Maybe it was taking a Fluconazole after my doctor notice some tearing “downstairs” at my annual physical when he was checking out my surgical scar from July.
Maybe it’s that I am on my seventh session of hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and the results starting to compound. Protocols say it takes about ten to feel a difference and my full protocol will be sixty so I’ve got a ways to go.
Maybe it’s just the absolutely gorgeous fall weather filtering in the perfect amount of light for that ideal temperate middle ground of low heat and humidity that makes being outside a joy.
Maybe it’s just a fluke. But today I feel almost human again.
I felt joy in being the adult responsible for running the household today. I managed loads of laundry, housekeeping, a proper grooming session of my own body, a grocery run into town, a decent workout, and of course, time in the hyperbaric chamber.
My husband is still struggling mightily with whatever combination of infections, stress, and post-viral damage is ripping up his immune response. He is usually the one caring for me. But today I was able to care for us both.
Being a victim in your own life is a choice. We get dealt a hand of cards and we have a say in how we play it even if it’s a crappy hand. The odds being what they are you probably got dealt some bad cards.
I’ve learned the most about empathy from the men in my life. It’s not always true for women but being raised to accommodate is part of being the weaker sex. One need not always accommodate in life though. Sometimes their problems just not about you at all. And that is ultimately alright. Everyone hurts including you.
Of course it’s unwise to reinforce a victim mindset in people, but sometimes people actually just have been victimized, sometimes repeatedly and brutally, and lasering in on their small slice of responsibility just reinforces their pervasive sense of being totally alone. At some point you hope they look at their patterns and see if change is possible. But if they’re going to get there, it’s going to be because someone was kind enough to sit with them, believe them and hold space for them until they were ready. VividVoid
Letting someone see you in the way that they need to see you has its purpose. It’s a beautiful thing to sit quietly and let someone really blame you. Be disliked. Letting someone who has genuinely got shit going on just be furious at you is a form of empathy. Be their villain.
I’m learning to sit comfortably while being someone’s villain. If that’s what they need in their hardest hour I can be that. It’s not something you should give too freely but this is where boundaries are a blessing.
I’ve seen more men than women be capable of handling this kind of rejection. The empathy of not engaging. Let them be hurt. You can suck if they need it. I believe it’s a strength to cultivate comfort being the bad guy
Every parent learns to do it, anyone with responsibility for making a goal or a bottom line or a budget work knows that sometimes you just have to be the bad guy to make it work.
The parameters of all of that is hard and we are reworking our way through helping people overcome their hurt. We’ve let cultural expectations dictate so much.
Everyone is fighting their own hardest battle and if you let them be mad at you and don’t take it personally you just might help.
I love Carl Sagan’s Contact. I first read the book in my middle school years and was allowed to watch the movie starring Jodie Foster despite having a very limited “screen time” diet.
As I got older I was allowed to watch edifying science fiction and book adaption only if I had read the source material. Contact passed both tests
It’s a beautiful story of faith and science about on a radio astronomer who finds a signal from alien intelligence which kicks off a planet wide space race to make contact.
There is a scene in the film where our protagonist Dr Arroway is set to launch a machine which we humans do not fully understand but is presumed to be some sort of transportation device.
Just as the countdown nears zero, she loses contact with the ground team. Roaring machinery and turbulence drowns her voice as she repeats over and over “I am OK to go” until a blind colleague finally picks her voice out of the static. The capsule is let go. I won’t spoiler it.
I’m OK To Go
I had a little moment of being out of contact myself today. I am now the proud owner of a hyperbaric chamber but still getting used to the machine. Alex, watching me as I adjusted, communicated with me through the glass with gestures.
Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy has roots in diving as managing pressure changes is an important aspect of safety for underwater and high altitude work.
When diving you don’t give a thumbs up to show you are alright. Thumbs up actually means ascend. You give the OK sign to communicate that you are doing fine.
The “OK” hand signal in diving is formed by touching the tip of the thumb and index finger together to make a circle, with the other three fingers extended upward.
Even as I was a little dizzy and struggling to acclimate I was ultimately “ok to go.”
The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.
We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.
The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.
I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.
Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.
Someone acquired a new piebald
Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.
The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.
I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.
I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.
What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.
As I often do on transcontinental travel days, I wrote my post for the day first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how the journey would go so I thought “let’s post this early” in case things get hairy. And boy did it.
It’s a weird thing to complain about air travel on 9/11, but I don’t think much of the security theater we’ve accepted over the years did much to keep my transit safe yesterday. Twenty four years later we go through the motions of keeping air travel safe from terror because what else are we going to do?
In fact, it didn’t seem as if security was particularly tight yesterday so much as particularly incompetent. It was chaotic confusion everywhere from passport checks to boarding flights.
I had a Frankfurt to Chicago polar day flight, along with a positioning flight on each side. I went through a lot of security screenings and passport checks yesterday and stood in more lines than I can count.
In Frankfurt the lines were so long that even with planned two hour airport transit time, I was among the last to board my flight.
The “special purposes” line I begged my way into as my inbound was delayed by fog was glacial in its pace. It seems the new transit grift is wheelchairs. So perfectly abled people are now pretending at disability to board early and use special security screening lines.
It left wishing I’d registered my real disability as I attempted to run the two miles of the international terminal with suitcase and backpack torquing my spine so I wouldn’t miss my flight to Chicago.
