Maybe these heat death statistic needs to include the general quality of life dip that comes with a hotter climate. If we once went inward in to our psyche in winters and enjoyed summers of slightly crazy hot joy that life is passed.
Maybe the long now of the perma-weird has cast a shadow of stuck culture which that I see more clearly when life becomes unlivable outside. If you keep living out in the world things do move forward. It’s less pleasant to touch grass when it’s dead and a fire hazard. And so the summer slows us down enough to see inside ourselves
I spend more time inside in the summer than I do in the winter. And given that my home is in Montana, you’d probably expect it to be reversed. Thankfully we only have two months where the weather gets into the “indoors between 9am to 9pm” heat risk. Other lower latitudes have more troubles than we do and blessedly our power comes from our own solar grid so I never worry about running air conditioning.
I am a wreck. But now that everyone is discovering the value of daily writing (get in the repetition before the AI harms your skill), I have to gut it out as usual when I’ve got little in the way of cogent thought.
In an attempt to recover, I’m in a hyperbaric chamber sucking back oxygen under two atmospheres of pressure and I still can’t get my heart to stop pounding. Damned drugs.
It’s 100 degrees outside which probably doesn’t, help but even with oxygen, an eye mask, a soothing Endel NSDR session delivered by Bose noise canceling headphones, I could not get my heart rate under 100 consistently.
I wish I had a better theory than having over extended myself by traveling from mountain to swamp and desert to sea and then back again. Work and family call me, and they are not ever in the same place. It’s been a season of enormous wins but the price is being paid now.
It would seem that I’ve found my way to my first full system cascade failure since I went off my IL-17 inhibitor and onto a peptide regime with hormonal support.
I’ve had four glorious months of being able to act like I’m a reasonably healthy woman. Then I returned from a Fourth of July celebration in Utah to Montana and immediately fell apart.
My physician suggested the dreaded prednisone as well as a cycle of doxycycline. Goody goody gum drops. Both notably raise resting heart rates.
Want to see how bad? Get a look at this chart of horror and pharmaceutical malice. I woke up around my usual time and my heart has been pounding all night (no wonder prednisone makes people go nuts), my HRV registered as an 8 (average at my age should be 40-50) and this only registered as kinda in the green because I’ve had a week of it being in the mid teens. So yeah what the actual fuck. What do I even have?
The worst Whoop recording I’ve ever had
Maybe I just need to quietly let the steroids tamp down any inflammation and let the antibiotics kill off any bacteria that have decided to colonize me but I won’t lie I am terrified that those good months were a fleeting moment and this is my new normal.
Thankfully I know in my rational mind I’m in my luteal phase of hormonal horrors and I’ll get bloodwork as soon as my menstrual cycle lets me bleed.
It’s likely I’ll be in need of some new hormonal pellets sliced into my ass and any infection or inflammation is just a function of having gone a bit too hard and too fast in my glee that I can feel good again.
I write every post on my blog with my own mind and my own hands. I type on my phone whatever my mind has managed to organize on a given day. It’s a ritual for thinking more than an attempt at being read by others.
Three years later Isaiah’s reactor went critical, I’m still writing my human brain derived content, and timelines from Twitter to Substack are drowning in pithy highly readable artificial intelligence written content. Poor Will Manidis has jokingly taken responsibility but feed slop was coming one way or mother.
It does make a chronological feed as a timeline a much better choice for personal use as algorithmic buffing of content will make a night river of a platform into a million tributary parts. The feeds crack as the water of thought are routed elsewhere.
This metaphor has clearly reached me as yesterday I went to some effort to do a full shower, exfoliate, shave and wash routine with new products meant to improve my epidermis from tip to toe. I ended up giving myself a number of itchy red notches and spent the evening slathering on lotions and cortisone creams.
My stratum corneum cracked just as my timeline did. The moisture in my skin is we sucked out by acids and scrubbing. I’d taken off a few dead skin cells and irritated the rest.
Just like the insights and prose have been buffed and pumiced to a flat surface of legibility in our feeds. Nothing was buoyant or smooth. It was flat with the occasional warm to the touch but of discomfort. Slopping on occlusives might help my skin but I have no fix for the timeline.
