamed by it. These choices are what was deemed necessary.
I do however think we are unprepared for the many private painful emotional moments that will come with the fourth turning as baby boomers pass and their children across modern families grapple with what was broken and its costs.
I consider myself to be incredibly lucky in this regard as I knew it was coming. I am less sure we are prepared as a civilization for the pain that will arrive as more change and death arrives.
It’s been a weird week. I’ve kept a slight distance to the logistic of it for sanity, but my father’s memorial is being held tomorrow. He passed over the last long weekend of summer. I found out by voice mail.
It is a complex family dynamic and I am not (insofar as I can tell) invited to event. I know it sounds odd to be unsure, but given how the information has flowed, who has been prioritized, and the reactions to condolence communication I’ve done my best to keep a respectful distance. My grief isn’t the most important grief.
Neither of my father’s children nor his previous wives will be in attendance. It’s not necessarily our choice, or even our place, to have an opinion as he had a third family who welcomed and loved him and I am grateful for their generosity. He had no further biological children but he had another family.
We’ve spent the last few weeks doing a comical amount of legwork with the help of kinds souls, friends and my mother to acquire the ideal floral arrangement and make sure it arrives alive and healthy.
Two Venus fly traps carefully placed in a cardboard box for travel from Colorado Springs to Boulder
In an age where Miss Manners would find few remaining social mores, a respectful but symbolic floral display seemed the most likely to be acceptable and held the most meaning for me and the father I remembered.
He loved Gary Larson, and in the early nineties convinced him, through a bouquet of carnivorous plants to participate in calendar application for Macintosh. Gary decided the Internet wasn’t for him later but that early desktop computer program and its genesis remains a favored family story. A creative and bizarre tale of making something happen.
The Far Side Computer Calendae
Alas it’s not all charming anecdotes. Yesterday a large box arrived with a return address in Big Fork Montana. That is where my father had retired so we knew it was likely from his estate. Part of our hopes in moving here was to be closer to family.
Inside was a mess of the broken glass, old picture frames and hundreds of photograph of a life that my mother, my half brother and my father lived quite happily for a time.
Hiking, fishing, skiing, my first golf lessons, and horse back riding photos filled out the details of a childhood between spectacular eighties family portraits.
Little evidence of the hard years of poverty in tiny apartments was included. It was entirely the glory years of boom times. They were happy memories.
There were also glamorous soft core pictures of my mother in lingerie or swimwear which my father had apparently taken himself. I was initially quite shocked.
Nigh professional grade photos of my mother posed like a pinup are not exactly what one expects in an estate dump of memories. Especially as she is very much alive and well.
My mother’s has given me permission to discuss the images, though she was a bit shocked to learn they still existed.
She swore she had them destroyed but I’m glad they were not as I enjoyed seeing her beauty and vitality. Everyone deserves to remember the years where they were at their physical peak.
My father was a man of many talents and interests and he loved to learn new skills on the latest gadgets. I just didn’t expect to learn he was that sort of artist.
I hope the flowers and our card will be accepted tomorrow. I’ve been reeling slightly from the photo dump and its unheralded arrival. It felt like one last piece of unkindness when magnanimity would have been simpler.
I don’t know if anyone will understand the story behind the flower, so we have made arrangements for the plant’s well being if they are not. It is an imposition to send a living thing and it was my hope to do as little imposing as possible that might cause distress.
My grief is my own. A whole life was in that box and I have no idea if anyone will remember or recall any of it as anyone who was there isn’t invited. But I remember and I will treasure it. He’s on the far side now and free of petty concerns. I love him and I always will.
I don’t know if high schools still teach Flannery O’Connor. I’m not entirely clear if we even teach American literature to college students anymore if I’m honest.
Reading literature for enjoyment seems to have been reduced to mostly pornography, but I suppose that’s what they said about D. H. Lawrence a hundred years ago so maybe I shouldn’t judge.
Why else would we read fiction if not for the vitality? And what goes from fiction to literature is a reflection of its time.
What it means to be alive, and experiencing the consequences of one’s actions, can feel pornographic if the subject is genuinely exposed. I’m not so sure the explicit and the erotic are any worse a subject than the base and the broken.
