My head hurts, I’ve lost my voice and I’m achy everywhere but I’ve got something resembling a tan and my lymph glands are only a little swollen.
Is this is the halfway point of the summer season I feel like I’m doing it rather well. That is rare for me as summer is traditionally my most challenging season but I seem to be doing rather well despite the workload and constant travel.
In a fun coincidence of scheduling, I shared a blue moon at the end of May in Greece and the waning of the full strawberry moon in Utah with same person.
A blue full moon and a sailboat light
What a joy to be half a world away and still find a way to come together. From the Ionian Sea to the high alpine skiing mountains of Utah you are never too far away from a friend.
I’m back in Montana and hoping I’ll enjoy a reasonable chunk of time here as I do feel the strain on my body. I don’t think I am sick but I am struggling to with fatigue and the annoyance of a throat so sore from talking that I should probably commit to a silent retreat for a few days.
So I’ll sip my slippery elm tea and browse the cosmetic sales for skincare (and a little makeup splurge to celebrate the big wins) and get myself back on a routine. I’d like to put on more muscle mass and improve my cardiovascular fitness now that I have more capacity.
If I can manage conference after conference, gala and launch demonstrations along with my workload and time with friends then surely I can add in some overhead presses and a plyometrics right? I did a short but brisk mile and half circuit around the neighboring pastures. And then I got back into bed.
If professional class workers thin out as a function of artificial intelligence taking some of the work done by the professional management or PMC class, I suspect we will see nostalgia for the time they were seen as aspirational. I’d like to explore that near-future science fiction today with the PMC Olympics.
After the initial decade or two of upset (possibly even rage) at the power shifts & new status dynamics subside, we fondly remember business class types like lawyers & consultants with the same wistful fondness as we recall switchboard operators or the stenography pool.
I’d bet in the nostalgia wave, we see competitions, cosplaying and an equivalent of Renaissance Fairs or reenactments pop up where former PMCs and thr youth pretending to be them, compete in a cargo cult display of its cultural identity markers.
And when this does inevitably emerge as a cultural touchstone, I want to compete in the PMC Olympics with my husband in transcontinental logistics events. Think of it as figure skating but for married business partners.
I’m confident we would medal in the transcontinental travel logistics category. I’d get gold in the individual “cosmetic and liquids” category. Think of it as “uneven-bars” of the transcontinental logistics travel competition.
As part of this mirthful sci-fi exercise, I input a prompt to ChatGPT’s current image model and it gave me a very amusing montage of who might compete and win in just such an event.
Naturally the shining blonde California affluence worker (subcategory creative class) took the gold but let’s not forget the New York finance couple nor the European directorate class.
ChatGPT image prompted with: Make me an image of three sets of couples who are professional management class knowledge workers. They are on an Olympics podium receiving gold, silver and bronze medals for medalling in the “Transcontinental Logistics: Couples” event. I’d like two American couples (one New Yorker finance style and one California Hollywood style) as well as a European couple (Swiss) in the style of a Brussels bureaucrat. There should be suitcases, travel bags for laptops, a 1L cosmetics bag, a medication cold tube, and other travel essentials in the image
I know this sounds a little goofy, but the work that goes into managing what a couple need when constantly switching between personal life and work on the road involves a surprising amount of logistical support work. And that’s without children. I’d add a category with a toddler as the most extreme form of this event.
Just check this prompt I made for my own PDF for an event involving both industrial site visits and formal galas that I am attending after flying west from London. Some details are changed or redacted for modest privacy. Anyone can easily guess what I’m going to be doing.
Build a 8-10 day travel itinerary for a business trip departing from Heathrow London and arriving to Salt Lake City and a remote desert town in Utah, from June XX to July 2, 2026. Include a day-off rest plan for Salt Lake City, a Department of Redacted event logistics flow chart, transport coordination for a bus to small town and return back to the city on July X of event, and recommendations for high-quality food near event venues.
Include transitioning time and necessary grooming required for a facility floor tour with safety gear and a change for a formalwear gala with an hour buffer assuming an event mid afternoon, there hours transit and evening formal event at 7pm.
