Tag: Pain

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1852 and The Nothing

I did not have a good weekend. I feel the emotions of humanity’s current transitional phase too keenly. There are the wondrous upswings of hope and deep darkness that consumes anyone who bears witness.

I feel compelled to bear witness. Even though I know it harms me. Even when I know I am staring into a war, purpose designed to push me into or out of the myriad conflicting agendas of state, corporate, faith and cultural powers. A thousand agendas who wish us submit to their will.

I wish I had the guidance of the generation who led the world through modernity’s war torn emergence into our current networked age. Without knowing our future, would they be able to use their past to help us see through the fog that clouds our present?

I find solace in the children’s literature made by artists who lived through brutal dehumanizing totalitarian regimes. They told stories with truths so clear a child could grasp them.

I return to the works of Tove Jansson and Michael Ende again and again as I try to make sense of what it means to be human. Ironic that I should find human truths in authors who wrote of fantastical worlds filled with whimsical trolls and flying luck dragons.

And yet truths that seem crystalline in fiction distort when I apply the lens of my present. I recall Corinthian’s 1 “Through A Glass, Darkly” and know I am not the first to have such troubles. I will not be the last.

Ende wrote a fictional formless entity called “The Nothing” in The Neverending Story. The people of the realm Fantastica voluntarily leap into The Nothing. It has an irresistible pull.

Worse still, the destructive phenomenon changes the Fantasticans who become lies in the human world. Fantasticans who are destroyed by entering “The Nothing,” don’t just vanish. They reappear in our human world as false beliefs, deceptions, and propaganda that people mistake for reality. The symbolism is clear.

When we suppresses imagination and our inner life, our “lost” fantasies don’t disappear. As in shadow theory, they return as toxic narratives, distortions, and myths that make people “blind” to the difference between reality and illusion.

I do not wish for any of us to kill who we are. We walk into The Nothing and whatever version of ourselves comes out the other side is not the truth. I can only pray that I am not willingly walking into The Nothing as I bear witness.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking Travel

Day 1845 and Lake Effects

I feel a ray of optimism emerging like a bulb who mistimes a false spring in late winter. I am in the dead of winter and I have the first glimmers of light.

“How you do one thing is how you do everything” is an aphorism about character that would take a natural born contrarian to engage.

I made a series of small decisions to keep myself still and make use of resources and skill clusters so I didn’t have to stress myself for a timeline that I didn’t make.

I took a few days to back off into medical tourism and longevity experiments. Nothing fancy or even novel. I wanted good sleep and a classic NAD+, Myers Cocktail, essential trace minerala, glutathione, Alpha-lipoic acid. Just good clean anti-inflammatory fun.

I want the good decisions about sleep habits and nutritional choices (sea bass, shaved vegetable salad, prawns and artichokes), the good exercise decisions (mobility and V02 max if I can’t push muscle too hard without impacting my my nervous system’s vagal tone).

I feel so lucky that this is a choice I can make. I need to be in fighting shape or the compounding choices of my health will have the wrong trend line. I want to see our future.

I am breathing slowly and watching a kind of lake effect whip up the water in the pool outside giving a fluid dynamics show to anyone who loves the movement of water and wind. That makes me want to live in our present.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1843 and Does Enya Listen to Herself In The Bath?

As a woo child of the New Age 90’s era of music, I love listening to Enya in the bathtub. Pure Moods and a hippie mother set a tone for bathing for the remainder of my life.

Alas in Montana we do not have a bathtub in any of our bathrooms. We have a hot tub but the chemicals bother my skin so I only get to enjoy a bathtub when I’m traveling.

And you better believe I have Enya downloaded on Spotify for those occasions even though I’m certain at some point we probably owned all of her music on tape and CD.

While I love the classics (who doesn’t want to sail away?) I had Wild Child come up as I was soaking up magnesium yesterday. Which is not a bad checklist for becoming present in the moment.

