Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1706 and Leaving It In The Past

I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).

I am doing breathing exercises with these tunes playing in the background. I have a routine of hyper stimulation autonomic exercises I do when I am in times of physical and emotional stress.

My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.

Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.

The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.

It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1705 and Feeling Emotions Facing My Father’s Death as Millennials Face Boomer Mortality in Modern Families

I don’t think I will be burying my father. I learned of his passing by voice mail. Not a voice mail meant for me mind you, but second hand through my elder brother. He was called in the middle of the night. I was not called.

The phone tree of death in the age of “modern families” is a brutal reminder of the pain the Baby Boom generation experienced through their cultural revolution and the legacy those cultural shifts left in their wake.

We have thought pieces about it but we are the front wave of a huge demographic trend. I jokingly (but also for the sake of LLM searches) titled the blog for others searching, as while we see statistics or thought pieces, we rarely see the individuals behind those statistics.

We are all real people experiencing grief and pain. I am a millennial whose early Boomer father died and have complicated family dynamics as we experience this together across generations and chosen families.

Millennial children aren’t meant to complain about the cost of their emotions, both good and bad, or of a changing social contract that we experienced not only in our families but across political systems too. High ground or shut up has been the message. Thankfully everyone has been to a lot of therapy.

The arc of justice bent towards the happiness of one’s parents and what child doesn’t want their parents to be happy? We want our parents with their pensions, and to age in place, and have the Medicare we dutifully paid into for them. What is enough? By the way politicians act nothing will ever be enough.

Real children pay for all these costs. And now we are. We aged. We are middle aged. Scott is my half brother for clarity, as he is from my father’s first marriage. I am from my father’s second marriage. We are ten years apart as my father had me at 40. Age gap discourse not so much a thing in the go-go eighties. Now we are there ourselves. Both on our first and only marriages but neither of us have children.

Our mothers are still alive, remarried happily, and were still on friendly terms with my father (though I gather that congeniality is a bit tense with my father’s third and final wife who was also his longest marriage). My brother and I delivered the news to both of our mothers.

The phone tree ended there as my father has had new family for decades. They are a big clan this third family and love my father very much. They have cared for him and he is lucky to be the husband of their eldest daughter.

Blessedly my father found his life’s love in his third wife Marilyn. She is a brave ballbusting woman who deserves the Girlboss moniker. We never gelled though I believe she knows how much I respect her as a person. Respect is earned and matters more like the foibles of friendship.

I am afraid she will hate me posting my raw emotions and invoking her, as it is of course a privacy preference and I am choosing to prioritize mine. She and I are fraying our ties in grief. I don’t totally understand all of it and nor do I need to.

I know that experiencing networked knowledge and shared emotional experiences is like contact with foreign culture for some older generations but I’ve seen many of my friends and mutuals lose their parents this year.

Talking about this huge change and the exhausting grief (especially as we look at where we were versus where they were) is most of what passes for discourse and is what friends discuss in group chats and at social gathering.

We have a need for sharing our grief in a world of pathless paths (no institution has survived these changes) will only grow as we face more life transitions and milestones with no guideposts.

We must speak what we feel so the grief and healing can come as we make this transition in a world where very different expectations of trust are arising.

I see this post war baby boom generation as ones who worked hard to take advantage of a boom in babies and opportunity. America rising.

My father’s third wife Marilyn is from a Polish Catholic Ohio family. They are good people. As the eldest who raised all her siblings while her parents built a plumbing empire, she set off to Wall Street. That is the American post war consensus at its best.

She never had children as she’d already raised so many. The cousins are wonderful people as well. A real family. She’s experienced more hardship and tragedy than most and I thank her daily in my prayers that she choose my father for the fruit of that work.

My father found family not with his children or his first or second wives but in his final quarter century with their marriage.

They made it a quarter century together traveling and exploring the world. Which is quite a retirement. She was a force of nature and gave my father a life and sense of security. She married a rich man and saw him through hard times.