July 2-5th include a secondary itinerary for a follow on mountain social event at 8,000 feet Utah mountains with outdoorsman activities.
Format as a structured PDF briefing with time-stamped logistics, travel maps, and weather-appropriate clothing advice for the city to desert climate shift as well as mountain elevation needs. Include medications, standard pharmacy and first aid needs, cooled medications for peptide regimen, sun safety, facility floor safety gear, day event makeup, formalwear makeup, possible television ready makeup as well as hairstyle needs based on 3 day warning cycle.
Make sure personal preferences for all clothing, sleeping, cosmetic, medication and other gear is accommodated in a carry on suitcase, personal bag and one checked baggage.
Pretty fun right? And I might add that it’s relatively easy to spit these itineraries out once you’ve harnessed your preferences and all necessary items in one’s personal stock keeping. Always take inventory regularly when on the road and unpack and repack quickly for fast turn arounds. Oh and use the three pack cascade system. To my fellow flying logistic Olympians I wish you safe travels while we still enjoy global transportation for capitalism.
Well I’ve done it. I have written and published to the internet a blog post every single day for two thousand days in a row. So I am going to toast myself to a job well done.
In earlier milestone posts, I was always surprised I’d made it, but now the harder thing to decide is if or when I’ll stop, not if I’ll keep going.
Half a decade goes by a lot faster than you think. The accomplishments actually do add up if you keep yourself pointed in the right direction.
In a personal capacity, we got ourselves to Montana, set up a life that let us live the way we’d always dreamed and invested in the future we wanted to see.
From a civic perspective during that time we helped pass meaningful reform in housing, testified for crypto rules of the road and worked to ensure Montanans have a right to compute.
From an investing perspective, we have been first in Solana’s most crucial infrastructure player Squads. Because yeah crypto is going to matter a lot in an artificial intelligence age. We have stuck to our core mission of adaptation by backing the tools needed to benefit from our new AI speed run.
And yes we care about open source. From vector databases to inference labs to experimental dueling models, we have snuck into some strange experiments. And oh yeah we were the first check in a small modular nuclear reactor that is winning the atomics renaissance race (at least this week having achieved criticality).
There have been a lot of failures in those years though oddly not investments or policy. I have battled health issues and fought to not just maintain working capacity but to gain back the capacity I thought I’d lost forever.
I did woo woo whacky things from PEMF and HBOT to peptide stacks and traditional biologics. Thanks to the horrors of hormones and steroids I was early to GLP1s and made some good investments there too.
Maybe I’ll tag all of this more cleanly later but I do think it’s important to remember the days are long but the years are short.
Get on the airplane. Go meet up in person. Buy that dream house. Build a solar array and a sauna. Do wildly romantic things and go to galas. Say yes to more.
And open your heart to the heroic efforts others are also putting into making our lives and our world better. We live among every day heroes. And yeah lots of bad shit has happened in this time too. My father died. We failed for five years straight at getting a visa for a close family friend.
I am aware of the shitty compromise we all make to survive. But you have got to hold on to that feeling. So yeah on day 2000 I think I’ve earned the right to be corny as hell. Don’t stop believing.
I write about packing so much on this daily blog that you’d think I’d have an equally large collection of posts on the art of unpacking. I enjoy unpacking emotions, family systems work, a complicated social graph so why not my travel bags?
The forethought and execution required for a well packed travel bag in summer high season is a tactical exercise I both love and loath. My husband and I compete on who can most effectively compress down different categories of items from first aid kits to travel cosmetics.
I am however in my mind not a particularly fastidious unpacker. Or maybe I am? I repack my bags on the return leg as closely as possible to resemble the outbound packing trip. There are labeled bags for under garments, separates, and dresses.
I’ll transition some garments into a bag that is designated laundry, but I’ll almost always take laundry detergent with me. So it’s not unusual for me to make a return trip with clean clothing. When one travels as much as I do it can help to treat as much of road life as you would your regular life.
I unpack immediately upon arrival at my destination whether that is home or away. I prefer to get things out and tucked into the proper drawers and line ups. This applies doubly when I return home. I once had a suitcase sit unpacked for two weeks after a particularly bad flare. It was a nightmare.