Ever close your eyes
Ever stop and listen
Ever feel alive
And you’ve nothing missing
You don’t need a reason
Let the day go on and on

Let the rain fall down
Everywhere around you
Give into it now
Let the day surround you
You don’t need a reason
Let the rain go on and on

What a day
What a day to take to
What a way
What a way
To make it through
What a day
What a day to take to
A wild child – Enya

I’m no wild child but I don’t need a reason to enjoy a bath or a day. Rest up and rejuvenate.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1830 and Itchy Twitchy Bitchy

It’s one of life’s truisms that we may wish for prestige, power and money, but none matter without your health.

“The first wealth is health” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

I don’t think it is self flattering to admit I have got some amount of respect, influence and capital. And yet every spare dollar and moment I have I spend trying to improve my health.

The other types of wealth I have don’t matter if I’m in too much pain to think or I am so regularly infected that my resting heart rate is in the mid nineties.

Yesterday I started getting what I call itchy and twitchy. It’s often the first sign of an infection that has broken through an altered window of immunity.

My entire body will itchy. Sometimes it will be accompanied by a rash like eczema. If the rash is bad enough to be opened through itching I can easily get a bad infection. The discomfort of all that makes me twitchy from the anxiety of it all.

I suspect I am itchy twitchy at the moment as I am in a city with polluted air from major construction and high air mold counts from the winter rains. It makes me want to hit the road immediately for dryer climates but I’ll take prednisone first.

That should make me very pleasant. Anyone who has taken the steroid knows it’s a joke as the drug makes everyone who takes it feel a bit crazy. And you get fat and moon faced for added insult to injury. So apologies in advance if I’m going to be a bit bitchy.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1829 and Frigid Individualist, Snagging and Bagging Narco Terrorists and 2026 Forever War Time

The New Year shouldn’t really get going until after Epiphany. I’m not a Catholic, but I think the Holy Nights are a time for prayer and looking inward.

Alas, we seem to start the new near with a bang every year now. Concerns about Iran’s currency crisis was the big story in geopolitics as the chattering classes concerned themselves with socialist mayors in America were going on about collectivism’s warmth. I will take frigid individualism thanks to

Today I woke up to news of an early morning “snag and bag” of the President of Venezuela Nicholas Maduro and his wife being taken my American troops to stand trial.

The front page of the New York Times around 11am GMT

I’m in Europe so we had a bit more time with the news before Trump addressed the nation. It’s a little chilly where I am and I’m still worked up about the the warm fuzzy communism of the Zoomer youth who seem to think all problems are solved with more money and never seem to realize that it comes at gunpoint.

And despite running on an explicitly anti-war platform, Trump is now giving a press conference suggesting American oil companies are up for a forever war run by Marco Rubio. Rough day for our Secretary of State who is also probably as worried about Iran as anyone.

I suppose it’s now or never for a number of things. Toppling regimes named as narco-states and cutting off oil and capital flows as China does exercises in the straits. Things are malleable indeed.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 1819 and So You’re Safe Enough To Celebrate With Rest

I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. What traditions my family had were mostly oriented around the night before Christmas and not Christmas Day itself.

We’d have a Christmas Eve dinner, our one item per person gift exchange, and most excitingly staying up for midnight mass with my mother

Christmas Day meant Christmas stockings and a jumble of different half heartedly attempted Christmas wishes and lots of long distance calls. Much less fun from a child’s perspective than gifts and late night ceremony.

So here I am on Christmas Eve all prepared for tomorrow’s day of stillness and rest. And I am exhausted. My body has sensed it’s safe to collapse into the kind of sickness that only comes after cortisol washes away on the tides of adrenaline going out to sea.

I’ve got not plans. My worship has never required a church. My prayers are between myself and my maker. I’ll be sick and happily collapsed into my own quiet reflection. May peace be with you.

Categories
Aesthetics Chronic Disease Travel

Day 1816 and Bedding Down

Having put no small amount of effort into preparing to be quietly away from the world for Christmas, I have made myself a very cozy in the chosen retreat.