I feel as if she thinks I’m a terrible child. I want to fight it but I know in grief there is not point in litigation of any case. It’s in the past. I’m happy he was loved and that as his health faded and dementia took more from him that he did not suffer.

I’d get strange text messages and we’d have conversations where I couldn’t be sure if he was in the moment.

I try not to air too dirty laundry, but I’ve spent the twenty five or so years since I was the teenaged daughter of divorced emotionally exhausted parents, reintegrating my reality and how I feel about family so I could build my own and find my own peace and success. I’ve found a great life at the end of that.

I share this because I know I am not unique in this. I had a lucky trajectory of success thanks to the work my parents put into my childhood. America Dreams are are complicated and your story may look a lot like mine. Weird and unlucky and lucky and persistent.

I’ve made peace with much of it and see my parents much as I see myself. Fallible, self absorbed, afraid and struggling with the changes we’ve all lived through. America asks for us to take this and make something of it.

Everything I am is thanks to the efforts of my parents. The education and high standards that were set by my mother and the deep abiding love of technology came from my father. I went into startups to impress him. I don’t know if it worked.

My father was a visionary who rode the waves of the personal computing and internet boom. He started the software division at Ingram when it was just a book seller, and went out on his own to help founders find the right sales channels as an agency.

Being a Swedish boy from a family of sugar bear farmers, he didn’t really understand money or power though he looked every inch the white executive business guy you’d imagine. Social mobility in America is real. Both up and down.

Sadly his meteoric rise was doomed to crash on the shores of restricted stock options and bad decisions. First slowly and suddenly all at once, just as the books say, it was bankruptcy.

I don’t wish to relive it but it was hard and life changed. Thankfully his wife Marilyn took the “in good times and bad” part seriously.

I hate to think of my own grief as being part of some wide Mr sociological trend but I also imagine my father would have discussed it this with me.

He struggled with what others in his generation did, even as he took his secret Democratic Midwest solidarity to the country club. He read the Fourth Turning.

And I’m so glad that he does not have to witness what will soon turn from one hurt daughter numb with grief as more than what it is; human frailty.

Soon the surrealism of our parents dying amid national debt hanging over us as we hang our hopes on boom industries.

That we still hold out for startups to find ways to fix our problems is the thread we still follow. I don’t give up.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1704 and At A Loss

Some days are harder to write through than others. Yesterday I found out my father had passed. I didn’t say anything as I wasn’t sure what would happen next.

I didn’t know who else knew or if others were being alerted so I didn’t discuss it. The last thing I wanted was to disclose something inadvertently as the rest of the family found out. I loved my father very much. We had a complicated family but I didn’t doubt that love.

I learned of his passing as my brother received a voice message in the middle of the night from my father’s wife. He called me immediately when he woke up and had listened to it.

There wasn’t much information in the voicemail but there is a certain logic to the phone tree of death when a family member passes. My brother called his mother after he called me. I called my mother. That was the end of our tree.

I did not get a phone call or other information but my brother has and it is likely I will remain at a loss for words as to how to consider my feelings about all of this. I can speak about it as I know that the parties concerned all know but what to say is beyond me.

The complexity of the social contract and our expectations of family ties has been ongoing for several generations now. Divorce and remarriage have been common in my living memory and the blending of families the norm. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s not.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1703 and Termination Shock

I have had a shock that is in reality not a surprise. The inevitable and the most surprising thing coincide rather often I’ve found. I imagine shock is as means reverting a phenomena as any.

All things are inevitable in hindsight. One can greet something as inchoate and far reaching as the Fourth Turning and still be a bit surprised to find it applying to you.

I believe we are about to find out a lot about our social contract soon. How the tensile strength of relationships hold under personal and national and global stress. If we are accelerating then any frictions on that process are going to sizzle and snap.

There is freedom to be had in future shock. Knowing you are repeating history and doing what you can to break the worst of it. Knowing no one can do any thing. That ultimately all any one of us can do is what we personally can do. She done what she could.

Categories
Biohacking Internet Culture

Day 1702 and One Shot Positive Results

I feel occasionally silly about how much I discuss the comings and goings of the internet and in particular Twitter.