So today I had unpacking work that required a bit of disassembling of multiple types of trip packs from gala makeup and silk gown to Greek island hopping swimsuits and even Utah desert nuclear facility visiting garments. It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks.
I feel almost like I’ve found the bits and bobs of items that were misplaced inside tiny pockets or stowed away in unseen baggies. I am still searching for a few things but unpacking why the unpacking took so long is for another day.
Heat and sun only added insult to injury as my body struggled to manage inflammation. I had purchased a bathing suit I loved that became known as “the bathing suit I never wore” as I was simply packing it as an aspirational garment.
It was packed carefully in my suitcase trip after trip, in the hopes that I might have a good day without pain. Years went by and I never wore it. It was a sad joke. Not for aesthetics or vanity, but for the cruel pain that poor health puts you through.
If you go through the tags on the blog for ankylosing spondylitis you will see a journey of some length. The blog chronicles it from its starting years and, one day I hope, to its finish. I’ll may never be cured but I am finally living again.
The pale blue Ionian coastal waters protected from development and over traffic contain a beautiful array of fishes
I know it sounds silly that being able to wear a bathing suit without pain is a huge milestone, but I was unable to participate in the most basic outdoor activities with my own family.
A bathing suit was an aspirational garment not because I too afraid to be seen in it, but because the compression along my rib cage and spine hurt so badly.
And today I was on a boat for four straight hours including jumping off into the warm aquamarine waters of protected coastal Ionian water.
Nothing hurt at all. And I am not on any immune suppressant drugs at all at the moment. I am not on antibiotics. I am on a simple peptide regime. And now my swimsuit is being worn so often I need a second one so it can dry.
A halter top from Norma Kamali and a hat from a tourist shop.
Having decided to take a proper break I am going all in on making sure my body and mind get the proper signs and signifiers to just let go.
My first activity after a long mess of travel was to sleep for an impossibly long term. Whoop approvingly noted that my 11 hours and fifteen minutes was the longest I’d slept all month.
Low stress, a green recovery and plenty of hours of deep and REM sleep
I know they say you should stick to a regular sleep schedule. I generally have a firm bedtime just past 9:30pm and will sleep nine hours if I can.
But between conferences with evening events, long drives late into the night and an eight hour time difference I was carrying a sleep deficit that needed to be remedied.
My next order of business was equally taxing. I booked a spa appointment for a pedicure and a waxing. Fresh toes and a clean bikini line seemed like just the trick before laying out on a pool lounger or on a beach.
Not that anyone will be taking too close a look at me but I like feeling as if I’ve cared for the little details. Cosmetics and beauty are more of a way of appreciating my own body than adhere to someone else’s preferences.
I usually wear a very basic nude shade on my toes. I almost never do my hands but I appreciate a but I felt like I needed something more Ionian in quality or perhaps one of David Hockney’s pools.
A bit of pool blue lacquer
Normally I wouldn’t go quite so exotic on a pedicure as I’m much more basic in my preferences but if I have a chance to stare out at wine dark sea over an aquamarine pool I may as well make the most of the experience.
Women are at a bit of a disadvantage to men when it comes to relieving ourselves. Yes I am talking about taking a piss.
From road trips to the backcountry, we’re forced to hike up our skirts (or worse shimmy down our pants) and aim our stream through squat & thrust such that it lands where we desire without soiling our garments or surrounding areas.
You might be wondering why I’ve got such a urological topic on my mind. And I might remind you it is not as if my writing lacks for lewd colloquialisms. Some readers may recall my viral hit “dick riding” so if you are inclined towards Freud we can have a chuckle about penis envy. And today it might even be true.
I am at the moment stuck in a literal can. I am nearing the end of a session of hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy. To be specific, my 27th session on my second round of the therapy. My first round of it was forty sessions last fall. I am rounding the end of my second set in the next two weeks.
I happen to feel dare I say good this most recent round of HBOT. It’s a marvel what it can do for the lungs and for healing wounds. However I can’t credit my current upswing just to the oxygen I’m breathing in while under two atmospheres of pressure.
