The MilFred family household is not at its finest. My husband Alex seems to be in the throes of pneumonia while my body is doing its best to manage a host of medication changes.
We have all the typical work while this goes on along with a few other crisis management projects (mold). All dashboards flashing red.
I keep toying with posts saying I’ll have to consider if this is where the habit goes away or that I need some do not disturb time. This is certainly a big part of why.
It is in the nature of dysfunction to misuse resources. Something goes wrong and a system that once grew or self sustained finds itself in decline.
What to do? One can apply palliative care certainly. But you can go to the root of a problem and hope systems can be righted by bitter medicine.
I’ve had some degree of measured doom about topics like debt and monetary policy my whole life. I grew up with concerns of peak oil which turned to climate change. There is always a new crisis anytime we find ways to be resource constrained.
But we are resource constrained. That’s just a variable to be accounted for in the engineering of a solution. I care about energy. I mean it in the abstract as in fuel. But I also mean the energy I control.
I don’t have to expend expensive attention for all problems. Maybe becoming “do not disturb” is a scarcity mindset. But sometimes the poison is in the dose. And I want to keep pushing for better.
I am doing my best to remain steady. The world at large doesn’t make it easy. Every day we have a new crisis, impending doom and looming fascism.
I would be more inclined to reactivity if it didn’t seem much more important to pay attention to the actual problems over which I have some agency.
Some days that agency is used on frustratingly small things and others it’s the most fantastical science fiction come to life in our day to day reality. The indignities of human embodiment and the miracles of applying knowledge to problems exist in the same reality.
There is so much pretending and posturing in the process of pursuing any goal, it’s understandable that people mistake the symbols of things for the thing itself.
I’m writing this in the waiting room of the new hospital campus in Bozeman. We’ve recently had an outpost of the Billings Clinic go up alongside the highway between Bozeman and Belgrade to keep up with the growth in Southwest Montana.
It’s really nice and absolutely packed with people. The average age looks to be early seventies so it’s not a young crowd in the eye clinic.
The only other mid-life people besides Alex and myself is a prison inmate in a yellow jumpsuit and his two Corrections officers. I had half a mind to go ask him what he was in for while showing off my own deformity m.
I’m unsure if it’s a side effect of changing medication or just plain bad luck, but I have an infection in my right eyelid. It started about a month ago and looked like it was a simple chalazion.
It’s sometimes called an eyelid cyst or a meibomian cyst. It slowly forms when an oil gland (called a meibomian gland) becomes blocked. Cleveland Clinic
But over the last month it went from painless little boba ball sized lump to my entire eyelid being swollen. It got much worse this week especially as I started applying wet washcloths to it regularly.
They were able to perform an incision and curettage (don’t click through if you don’t want to see some gnarly eye stuff) as my discomfort was pretty intense. I desperately wanted it drained and they did not disappoint.
I hope this heals well and without issues. I fear this was complicated by the changes I’m meant to undergo in my medical protocol from one IL-17 inhibitor to another.
To soften any backlash in symptoms during the change I’m on another immunosuppressant so I’m particularly nervous about infections especially when it comes to sensitive areas like the eyes. I’m glad I was able to get this drained but I’m a bit nervous about how it will heal.
I hate to add fears that we will face a “dead internet” but increasingly we lack shared context in our online spaces. As context collapses so too does culture. Bad behavior proliferates.
Without shared values we cannot find purchase on the informational ravine of the open web. Competing narratives and interests buffet your mind as you try to sense-make your way into a firmer grip. It’s easy to slip and find yourself unsure of what is up or down.
The vibes are bad. People have entirely different interpretations when presented with something as innocuous as an email asking “what did you get done this week?” If you discuss a particularly contested space it quickly becomes a hostile information environment. Many retreat.
If you are tempted to argue with me about whether that action is in fact innocuous you have to wonder how far apart you and I are from each other as we try to climb through the great ravine to the other side.
I’ve not in one thousand five hundred and thirteen days of writing in a row set forth a m standard for how I might quit. Four years (or 216 weeks) is plenty of time to come up with a criteria for making a decision.
I have in that time embraced the haziness inherent in self trust. I’ll just know when it’s time. That’s obviously a rationalization. I assumed that circumstances would decide for me which meant I’d never need firm criteria for stopping. It would just happen.
Given my health and the general state of the world surely in this long timeframe some calamity, crisis or mishap would keep me from writing one day and that would simply be that. The chain would be broken.
It has not yet happened. No forcing function has stopped me from my writing practice. And I’ve not yet set worth anything firm about how I’ll know.
So far 2025 has tested me. There are many short posts. I have been hampered by health and home issues which sorely make me want to give up some days.
I’ve tried to included more sporadic “linking and thinking” to make my writing space more blog-like and less essay oriented. Backing away from narrative forms is a fine way of introducing flexibility into one’s writing.
I can’t help wondering if I should introduce a forcing function and create a set of criteria for when I’ll stop. But the truth is I’m scared to give myself a clear way out when I’m struggling. Perhaps it’s better to keep that trust that I’ll know.
It’s been a bad month for me. It seems like a bad month in general. But that’s February for you right? It’s a thumbs down kind of month. I’ve enjoyed the nonstop snow but we’ve finally gone above freezing.
As the sun melts down our power into icicles I’ll try not to dwell on the negatives.
Reading
The Brussels Effect or Denialism in Europe
Are you a Frankfurt School student? I certainly am. If you are, you may find John Ganz’s review of Alex Karp’s new book The Technological Republic to be an amusing read. His Substack also has some gems including this imagine of Adorno which I intend to use everywhere.
Watching institutional powers and public figures goes through the Kübler-Ross grief cycle as they grapple with technical and political change sucks. People are all over the place.
Institutional distrust from the public has America and Europe at odds just as our geopolitical position relative to China is most precarious. And yet this strange new world cannot possibly be coming. Having spent the last year in denial Germans have moved into anger.
Imagine what bargaining will look like as power shifts over the next few years. I’ve seen the depression stage already in technology as the shift in intelligence and computing washes over us.
I’ve come to acceptance only because I’ve got a head start. I didn’t look terribly sane at the time and now I am sitting pretty. Taking action while we grieve the loss of the world we knew is the human condition. If you can accept change is inevitable you might even start to enjoy the process.
I am seeing some progress in my various home and health projects. I’ve been doing my best to remain optimistic even though I was not feeling well and the sheer amount of changes required was intimidating. But I’m seeing low progress.
An industrial hygienist is coming to do an arm test tomorrow on our basement as well as the rest of the house to confirm the extent of our mold problems. Our hope is that it’s contained to the bathroom in the basement.
If we have to do a bathroom remediation that presents an opportunity to do some renovations. While exciting that is also introducing more risk. But you can’t waste a crisis right?
Stuff I Read
CoinDesk reporting on the Libra scandal in Argentina
Politico: Voters Were Right About The Economy
Epsilon Theory “It Was Never Going to Be Me”
I am pushing myself to continue with the daily writing habit even as I am on a rollercoaster of health and home challenges that have put me well on the back foot.
I want to rage against the symptoms, the system that can’t solve anything, and even my own body for being tricky. But that won’t fix anything. I’m need to give the new protocols the space to work.
So it’s one foot in front of the other. Whatever is happening out there in the real world I just need to put one foot in front of the other. Or if you prefer a meme. Just keep swimming Dory.
I’m doing my best not to get it get me down. I’m afraid of the setbacks. I am afraid of the length of recovery and the potential for things to be worse. But I’ll Dorymaxx. It’s all I’ve got in me