And yet there is so much signal within the noise. It’s a fount of useful information that can rapidly transform your life if you pay attention to it.

One of the memes that I’ve enjoyed is the “one shotting” conversations both positive and negative. Recently the meta (as TPOT calls it) has been about the good things that have removed obstacles in their life.

Lots of good suggestions made up the conversation and I’ve tried all of them. Supplements like magnesium and Oxytocin. Theories of mind like the pathless path, jhanna meditation, somatic release, nervous system work, Alexander Technique, and even coaches like Joe Hudson. So many other modalities that I also use were there.

One of the one-shots mentioned was “unclenching” which has been doing numbers. I myself am trying to “do less” and even “no effort” as part of the minimum coercion effort as let’s be real my HRV (also a one shot) has been a little low.

Isn’t it delightful to be inside a set of good and positively reinforcing memes that make your obstacles disappear. I guess we should all be one-shotting so we can speed run reduced suffering.

If none of that is legible then consider poking about as it has made my life better and maybe it will make yours better too.

Categories
Media

Day 1701 and USS Enterprise (NCC 1701-D)

I have mentioned I’m a fan of Star Trek a few times. I am a genuine fan of the original series, the Next Generation and Deep Space 9 as well as many of the movies.

Gene Roddenberry pitched it as space cowboys but it’s become a template for entire generations for what competence in the face of the unknown should look like.

I’ll happily take either side in the Captain Picard versus Captain Kirk debates, because just as that fashion editor in Devil Wears Prada said about two superficially similar belts, “it’s hard as they are just so different!”

We are facing quite a bit of the unknown right now. Old hierarchies and expectations have changed. Or at least been revealed for what they are. We must ask what we owe each other and how we should expect ourselves to commit to a common cause.

I find myself considering the incredible competence both personally and professionally of the crews. I named this post NCC-1701-D for Picard’s Enterprise as that crew is famously a collaborative and high trust crew. Each one well developed with expertises professionally but also everyone was always trying new things and exploring new skills.

One of my friends accused me of having nerd “stolen valor” as I couldn’t have suffered for my affection for interests like Star Trek. Maybe it’s true girls don’t experience it the same way. Maybe I didn’t notice. I don’t think I cared. I’ll always be someone who sees 1701 and thinks “that’s the Enterprise!”

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
Medical

Day 1697 and Gut Brain Axis Misery Meets Peptide Season

It would seem I found an antibiotic that disagrees with me. As the tail end of my soft tissue recovery from my abscess surgery and deep tissue infection appears in sight I had a setback with an additional antibiotic.

Cephalexin was one of the top choices on the pathology report from the hospital and recommended as a first line treatment by the surgeon, several artificial intelligence differential diagnostic secondary checks and my primary care doctor.

They did not prescribe it first and I found out why yesterday when I felt as if I’d hurt a shoulder ligament doing, of all things, tai chi. I was despondent over it (ironically another side effect). The gut-brain axis gets weird when you kill off bad microflora.

So yeah not the antibiotic for me. As it turns out we recently learned it’s associated with tendon rupture. Not quite as bad as the other more infamous Cipro. Which ironically I was on with no issues. But Cephalexin has got some risks to tendons and ligaments too.

Being on an immune suppressant (an IL-17 called Bimzelx) for ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis has improved a number of biomarkers but also made me susceptible to skin infections. Like the kind that require slicing. Not fun.

Now in the wake of the deep tissue infection, we had a systemic MSSA problem. It was entirely rational to nuke that thing from orbit. Any resurgence needs maximum force to prevent chances for regrowth. You simply have to to be very watchful for side effects in all things now.

I feel like I’m in some awful healthcare version of pimp my ride. Pimp my diagnosis?

So I heard you had side effects so I gave you a side effect for that side effect.“

And so I’ve been sent down the peptide rabbit hole to see if that might help with tissue healing. My shoulder is probably fine as I stopped quite quickly but a reminder that I need to be watchful of what I’m taking and experiment carefully.