I have gone off my biological injection Bimzelx after a frightful year of infections despite its excellent ability to squash down inflammatory biometrics like CRP and sed rate. I’ve added in hormone therapy via testosterone and estradiol pellets (also my second round of them). The big change is that I am heading into my forth week of injecting experimental peptides.
Those had a hell of an adjustment, but seem to have done absolutely everything which was claimed by their champions in terms of anti-inflammatory benefits. Alas I am not sure if I should discuss them too much lest I get in trouble for being ahead of the insurance rackets. My doctor supervised and approved of them which should be good enough but one never knows.
That was a long way of saying that this combination of discontinuing old expensive therapies and adding in new cheaper less expensive treatments is adding up to a lot more mobility and capacity for me.
So today I went hiking and I lifted weights. Actual under the bar squats in my own rack like an actual human. The kind of active life that I’ve been desperately trying to regain for years.
So I’ve drank rather a lot of water today. More than perhaps I should have, as here I am in a pressurized can absolutely desperately wishing I could urinate.
Alas I am waiting the timer praying for decompression to arrive so I can relieve myself in a proper water closest. And thus we circle back to the penis envy.
It’s just that I have an empty can in here with me, it’s not out of the question I could find relief in that manner. Perhaps I’d have a better treatment. My heart rate is higher than I’d like and my bladder is unhappy about the pressure. But I’ve got no aim and little room for error.
Just imagine the smell. If urine smells in a well ventilated area like a roadside rest stop, just imagine how it might smell in a pressurized tube. It’s not a place you want to fart I’ll tell you that much. So wetting the blankets, upholstery, and my clothing in here would be a disaster. I’d never get the smell out.
So here I am laughing to myself about wanting to piss in a can. Maybe a good reminder to buy one of those hiking helper devices for women. You never know what kind of situation I may find myself in this summer if I can actually move my body comfortably again.
I seem to have accidentally fallen into polyphasic sleep. Those experimental not for human consumption, long amino acid chains that everyone is doing n of 1 research with?
Well, my n of 1 experiment seems to be yielding the occasionally odd sleep pattern. I’ll be up early after having a night of sleep that feels more nap than fully weighed sleep hours.
Think out by 9pm and awake before dawn. I feel fine, so I pack in the full day till around 3pm when lunch digestion & the general slumps have me saying “maybe a short nap.”
I’ll find myself popping back up at 6pm with an eye on dinner. Another accidental siesta has stolen the afternoon hours back from the long evening hours to which I’d applied them.
I won’t have any trouble going to sleep on time early. This pattern seems to be applied to days where I have a lot of physical strain.
If I get in a workout, a long shower, extra walking time, and other physically demanding tasks in alongside my mental work I end up needing the nap and still fall asleep on time.
I am trying to get healthier, but that suggests it is even an achievable goal. It would be wonderful to get back to endless working hours or even just eight hours on my feet.
Every time I make a tweak to my routines and I see a change in my biometrics, it’s becomes eventually cause for concern. There’s no stable equilibrium to be found, and I know that’s part of life, but I’d like a stable equilibrium that’s a little bit better than one day at a time or ideally a couple weeks at a time.
Take my experiment with Bimzelx. Even when I achieve an outcome like getting my CRP rates into the normal bounds, it came at a cost that is simply too high to maintain. I had four separate incisions and surgeries last year from soft tissue infections.
What good is a drug that tamps down my immune system so much that I need to always go under the knife? It was like Goodhart’s Law came to haunt me personally.
I am going off the biologic (I am 12 weeks from my last injection) and already seeing change in the wrong direction. Not enormously bad but my immune system will pop if it’s not locked down.
Yet there’s very little I can do except keep going and hope that the balance will be more manageable, as I don’t know that I could have another year like 2025 again.
I set out trying to reboot my immune system last year, and it certainly seems like it worked. But can I keep the numbers in a place that are low enough to let me live, and ideally live with fewer medications?
I am constantly working against some new tweak or some new problem, and even little gentle experiments like a Pilates reformer workout or 10 minutes on the trampoline can turn into a full-day migraine if I am not immediately able to tamp it down. Thoracic pain will pop up crushing my breathing if I take a nice slow hike in the pastures beyond our house
Apologies that today’s post is going to be only partially organic human produced writing. I’m a tad more focused on cobbling together my current end game which feels promising.
