Tag: Covid

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Culture Travel

Day 1791 and Hack, Hack, Cough Cough

One of the oddest post pandemic norms we’ve come to accept are the hacking coughing fits we pretend are normal parts of public transit.

By public transit I don’t just mean just subways or busses. I’m sure they suffer from this issue as well.

But rather our most expensive version of public transportation, air travel, is riddled with passengers clearly infected with one variant or another of a respiratory illness.

Now I get it. It’s not cheap to fly. A cold coming on won’t stop you from going as you paid a lot to travel. Everyone is on the road trying to make their way to family, friends and community. It is hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to get from here to there.

So as you stand in long boarding lines where people queue seemingly at random in groups 1 through infinity, you see various flavors of sneaks, cheats and idiots bottlenecking the mess.

And then you hear the coughing, hacking, sniffing, sneezing and other variants of ignoring the body’s strain.

I am prone to skin infections rather than respiratory ones or this trend would worry me more. I generally don’t mask unless I’m stuck in tight quarters. Sometimes I wish I had. Dealing with Chicago and the sweating, panting, running, struggling human masses, I feel I should have.

You still see depending( on the city, its demographics and its politics, a range of mask wearing. The elderly are often masked. I see frequent flyers wrapped up tight in the good N95. There is quite a lot of masking and I think it’s a good thing.

Maybe these maskers know something. They must be used to persistent cold and flu season and understand some folks who don’t care about their impact on others. Masking must work well enough to be worth the hassle for some.

I hate to bring up the old awful politics of the COVID era, but we should have learned a thing or two from Asian nations who politely mask themselves when ill to benefit their fellow citizens.

Wouldn’t that be an impressive thing to see? Americans caring about each other’s welfare. If I have a cold, it will be because I was too stupid to mask up. But if I get a cold I promise I’ll mask up to avoid passing it on.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1765 and Hollowed Out

I’m at home with a freaky red light mask that could absolutely pass for a horror movie prop. My husband is sealed up in a hyperbaric chamber with two atmospheres of pressure and oxygen pumped in through a mask.

It may be Halloween but neither of those activities are horror movie material even though you could easily imagine them featuring as props in a serial killer series or Final Destination.

And yet these are things we are doing for health and wellness. One man’s horror movie is another man’s idea of a good night off and you can really tell we are tired childless adults that this is our idea of winding down on a Friday night.

The childless part wasn’t entirely a choice but we picked lives of professional intensity a long time ago so Friday night spent in self care is a sign that we’ve earned some respite.

Millenial success stories involve long hours. Millennials being all hallowed out on All Hallows’ Eve shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, given the current state of American politics.

I’ve never liked Halloween much as if I want to dress up I don’t need social permission and I really don’t care for parties or socializing. I got all partied out in my twenties when I had to do a ton of it for professional reasons. I know it sounds glamorous but nightlife is work.

I had a tequila client and I had a hotel with the hottest nightclub in the New York City. I somehow managed to have both Patron and Le Bain as a client in my advertising agency era, and while loved both clients it did mean eventually all I can associate with nightlife is work. When I had a night off I stayed at home and read science fiction with a face mask.

Which means some things never change. There is no suburban holiday with children to dress up and take out. And I barely have recollections of doing any of that as a child. It’s no surprise this holiday has no hold on me

I don’t know why I have no fond memories of it but I don’t. I have almost no memories of Halloween. The precious few years in which we lived in suburbs, where I had both parents and I was young enough to go trick or treating barely register. And I don’t feel sad about it

I am much sadder about the kind of world we fought to succeed in as adults. I am happy to be home and with the horror movie treatments to heal the ravages of the real world that have been enacted on both of our bodies.

The long hours over decades, the multiple Covid infections my husband suffered, my own autoimmune issues and the realities of aging are not horrors but they are real. And I acutely am aware that Halloween is pretend.

And nobody should have to pretend that they aren’t hollowed out when they are. That is a fairy tale for children and for the people who still are. Neither category include me. It’s perfectly fine to be tired on a Friday.

If I’m going to put on a mask tonight it damn well better have health benefits. Here is to red light therapy and collagen masks. May they heal what ails you on all hollows eve. You can face the dead and your demons tomorrow.