I am an enormous fan of Freddie Mercury thanks to my mother’s excellent collection of classic rock. You’d be surprised at how much I’ve committed to memory from the core cannon and deep cuts that span the Beatles to Cream & Edgar Winter to Led Zeppelin.
I’m not much for karaoke, though I once tweaked my neck doing a full head bang hair whipping, Wayne’s World style, for a friend’s birthday party.
Knowing all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody is clutch in these circumstances. As can go in, do a full rock opera and ease yourself out of any further obligation to participate saying “oh I had easily three times the stage time as everyone else I’ll just cheer you on!” Pro-tip for group activities amirite?
Fun fact from Reddit. During the Bohemian Rhapsody scene in ‘Wayne’s World’ (1992) Mike Myers and Dana Carvey are both grimacing in pain while headbanging. The director, Penelope Spheeris, shot the scene for approximately five hours. Basically how I felt after my friends birthday karaoke.
Now I don’t always have the common sense to stop myself. I am a real mess at the moment as I have finally come home and I can let the whirlwind dissipate for a moment
Strained sleep with upsettingly high strain but at least it’s restorative. Now if only I could get my resting heart rate down and my HRV back up I’d be right as rain.
My Whoop is sending up red recoveries with a week of barely better yellows, as I spent a bit too much of the last few months going full Freddie Mercury “Don’t Stop Me Now” as not only was I having a real good time but I had a lot to get done.
Tonight, I’m gonna have myself a real good time I feel alive And the world, I’ll turn it inside out, yeah I’m floatin’ around in ecstasy So don’t stop me now Don’t stop me ‘Cause I’m havin’ a good time Havin’ a good time
It’s nice when you work and your life are aligned such that every step feels like you can only accelerate. But if we are sticking to thermodynamics, l may have allowed a little more entropy into the equation.
So give me some time to sleep it off. I’ll be in bed trying to keep my heat rate down. But being in the red won’t stop me forever. It’ll just stop me for a little bit.
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.
I’ve been hiding out from the heatwave in a hotel room. I am one of the lucky ones. Europe is as diverse as America so it’s a little silly to discuss it as a whole but only 20% of Europe’s housing has air conditioning. Germany is at 3%. The United Kingdom is at 5%. Honestly the mind reels as in America 90% of our housing has air conditioning even if we can’t all afford to run it.
It’s not just the housing either. A hotel room with strong air conditioning is a rarity in Western Europe. They will claim they have air conditioning at corporate chains and in Airbnbs, but it is not always the air conditioning you’d expect in America where you have more control.
In Europe you have a few options generally. A corporate hotel will be controlled by a central HVAC system. They may pretend that you can change it but in Germany they won’t let you go below 72 degrees at a Marriott. Ask a United Airlines pilot in Frankfurt what block of hotels they stay at to get a decent night sleep. It’s a nightmare and hacks are numerous but usually fruitless.
Your other options are finding independent hotels or Airbnbs with a mini-split. But good luck with that. The Germans and the French will tell you off for running it. There are towns where you need to show a medical need. I once had this happen to me.
So yes it’s usual that I’m in a comfortable hotel with a central HVAC system with individual room controls (not a mini-split) that allows me to get it down to 18C. That’s pretty unusual.
Why am I so lucky as to have air conditioning in a European hotel room that is central air and not a mini-split? Well I picked the hotel that the diplomats stay at in the capital. They don’t suffer at all.
The private small independent hotel I am at has NGOs staffers constantly winding people in and out of. It is a well maintained beauty of an independent hotel in an era of corporate standards. So it has a wiff of the old patrician smell to it and they enjoy their perks.
There are zoomers outside protesting corruption but inside technocrats and policy analysts and other bureaucrats enjoy cool temperatures at their control as they go about their work being high minded about democracy and equity.
During the current record-breaking European heatwave, the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels experienced an AC system failure — or forced shutdown — on Friday, June 27.
Staff on floors 1–7 received an urgent text message at midday reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day” The Express
I’m glad my hotel was allowed keep its cool since her lower tier staffers don’t have that luxury. I understand why it’s a scandal. French and German cultural leaders can discuss their hospitals and schools without air conditioning with as much pride as they like. I am not buying it. Europe can fix this problem if it likes.
A vast somewhat intimidating vista is stretching ahead of me between two thousand days of writing every day and the possibility of reaching three thousand days of writing every day. One day and one post at a time right?