I am now dosed off my current biologic. Tomorrow I go in to run a bunch of bloodwork but I feel more stable than expected for 11 weeks since my last injection.
I take it for psoriatic arthritis and active ankylosing spondylitis. I do not recommend this devil of a medication unless you intend to reboot your entire autoimmune system (which I did), can tolerate a lot of soft tissue infections (which I couldn’t) and have tried everything else. Which I have. And this past year was brutal fighting off the side effects but I think I might actually have a shot at remission.
I am now layering a bunch of mechanical interventions to rework years of compensatory patterns my body has used to manage the constant pain in my thoracic spine and other areas of inflammation including my sternum, rib cage and joints.
But after seven years of trying everything I can to recover from prednisone to methotrexate to Humira and Taltz to literally just not eating for ten straight days (don’t worry I was supervised) my inflammatory biometrics are coming up clean. The pain isn’t fully gone but I think the pain can be diminished by quite a lot as I rebuild.
So it’s now or never if I want a shot at life without suppressing my immune system. I have no idea if I can do it and I may need to dose back on something else but at the moment I’m managing with a new arsenal.
Here are the artificial intelligence bits of the mechanical interventions I am leveraging. I am using a bunch more than the two below but it’s what I’ve got so enjoy.
1. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT)
Mechanically, HBOT does a few things that line up with what my data is showing:
More dissolved oxygen in blood and tissues Breathing 100% oxygen under pressure increases the amount of oxygen dissolved directly in plasma. That can:
Support tissue healing (skin, soft tissue, surgical sites)
Help inflamed or energy-starved tissues keep up with demand
Autonomic “downshift” for some people Research is mixed, but many people (and some small trials) show:
Lower resting heart rate and subjective anxiety after sessions
A tilt toward parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) dominance In your data, the days after HBOT blocks are exactly when we see HR drop back toward baseline and Recovery go green.
Anti‑inflammatory & microcirculation support (early evidence) HBOT can:
Modulate certain inflammatory pathways and oxidative stress
Improve microvascular blood flow, which matters for both autoimmune-affected tissues and healing pelleted areas / irritated skin
In your context (autoimmune, infection risk, prior soft‑tissue complications), HBOT looks like it’s acting as:
A structured, time‑boxed reset that helps your heart rate settle and supports healing, without adding mechanical strain.
You’re already doing the key safety piece: using it under medical guidance and watching how HR, Recovery, and symptoms respond day-to-day.
2. SCM (sternocleidomastoid) muscle work
The SCM runs from behind your ear to your collarbone and is heavily involved in:
Head and neck position
Breathing assistance when things feel tight
A dense web of nerves and fascia near the vagus nerve, carotid artery, and jugular vein
Working on SCM (gentle massage, trigger-point release, careful stretching) can impact:
Perceived heart‑rate “rev” and breath tension Tight SCMs show up when:
You’re chronically bracing, in pain, or anxious about pain
You’re using accessory neck muscles to breathe
Releasing them can:
Make breathing feel less effortful and more diaphragmatic
Reduce that “I’m keyed up in my chest and throat” feeling even if HR number isn’t wildly high.
Headache/migraine and neck-related pain SCM trigger points can refer pain to:
Temples, behind the eyes, jaw By easing those trigger points, you sometimes reduce:
Migraine severity/frequency
The background neck/jaw tension that keeps your nervous system on edge
Autonomic tone (indirectly) The area around the SCM is rich with baroreceptors and vagus-adjacent structures. Gentle work there can:
Encourage a downshift in sympathetic drive (less “fight-or-flight bracing”)
Pair nicely with breathwork (especially long, slow exhales) to reinforce parasympathetic activation
In practice for you, SCM work + HBOT looks like a two-pronged calm signal:
HBOT: physiological support + autonomic softening from the inside
SCM: mechanical and sensory de‑bracing around your neck, jaw, and breathing
My Whoop is seeing HR and Recovery respond in a way that suggests this combo is genuinely helping my system get out of that “stuck high-gear” state.