Deplaning at Chicago I couldn’t even count the full set of wheelchairs waiting.
Add in enormous confused families using the special purpose line, who spoke neither German nor English, with 3-4 bags a piece and every sort of banned item from pocket knives to 1.5l bottles of liquids and I am shocked anyone made it through security to their flights on time.
I watched a foursome of black Arabic speaking grandmothers in hijabs and wheelchairs shouting at German security guards and their extended families as I waited for my turn. Their fierce attitudes did not speed anything up that I could tell.
I saw them 9 hours later gathering somehow even more checked luggage upon arrival in O’Hare. I’m glad my Global Entry let me pass them by at passport control as I did not want to be behind them again.
Not that I got through Chicago’s security lines unscathed. The TSA pre-check lines were four times as long as the regular line. Figuring I was well packed I could handle the normal line. Naturally I got randomly selected and unpacked basically everything
As I stood in my socks waiting for the agents to stop gossiping and listen to the only working agent explain to them that “yes that the ice pack was for medications so they can move this along” I got an alert on my phone that the conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk had been shot.
I wandered in a daze to the United club where I was denied entry. This despite booking a business class ticket for the entire transit through their own hub via their Star Alliance partnership with Lufthansa, I couldn’t use the club as “the last leg of my flight didn’t qualify.”
I knew this was possible as this last leg issue happened to me on my last transit through O’Hare so I’d bought a day pass ahead of time. But they weren’t honoring those as it was too busy. I schlepped to another club in the terminal where they were still letting in day passes. There I listened to scared speculation from two blonde women about Mr Kirk’s status.
Another hour later I made my way onto my flight to Montana. I decided to just jump to the front of the line as I was in first with seat 2B. If everyone is ignoring lines then it was irrational to keep trying to politely queue.
As the plane boarded it was all talk of Mr Kirk. A news alert crossed my phone saying he had been killed.
A gentleman was playing a video of stitched together angles of footage on his phone with full audio on. You could hear the bullet hit again and again.
The cabin attendant told him to turn it off, saying sir please have some respect for the dead. A few hours later, still living, I made it home to Montana.
This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.
Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.
But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.
I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.
The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.
It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn
There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.
The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.
Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.
“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling
Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.
One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.
I like to manage my days with buffers around my routines and obligations. I find tight schedules to be tiring and unhelpful as I manage my energy, pain, and workload. A packed calendar raises my cortisol.
I believe I am easily stressed by shouldering too much, but I also fear I am on a downward health trajectory which will require more time, energy and effort. I am beginning to contemplate reworking my style of effort management as conditions on the ground change. Can I schedule my way out of a spiral down? What is my Pareto optimal plan here?
My 2025 has been significantly worse than my 2024 and an almost entirely different realm of issues than I faced prior to that. As I compare, 2022 and 2023 were entirely different worlds than my 2025. I thought I was pretty sick then but improving my inflammatory markers has nuked my HRV & stamina.
The stress of a permanently lowered baseline of biometrics makes me feel despair even as I have new tools at my disposal to mitigate them.
Will my whole life be dedicated to the care and feeding of my broken body? Is that something I can live for instead of simply living with?
I just don’t know how much effort will be put into managing this new baseline and what the effort to reward ratio looks.
Is there a Pareto principle I can apply to permanent disability which I can, and maybe even should, emotionally accept? Or do I soldier on hoping that my middle aged body may repair itself if I do absolutely everything right? And what am I doing all of that for?
It just seems as if no matter the time management, advanced medical care, constant research and daily effort I only get worse. I’ve been under a scalpel three times this year.
Each time I think I have found a new drug or treatment modality I am quickly slapped with second order side effects. And then those side effects have new side effects as I treat them.
It’s the pimp my ride recursion of biohacking, but instead of liking a thing and adding it to my car, I’m adding more and more mitigation measures to manage the results of the biohacking.
Any positive aspects of my year (passing the right to compute bill into law, progress in my startup portfolio) seems pale in contrast to emergency surgery, slow burdensome recovery and the arrival of mortality. I’m only at the halfway point of life (and a little bit past that for the year) and I feel done in completely.
I try to give my own slight biological grey matter processing power a run every day through this writing habit.
I try to move my own body with walking, weight lifting and other condition so it can stay a somewhat workable machine. Tuning my body requires more work than tuning my mind as my brain rarely gives me issues but my tissues are always in some stage of revolt.
I have other assets behind my mind and my body. I’ve purchased a car. Precisely once and I have looked into buying others and shied away. My home doesn’t need to do work beyond housing me and my “disposable and durable” goods which range from a tractor other home appliances. A few of them do produce things for us like keeping our land and our laying hens.
We’ve got a gorgeous solar grid that generates electricity we can barely use. It goes into Bitcoin mining and stacking and running utilities but I’ll admit in a little lax about putting my our existing compute to work.
I’ll admit this is pretty stupid as we invest in crypto, we invest in hardware and energy, and we have invested in compute and inference networks. So why am I not doing more for passive yield on this?
Humans have been working as inference machines since we decided to keep records with something beyond the digits on our hands and the foot of our feudal lord.
Counting and abstractions being necessary for all sorts of engineering feats from cathedrals to graphical processing units. And now we have inference tokens just waiting to be brought down in cost as we bring networks online. So I am setting up my compute to be a part of those networks because sometimes it’s good to focus on little resource allocation problems to take your mind off tbh fe.
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).
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.