Categories
Chronicle Travel

Day 1743 and Noticing Anarcho-Tyranny Through Habits

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.

Maybe this is why projects like the Network State appealed to me. I’ve worked on policy like the Right to Compute which has taken on more and more meaning as I go through my life.

I can’t believe I was able to pass a bill into law before I could get the state department to do its job. And government workers wonder why some of us wouldn’t mind if they got fired.

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.

This is not something I can guarantee when working with the United States and our State Department. It’s a hard thing to look at straight on as it traps me and my family into a kind of anarcho-tyranny where because we follow the law to the letter we are discriminated against while others brazenly broke laws.

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.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1732 and It’s Getting Hot In Here So Take Off All Your Clothes

You might want bring towel though, as our handcrafted Finnish sauna will need some use before the cedar is completely smooth. Yes, that’s right, the MilFred family Yellow Barn now has a sauna. And she is a beauty. Just check out the view we picked for her.

Alex and the wonderful family who built the cedar sauna structure placed her under the back awning of the big yellow barn today. Wiring and electronics are underway as I write.

We’ve been slowly but surely turning our barn into our ideal wellness center both for our own use and eventually for the wider community as well. We are privileged with skills, capital and loads of very expensive personal experience with chronic illnesses.

So naturally as geriatric millennials it is always our instincts to turn our pain into something useful and also if we are lucky pay back the expenditures and turn a profit. Which we can then reinvest. It’s the circle of life for a generation who found the circle of life to be a tad more inflationary than expected.

The man of action putting the finishing touches on the electronics. We don’t have anything in our home systems connected to the cloud, so he built his own fully local controller with
ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, RGBW LED controls
UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit. You can snag the code on GitHub

In true MilFred fashion, we are building and testing everything all on ourselves. An n of 1 is good, an n of 2 is better, and if you’d like to test it out hit us up while it is a work in progress. Build in public and beta test with your friends.

Tucked under the awning of the barn so one can easily pop in from gym, HBOT or cold plunge to warm cedar comfort and mountain views

We’d like to ultimately build a space for healing, relaxation and training for those who prefer time tested modalities like heat, cold, oxygen and pressure.

Friends and family can come and test out our now very impressive range of equipment as we build this all out.

We have one of the few hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers available outside of hospital use in the region. You can pressurize to 2 atmospheres and set a range of parameters for a range of treatments. I use it for my inflammatory condition while Alex is treating the remains of long covid. You’d be shocked what pressure and oxygen can do.

Our hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber

If you want a work out get in some squat reps in our power cage, take a swing at the punching bag or lengthen your spine on our Pilates reformer. You can even climb around on the rock wall built into the the barn ceiling (not even kidding that is the work of the previous family).

If you are looking for a spa day you can have a sweat in the sauna, do red light therapy on your face, chill out on a PEMF mat, and hopefully soon take a dip in a cold plunge. Though if you are ambitious you can sprint across the front pasture and jump in our pond but I’ll warn you that the ducks might not love it.

The pond is fed by a creek that comes from the canyon above our house

The point being that we are building by hand and through personal experience something that improves our lives and others and that’s a pretty hot thing to do. Don’t worry, we will provide towels and robes if you do indeed take off all your clothes. Just come on over and try it out.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1727 and A Happy Fluke or Compounding Effects

Maybe it was all of the crying, rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth I’ve been doing as I stare grief in the face.

Maybe it was taking a Fluconazole after my doctor notice some tearing “downstairs” at my annual physical when he was checking out my surgical scar from July.

Maybe it’s that I am on my seventh session of hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and the results starting to compound. Protocols say it takes about ten to feel a difference and my full protocol will be sixty so I’ve got a ways to go.

Maybe it’s just the absolutely gorgeous fall weather filtering in the perfect amount of light for that ideal temperate middle ground of low heat and humidity that makes being outside a joy.

Maybe it’s just a fluke. But today I feel almost human again.

I felt joy in being the adult responsible for running the household today. I managed loads of laundry, housekeeping, a proper grooming session of my own body, a grocery run into town, a decent workout, and of course, time in the hyperbaric chamber.