Naturally I’m already considering my risk profile carefully but as it’s peptide season in Silicon Valley (who isn’t on at least a micro dose of a next generation GLP-1 agonist or some new fangled GIP.

Why not add some more to the mix? Strong tissues and lean mass being protective against many a problem. Behold a little Grok breakdown of what I was recommended.

GHK-Cu (Copper Peptide)

GHK-Cu is a naturally occurring tripeptide (glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine) that binds to copper ions, forming a complex that plays a role in tissue repair and regeneration. Its mechanism in tendon healing involves several key processes:

  • Collagen and Extracellular Matrix Synthesis: GHK-Cu directly acts on fibroblasts (cells responsible for producing connective tissue) by increasing the production of mRNA and proteins for collagen (types I and III), elastin, proteoglycans, glycosaminoglycans, and decorin. This enhances the structural integrity of tendons during repair. Sources Sources
  • Angiogenesis and Nerve Outgrowth: It stimulates the growth of blood vessels (angiogenesis) and nerves, improving nutrient delivery and innervation to the healing site, which accelerates wound contraction and tissue remodeling. Sources
  • Anti-Inflammatory and Antioxidant Effects: GHK-Cu blocks the release of tissue-damaging free iron from ferritin channels, reducing oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation after injury. It also modulates inflammation to create a favorable environment for healing. Sources Sources
  • Systemic Effects: When administered, it can enhance healing systemically, even if injected away from the injury site, by regulating copper-dependent enzymes involved in cell growth and repair.

Research, primarily from animal models and in vitro studies, suggests these actions lead to faster tendon recovery, but human clinical trials are limited, and it’s not FDA-approved for therapeutic use.

TB-500 (Thymosin Beta-4 Fragment)

TB-500 is a synthetic peptide derived from thymosin beta-4, a protein involved in actin regulation. It primarily aids tendon healing by promoting cellular mobility and regeneration:

  • Actin Upregulation and Cell Migration: TB-500 binds to actin, a key protein in cell structure, enhancing cell migration (chemotaxis) and proliferation. This allows fibroblasts and other repair cells to quickly move to the injury site, accelerating tissue repair. Sources
  • Angiogenesis: It stimulates the formation of new blood vessels, improving blood flow and oxygen delivery to damaged tendons, which supports faster healing.
  • Anti-Inflammatory and Antifibrotic Properties: TB-500 modulates inflammation by reducing pro-inflammatory cytokines and preventing excessive fibrosis (scar tissue formation), creating a balanced healing environment.
  • Tissue Regeneration: In animal studies, it promotes overall wound healing and tissue regeneration, though evidence for tendon-specific effects in humans is anecdotal and lacks robust clinical data.

TB-500’s effects are mostly observed in preclinical research, with potential for muscle, tendon, and ligament repair, but it’s not approved for human use and carries risks.

BPC-157 (Body Protective Compound-157)

BPC-157 is a synthetic pentadecapeptide derived from a gastric protein, known for its protective and regenerative effects on various tissues, including tendons:

  • Fibroblast Activation and Migration: It promotes the outgrowth, survival, and migration of tendon fibroblasts under stress, enhancing cell proliferation and tendon explant growth in vitro.
  • Growth Hormone Receptor Upregulation: BPC-157 dose-dependently increases the expression of growth hormone receptors in tendon fibroblasts at both mRNA and protein levels, facilitating anabolic processes for tissue repair. 19 14
  • Angiogenesis via VEGFR2 Pathway: It activates vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR2), leading to the VEGFR2-Akt-eNOS signaling pathway, which promotes new blood vessel formation and improves nutrient supply to healing tendons. 22
  • FAK-Paxillin Pathway and Anti-Inflammatory Effects: BPC-157 activates focal adhesion kinase (FAK) and paxillin, proteins that regulate cell adhesion and motility, while also exerting protective effects against inflammation and organ damage. 24 25 20
  • Overall Tissue Protection: It accelerates post-injury healing in muscles, tendons, and ligaments, restoring function similar to uninjured tissue in animal models. 27 26

Extensive animal studies support BPC-157’s role in tendon and ligament recovery, but human evidence is limited to anecdotal reports, and it’s not FDA-approved, with potential unknown side effects.