That is my awkward segue into the stroke of good luck which introduced me to French existentialism and Southern Gothic literature in the same year as a teenager.
Reading Albert Camus and Flannery O’Connor roughly contemporaneously stood me in relatively good stead throughout the years as to assessing how little we deserve grace in this truly absurd world. Great horrors in a Christian world are hard tests of faith.
Human frailty is my point, and we justify a lot under that sad reality, even as it’s simply true we are all committing a litany of sin by existing.
Literature explores the quiet horrors that we are damaged people in a broken world. That is why we read literature in the first place.
If not for our search for our humanity, we may as well be consuming information via a machine synopsis of a bloated airport book. Thank goodness information pornography is rapidly becoming ever more déclassé than reading romantasy. Malcolm Gladwell may struggle with that one.
I think it’s fine to explore the vitality of human choice and our pragmatic darkness in the safety of fiction. Reality is often much darker. We could all stand to live our lives a little more, even if we are afraid of the shadows our actions cast.
And as part of that effort the first thing I’d drop is spending time on reading book length business explainers. Replace it with short fiction and the life you save may be your own.
There are many benefits to a networked world but there are many destabilizing aspects to opening up the world to all of us. I’ve been slogging through Vladislav Zubok “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” which refutes the widely held belief that the collapse was inevitable.
He argues that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, aimed at modernizing and democratizing the Soviet Union destabilized the country.
Now as an American I might see that in a somewhat positive light but imagine America being broken up and you can see why it’s worth studying. It is worth understanding that with scale and access, a networked system has risks that we have not previously encountered in a political or economic system.
The last time we experienced a modern collapse at large scale, we had a fraction of the networked infrastructure that we do now.
Artificial intelligence becoming the current bugaboo belies just how little the general public really understands the nuts and bolts of our information rich world.
The complexity of how it operates obfuscates how easy it is to tilt the cart and upset fragile hierarchies and understandings.
I wish I could persuade more people to this viewpoint. The strange bedfellows of professional misunderstanders are constantly infighting with murky agendas of state and corporate preferences.
We are all useful idiots to someone. An alliance between orthodox Christians and a rationalist sex cult is the sort of “only in America” marriage of convenience that fights for very particular reasons.
The technocrats having lost the battle with modern complexity (and along with it the Mandate of Heaven) are in the process of playing whackamole with uprisings of paranoia that is a pox across every type of community. And that sucks as sometimes the paranoids are actually right. We just are never quite sure when.
My husband and I are both sick. It’s the kind of “not quite respiratory, not quite sinus, not quite right” viral infection that always seems to take twice as long to clear as you expect.
Aging and stress is part of it but so is the damage we both have from covid-19 infections that turned into pneumonia. We’ve never been the same.
The good/bad news is that everyone we know seems to have the same basic set of physical degradations that we do. Varying levels of impact are met with varying levels of healthcare and wellness routines. From peptides to hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy, no one is taking this shit sitting down.
I was already chronically ill before the world changed forever. It’s now common to have a flavor of autoimmune inflammatory chaos. I feel both less alone but much more frustrated at the crisis in American healthcare.
My medical billing codes as ankylosing spondylitis (arthritis in my spine) and psoriatic arthritis (psoriasis but it’s inside your body and it hurts!) but the tldr is constant pain, occasionally losing the capacity to walk, and the persistent exhaustion of chronic inflammation.
As we both cancel travel plans (for a charity event we’ve supported for years) and struggle to manage food and medication, I am reminded of the grief we are all carrying around.
As the world goes on with the “before times” as l memory for older generations, and the idea of any kind of positive “before” is unimaginable to the young, the grief comes and goes. The elders we stopped civilization to keep alive are dead or dying and our youth are distraught.
I remember being so angry and afraid for him when he left for cruise as lockdowns went into effect. I begged him to cancel the trip. I was afraid he would get sick or die.
He didn’t share those fears. He got stuck on the boat for an extra week or two, as no port would let them dock. He had the time of his life. I was locked in an apartment in Manhattan.
I don’t think he ever got Covid. For which I am grateful. I know far too many who did. I know many angry Zoomers grieving lost high school and college years.
Housing went up by 50% as we printed to survive the crisis. Strange times for us all and now we face the Great Ravine where the choices we made catch up to us.