Preparing for a closed world means I’ll have the freedom to close down myself. My body has been a bit up and down as it usually goes s these days so I’d like to log as many hours in restful response as I can.

Other activities I’d enjoy would be bathing in a warm tub, going for peaceful walks with no one around and reading for hours on end. Which seems manageable. It’s a time for prayer and contemplation.

My only wrinkle is the lack of available prepared food. I mentioned I’d be rather remote. And I did pack as much as was feasible

But if I can’t manage a few days of cooking simple meals like pasta and chicken that would be pretty sad. I’m lucky to have relied on that part of my life being handled by others as I do find the idea of cooking to be almost as tiring as the reality.

All of that moving around on hard kitchen floors as you juggle timers and fire is not a favored activity for someone with spinal issues. Still I’m optimistic if I stick to a quiet routine of reflection, rest and prayer maybe I’ll manage. Or perhaps a miracle will occur and I’ll be fed literally and spiritually.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1814 and Spicy Boi Shots

I’ve been trying to coax myself into taking my final biological injection of the year for most of the day. It’s a very painful shot. The feeling of it is somewhere between stinging and hot sauce being pushed into your subcutaneous fat. It’s spicy

I switched my IL-17 inhibitor for my inflammatory conditions as one of my first actions of 2025.

I was filled with optimism that this new variant called Bimzelx might be the one that finally brought down my biomarkers. And it did indeed show promising results. My CRP and SED rates have never been better.

Alas, the cost is quite high. I’ve got no immune system response to speak of when it comes to my skin and soft tissues. I’ve had four major skin infections requiring surgical intervention and many minor skin infections.

I don’t think I can live with the side effects of the drug even if my inflammatory numbers are better. There is no doubt it’s effectively treating some aspects of my psoriatic arthritis, axial spondyloarthritis, ankylosing spondylitis.

My pain is better so long as I can avoid picking up an infection. I’ve been on antibiotics most of the year. Alas I’ve only had maybe 2-3 weeks without an infection brewing or being beaten into a retreat.

So today may be my last spicy shot. I’ve gone it a full year of adjustment. I don’t relish the prospect of adjusting back to my previous medication as it takes a full year to fully dose on and off these things. But maybe I’ll be lucky and on my final shot in the year I’ll see a change for the better

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1810 and Bodywork and Open Sourced Tactile Physical Data

I had a really excellent massage recently. The body worker really got under some of the tension points in my body and the compensatory patterns I was hoping for them to work through. I felt like the flow of my energy was reset.

This type of relational work between two people, one with body issues and another one who knows an efficient path for soothing them, need each other. I need relief and they need a payment that reflects their expertise.

Typically this has been labor paid in some increment of time. I paid for an hour long massage but I’d be willing to pay for more hours and the knowledge and capacity to execute that work on myself or through another body worker or tool.

I’ve got a Theragun, a Tiger Tail, lacrosse balls and foam rollers and I try to work through knots and pains. But I know way less than your average massage therapist or Alexander Technique practitioner so these tools are in the hands of a poor craftsman.

I would love for there to exist some type of Open Source Bodywork Database. I’m thinking work flows, anatomy training from video to textbook and routines input by every type of knowledge tradition and patient.

There are humorously already types of open source startups that work on body based API calls. One is called buttplug.io so you get the idea.

I’d love to see workers get paid to contribute their video, audio, and tactile experiences to an open world and ideally be paid a percentage each time it’s used.

Imagine being about to boot up this massage with an automated massage options. Or open share the repo with a therapist with less experience looking to learn. You pay the therapist trainee and for the routine and everyone benefits.

It’s a bit of a fantasy now but I’m sure we are closer than anyone realizes to being able to train these movements into automated systems. Imagine celebrity osteopaths with programs built into something you can use.

I would prefer this be an open source program for human body knowledge so that we learn mechanically the many physical routines and options that exist to make our bodies function better thanks to aligned incentives for everyone to participate. Dare to dream right?