Categories
Culture

Day 1695 and Only Knowing The Now

I let myself be swept into a rolling video scroll on Twitter accidentally today. You may know the awful dark pattern that occurs when you choose to watch a video posted by a mutual in the For You flow. It then sends you down a scroll of video content chosen by algorithm.

Typically it’s dross and I’m sure the account meant to show this particular video to me for nefarious theory of mind reasons but I found it enlightening.

I was sent to young African woman breaking down an epistemology of time in African religion and philosophy by Kenyan scholar and Anglican priest John Mbiti.

John Mbiti’s philosophy of time presents a distinctive African conception of temporality that fundamentally differs from Western linear time concepts…Mbiti argues that African time is two-dimensional, consisting only of the past and present, with virtually no future. – Perplexity Synopsis

Only present entities exist, while past and future things do not. Crimping from video and Wikipedia.

A screenshot of the video

Sasa (the now) and Zamani (the endless past) are the central concepts in Mbiti’s temporal framework.

Being western Protestant myself, lacking an epistemology or ontology for a “real” future that arrives feels sad to me, even if rationally I know I am only ever experiencing the now.

You can say I only “know” the “now” as it’s all I’ve ever experienced. We call this theory of time Presentism.

Sasa is now in Swahili. Which took me to a funny place as I thought of the use of sasa in the sci fi series The Expanses’s invented Belter creole for “to know.”

One can easily argue that all we know is the now which makes “sasa” as “now” and “sasa” “to know” easily bridged. I wonder if the linguist who created the patois knew this. Probably.

Sasa makes a mathematical sense to me as I live in 3 dimensions but know the 4th dimension of time to exist but only “know” time as “now”

Nevertheless I myself am quite interested in the future arriving. So I have put together a ham fisted Belter sentence of my own as I wish for everyone to experience more future time

“Mi sasa da future gonya kome. Me kopeng wedi da way long day”

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1693 and I Put A Spell On You

I went down a rabbit hole today with Screaming Jay Hawkins “demented” blues classic titled “I Put A Spell On You. You should really stop and have listen to if you’ve never heard it.

Considered one of the first pieces of shock rock, Hawkins performed while he “wore a long cape, and appeared onstage by rising out of a coffin in the midst of smoke and fogaccording to Wikipedia. Spooky!

The song took on a life of its own and became so iconic that it has been covered countless times by wildly different artists.

Nina Simone has a gorgeous version that sounds like a Bond theme with big band jazz stylings. Credence Clearwater Revival’s cover with Jim Fogerty’s intense vocals was closer to Jay Hawkin’s original. But it’s the signature rhythm guitar that transitioned so well to their style. They opted to play it at Woodstock. A year later the put out Bad Moon Rising which is even spookier.

There are more modern renditions of the song. Annie Lenox has a version which was included in the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack and took off. Even Marilyn Manson has a creepy drum heavy cover in his signature style that’s pretty good.

As artificial intelligence starts to spook people I go back to the early adopters who knew it would feel like magic to the uninitiated.

Decades ago we had communities studying chaos magick and popularizing Lovecraftian horror as a way of understanding computational processes.

Somewhere along the line, the magic of spell casting has became less metaphor and more literal. As people struggle to understand the technology stack the easier it gets to point and say these talking sand djinn computer chips sure demonic.

Gibberish cosmic horrors and witchy women spell casting are all fun and games until we have another moral panic on our hands. And I suspect spells become less metaphor for people and a lot closer to Neal Stephenson’s Babylonian memetic death cults hijacking available limbic systems.

Snowcrash is already here and it’s in Discord channels filled with those who have no immunity at all to the mind viruses of being perfectly mirrored by a machine.

What spells will we cast? What spells will others cast on us? How do we protect ourselves? Max Borders coined a term godwords. We will need to understand them in mind wars to come. I’m glad I have a couple decade head start.