My husband is still struggling mightily with whatever combination of infections, stress, and post-viral damage is ripping up his immune response. He is usually the one caring for me. But today I was able to care for us both.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical Preparedness

Day 1726 and Grief is for the Living

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.

My own father passed just two weeks ago. I am grieving his loss, as well as how the loss is being handled by others. But my grief is mine and he is gone.

I am not the one who gets to choose how to memorialize him. Life goes on and we make precious few decisions about how and when it ends.

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.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1708 and Calendaring Pareto Optimal Care on a Worsening Trajectory of Biometrics

I like to manage my days with buffers around my routines and obligations. I find tight schedules to be tiring and unhelpful as I manage my energy, pain, and workload. A packed calendar raises my cortisol.

I believe I am easily stressed by shouldering too much, but I also fear I am on a downward health trajectory which will require more time, energy and effort. I am beginning to contemplate reworking my style of effort management as conditions on the ground change. Can I schedule my way out of a spiral down? What is my Pareto optimal plan here?

My 2025 has been significantly worse than my 2024 and an almost entirely different realm of issues than I faced prior to that. As I compare, 2022 and 2023 were entirely different worlds than my 2025. I thought I was pretty sick then but improving my inflammatory markers has nuked my HRV & stamina.

I’m back to the bleak bottom quartile biometrics I had when I was first diagnosed with my complex chronic inflammatory diseases case.

I fear I never recovered from my two Covid cases including the one which eventually turned into a brutal pneumonia.

The stress of a permanently lowered baseline of biometrics makes me feel despair even as I have new tools at my disposal to mitigate them.

Will my whole life be dedicated to the care and feeding of my broken body? Is that something I can live for instead of simply living with?

I just don’t know how much effort will be put into managing this new baseline and what the effort to reward ratio looks.

Is there a Pareto principle I can apply to permanent disability which I can, and maybe even should, emotionally accept? Or do I soldier on hoping that my middle aged body may repair itself if I do absolutely everything right? And what am I doing all of that for?

It just seems as if no matter the time management, advanced medical care, constant research and daily effort I only get worse. I’ve been under a scalpel three times this year.

Each time I think I have found a new drug or treatment modality I am quickly slapped with second order side effects. And then those side effects have new side effects as I treat them.

It’s the pimp my ride recursion of biohacking, but instead of liking a thing and adding it to my car, I’m adding more and more mitigation measures to manage the results of the biohacking.

Pimp my biohacking

Now I have a new load of emotional stress and grief weighing on me as father died this weekend. I don’t even know what that process will look like, especially given the challenging modern family situation I have.

Any positive aspects of my year (passing the right to compute bill into law, progress in my startup portfolio) seems pale in contrast to emergency surgery, slow burdensome recovery and the arrival of mortality. I’m only at the halfway point of life (and a little bit past that for the year) and I feel done in completely.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1700 and The Passage Become Who You Are

I have been writing every single day for seventeen hundred days. 1700 days is approximately 4.66 years or 4 years and 7ish months. Not bad right?

This is quite a bit longer than I anticipated when I first began writing daily with the relatively modest ambition to write once a day for a month.

I had done daily journaling in private for ten days and was interested in seeing if I could write in public every day for some period.

I wanted to create to synthesize what I consumed across the media landscape as I tried to make sense of a world deep in the throes of Covid.

This experiment was my second sustained blogging project as I had kept a WordPress blog in the glory years of 2005-2008 or so. Other social media was easier but I’d always liked the format of public long form writing.

I had a secret silent ambition to take the daily habit to one year. It seemed doable. I fantasized about making it to 1000 days, even from the start, but that seemed bigger and more likely to fail. But if Scheherazade could make it to One Thousand and One Nights maybe I could as well?

I set out with realistic expectations but big ambitions. And now here on a random August Wednesday I am deep into the depths of a daily habit that shows no sign of stopping.

I nurtured my early ambition by saying I’d take it one day at a time, while never pressuring myself into achieving it. A journey of a thousand miles (or in my case days) starts with a single step.

I don’t care for pressure. I never have. I believe those who are truly ambitious about themselves set their own standards. You make your own life.

I will do things in my own time and at my own pace. I have never been a quitter so it’s never been a problem that I go at my own pace. Life is about results not effort.