So like any sane woman setting out on a long journey, I ate a salad, had some protein and checked myself into a spa for a massage. No reason to start a long journey exhausted right? I need to pace myself.
I got a pedicure to immediately turn restoration to grooming necessities, but one can’t keep pool blue toenails all summer. Not every day is spent on the Ionian. Some days are spent at nuclear facilities in steel toed boots. Other days are spent in kitten heels inside conference rooms.
Just in case anyone does need to see my toes after those scenarios, I try to maintain a tidy nude set of nails. Isn’t it strange what expectations we have for women?
I may work remotely, at odd hours and in odd locations that allow the occasional eccentricity, but at any moment I might need to be on an airplane headed to parts unknown. You only get to be so weird when you have big goals.
In this case, next week I’m headed to a desert town and then a state capital. That’s state is becoming a more regular occurrence in my life. That’s a pretty big privilege for me.
Being a supporting player in a number of larger endeavors gives me the chance to add additional gravity if and when I might be useful. Even if it is just showing up as a cheerleader. I love trying to convince smarter, better capitalized and better connected players than me that indeed it is my startups are the winners in the grand game of macro-cycles.
I wrote that the world was getting to be a lot more chaotic when I first started this writing journey. Now that’s common knowledge. Then and now, I care about adaptability to this increasing complexity. This has turned out to mean compute, energy and decentralization.
The strength of your network is in the flexibility and foresight of its nodes. And I hope I remain a trusted node at the forefront of our long journey as a species for as long as I serve us well. I’ll carry on this Odyssey till then.
I am in an all systems flashing red kind of place today. I slept poorly, my stomach and colon are tied up in knots, my HRV is in the basement around 12 while my RHR is in the stratosphere at 99bpm. It’s possible I’m sick on the road.
1871 days of Whoop and my metrics only ever seem to get worse
I moved from one crummy “luxury” hotel to another in an attempt to see the area and save a few bucks. I wanted to see the construction in a town where I’m interested in buying some real estate.
Why am I looking at real estate? Well it’s for both investment purposes and for freedom of movement Plan B scenarios for my extended family. And nothing makes you appreciate America quite like not being able to rely on America for your family.
So apologies to anyone who needs me on the grid. It isn’t going to happen for a bit. You can text me but I might end up ignoring you unless it’s an emergency.
I’ve holed myself up with instant ramen, Gatorade, some fruit, and a 12 pack of bottle water and I hope that’s enough to get me to the other side of whatever is ailing me. Maybe I can sleep through it.
Truth be told I think I’m just sad. Or maybe it’s hormones. Maybe it’s the frustration of making any sort of plans that don’t involve America as I hate being of the country. I love Montana. I love America. It’s just harder being away from home.
My sleep has been really poor as I’ve been jaunting about pretending to be a Eurotrash island hopper for a week or so. It’s both glorious but a little concerning as restorative sleep is crucial.
I’ve not gone as long and as hard as I have this late spring into summer since I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. A condition that seems to have potentially gone into remission.
And I’m trying not to worry. Something about late evening sunsets extending daylight, last week’s brilliant full moon lighting up the bay over Corfu all through the night, and the intense physical combination of swimming, talking, and eating communally has made it feel like I’ll can’t come down at night.
A late sunset over Greece turns to moonrise all too quickly leaving bright light at all turns
Last night I fell asleep as the sun was rising around 4am despite doing everything I could to be asleep earlier. I got in bed at 10pm with a boom, did vagal nerve exercises and breathing, took an OTC sleeping pill and a Benadryl, used only red lights past sunset, and wore earplugs and eye mask. I was doing it all right and my body’s response was all wrong.
So today I am aggressively injecting whimsy and exertion into my day with the hope that the risk of a flare in my conditions will be mitigated by the efficacy of my peptide protocol. My sleep was most disturbed up on my pulse off days so perhaps as I pulse back on into the week it will be better?
My logic is simple. Surely a messed up circadian rhythm is more dangerous than running around getting my steps, buying little treats at Flying Tiger (a forever travel notebook?!) and doing mat Pilates with travel bands. I couldn’t possibly flare myself with that kind of gentle whimsy exhaustion as my nervous system isn’t being pounded by training but extended gently with enjoyment.
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.