My investment thesis of an increasingly chaotic world was novel when I first began and now it’s the same pitch every Tom, Dick and Harry espouses. What was once unclear is now the consensus. I am I am alive to see it and find no satisfaction in being right. The grief is all around us. Grief is for the living.
I have not watched Jimmy Kimmel in his current incarnation as broadcast late night variety show host. But I did watch some episodes of the Man Show so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the man’s career.
That one unremarkable but sort of likable dude can jump from hosting segments about girls on trampolines to a national broadcast host with political opinions is somewhat impressive and also bleak.
If I had to give mono-causal explainer as why millennial women seem split into two distinct political camps when it comes to modern American politics, absolutely over itor absolutely irate, I think the continued existence of Jimmy Kimmel’s career would be as fine an explanation as any other.
This guy gets promoted over and over for just being the worst and what do we get? We get scolded no matter what we do. Of course some women are screaming banshees and the rest are like mmm shrug. Who has freedom and who has responsibility has always been a polite fiction.
Being subjected to years of increasingly sexualized entertainment featuring bouncing boobies, mentally unstable underage pop stars and the men who were paid to ogle them professionally probably had some downstream influence on our current political climate and the shitty state of entertainment.
The backlash to the backlash to the backlash as it were has happened and we just don’t care anymore. I’ll fight for your right to be perverted but I won’t lie to you and say it hasn’t negatively affected me in anyway.
I’ve always been acutely aware of where popular culture derived a women’s value. Jimmy Kimmel had a career and Britney Spears had a breakdown. And now you want me to fight to keep this twerp on the air because of our proud democracy and its culture of promoting speech and expression? Fuck off.
I genuinely believe girls on trampolines has inherent entertainment and artistic value. Almost everyone has an appreciation for the female form.
I’m unclear if warmed over political takes on broadcast television delivered by a middling broadcaster at midnight is more or less valuable an art form or as political expression. Maybe the FCC needs an overhaul for this new era or maybe we get pirates wires.
I’m neither a satirist nor comedian. I watched the Man Show because I had a boyfriend in a fraternity but I am not watching Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue now and neither are you.
And that’s all that matters to the business of entertainment. Slapping speech and politics on it is a reach that now middle aged millennials can’t manage. Maybe if we spent more time on trampolines.
Elite competition skirmishes over who controls the airwaves of broadcast television are barely interesting except to the absolutely irate. And these days we are all too busy to remain irate unless we’ve got luxury signaling to do. Which I don’t need to do because no one is coming for my blog.
I don’t see how anyone can turn a microwaved soggy ready meal remake of the people versus Larry Flynt out of Jimmy Kimmel.
Who wants to fight for that? Hustler had some inherent entertainment value and Larry Flynt had “readers.” It was speech and it wasn’t on public airwaves with a boss in Washington DC. Maybe you didn’t like what he did but were you prepared to fight for it? Lots of people were. Who wants to fight for Kimmel?
Oliver Stone has always been kind of a shitlib
Jimmy Kimmel was never anything more than the guy who read cue cards between the dopamine hits of girls on trampolines. Stuffing your politics into his pie hole doesn’t really change that.
Bob Iger knows it. I know it. The guy had dwindling ratings, an expensive contract and not nearly enough common sense to keep his mouth shut if one of his staffers was out of touch. If I were in charge of Disney that would be my excuse and I’d dump that Jimmy for literally anything else. I bet a swearing parrot would test better. Hell I know it would.
That’s why it’s so damned exhausting to care about the free speech that literally nobody asked to be said. Does anyone who genuinely cares about free speech feel like they can rally the cause to a bobble head spouting opinions that aren’t even his own? Doubtful. I’d sooner fight for Illinois Nazis. Shame about the ACLU innit?
Americans would rally for boobs though. If someone wanted to get the FCC to allow the return of the Man Show and place it on ABC after dark maybe then we’d have a worthy sequel to Larry Flynt.
But nobody is going to bat for Jimmy Kimmel unless it’s backed up with boobies. And there isn’t a perky tit in sight. No one is going to make a political meal out of this. I doubt even the Swanson’s heir could heat this frozen turd.