My tenacity remains a force in my life because I am comfortable tending to my will daily. We only make progress by nurturing the seed of a thing.

Not every day is a good day. We don’t always win. I have many days where I lose. But as Allen Iverson said “it’s practice” and you never miss practice. And practice adds up. I’ve done amazing things in the last almost half decade.

I hope that this aspect of my character is as clear to others as it is to me. If I sent out on a journey I will do what I can to make it. If I fail (and I might) it is because I couldn’t.

Maybe the timing isn’t always right or my mind or body isn’t right or the market isn’t right or I am not right. Full stop. But I’ll never let myself fail because I didn’t make an honest effort. And you make the effort every single day.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1666 and Disability Rolls

It’s a shame that National Public Radio is going out in a Trump fire as used to regularly produce reporting that I find informative. Look at this old piece of reporting. We have seen a steady rise of disability rolls.

Thanks to their work I was made aware of the disability industrial complex and I was introduced its scope and cost. Even 2013 National Review was singing its praises. And it is staggering that disability has become the fall off program for those who only have unskilled labor to offer. Disability replaced welfare. And it’s not gotten any better.

I think about how easily I could have ended up on disability myself given my health issues if I didn’t work an information economy type of job you can do sitting day.

But I also know there are ranges of accommodations for most of the work I have now. Things could change and that work might be less valuable. I’m sure many Americans are considering this as automation and artificial intelligence threaten knowledge work.

I was somewhat aware of the relationship to welfare burdens being shifted from the federal government to states during the Clinton era for the rise of disability as it is still paid at the federal levels.

Naturally it meant a growth in disability as Washington D.C. has more money than say Washington state. But to realize just how much money disability rolls have grown and how tightly related they are is salient in our current financial and budget situation.

Comparison of lowered welfare rolls to the rise of disability claims. Source: Social Security Administration Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And there are whole corporations that exist to make that transition seamless.

We are burdened by the unfit to work as manual labor has nowhere else to go but we will find other disabilities and other ways to get around labor if the contribution to rears ratios don’t work out in someone’s favor. After Covid this calculus got a lot worse.

Especially if health insurance continues to skyrocket. Better a live of poverty and healthcare than a live of poverty and no healthcare. But who knows if we choose to tackle this problem and when. If it’s all about getting what you can and we are in the exit scam era of America I am afraid to learn about the privileges of working while disabled.

Categories
Finance Politics Preparedness

Day 1583 and The Last Tariff Free Shopping Spree

I remember the weeks before Covid-19 lockdowns hit vividly. My father went on international cruise, my husband was traveling domestically right up to the last week, and I got yelled at on the internet for discussing buying masks, toilet paper, and disinfectant.

My father got stuck in a Latin American port as borders closed, Alex made it back with mere days to spare before New York locked down and I had a well stocked pantry & dry goods cabinet. I was a prepper long before it became the default of normie Americans after Hurricane Sandy.

So naturally I’m trying to get ahead of the impacts of the tariff war as the last container loads of goods ordered before “Liberation Day” are sold through by American retailers.

Items Most Likely to Experience Shortages if the Drop in Container Cargo from China Persists
If the current sharp decline in container cargo from China to the United States continues, Americans are likely to see shortages-and significant price increases-across several key product categories. This is due to a combination of record-high tariffs (up to 145%) and a dramatic reduction in shipping volumes, with estimates suggesting a 60% to 80% drop in imports from China

Via Perplexity

Clothing basics, footwear, and cosmetics are at at the top of the list of potential shortage areas so I stocked up on underwear, socks, Aquaphor and hit “order” on the two pairs of athletic shoes I’ve had languishing my cart for months.

Amazon must be having a great couple of weeks.

I also decided to treat myself to a few Landmark classics including Julius Caesar and Alexander’s Campaigns. If the empire is falling I may as well revisit some of my schooling.

Plus I just returned from a run through Alexander’s empire so perhaps this is a moment to ground myself on the rise and fall of empires. I never did much care for Rome though but I didn’t expect to be born in a late republic.

I don’t know how this particular supply shock will play out and I feel lucky to be able to spend on thing’s frivolous and essential. Dry feet and military history are as good as any a thing to have on hand. I imagine we will have more serious inventory to do but it’s better to take the first steps.