Tag: Travel

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Culture Travel

Day 1837 and No Pot To Piss In

The power went out yesterday while I was packing for the next leg of trip I’ve been on. It’s not the digital nomad age anymore obviously but it is the era of IRL reality grounding.

Being in constant contact with different markets and different cultures is a just another iteration of being in the moment but for making your life.

Being small enough that few of my interests interest the powers that be yet lets me be nimble in how I live (even with my health challenges or maybe because of them) so I’m driving up through Albania and Macedonia into Greece today.

At the moment I’m fascinated by the old Soviet capital folks ways from Tallinn to Tirana. I was in Sarajevo for New Year’s Eve.

I feel called to learn more about the people and places that found the brutalism of collectivism a worthwhile trade from the lives they had been living. I’m sure most of them didn’t realize the violence involved but survival can call for more than the civilized man would wish.

What does that mean for our future and who decides it? Will our young people feel similarly? It seems some already do despite much better conditions in America than I saw today as I drove through snowy bedraggled roads and abandoned industrial buildings.

The cold sun on snow and an abandoned factory with my hands visible in the passenger mirror.

The horrifying reality of modernism (and the war machines that came with it) must have baffled an ordinary person. What use has a farmer for state capacity and constant politicking?

Status hierarchies seem more acute now than I can imagine they were for the average person during the height of communism. Survival in the cold is a more understandable motivation than craving Instagram lives.

I stopped to gas up in a mountain town petrol stop. I asked for a bathroom. I was prepared for a mess but found it was simply a hole in the ground. As I attempted the hiking squat of a woman over the drain, I understood what “no pot to piss in” meant as I shivered in the frozen snowed in town.

Some material realities can certainly push you to consider if we can do better for people. Especially when I saw the bill. Gas is at a low in America and still fuel is apparently quite expensive in the semi-socialist European domains. 1.1 Euro per Liter for LPG. Sheesh. Who is that benefitting?

Categories
Preparedness Travel

Day 1836 and Lights Out

I’m packing in one of my favorite small countries in Europe to head to one of my favorite cities just a little bit further East.

Alas the weather has been very dramatic this week with strong downpours, gusty winds, and flash flooding. The city I’m in is rapidly becoming a major hub but still has issues with drainage and paving.

Just about fifteen minutes ago the power went out in the entire block as a burst of thunder and rain came down. It may be more of the city but I can’t yet tell.

Luckily for me I’d just had a Wolt delivery arrive with my meal and groceries for the trip. I’d made a point of freezing extra ice packs for the pop up cooler so my food should be fine.

Because I’ve been a tad paranoid about the weather’s impact on grid stability, I have made sure my electronics were charged and ready including my power bank.

I’ve gotten into the habit of carrying tea lights with me anywhere I go along with purchasing a lighter on the ground wherever I go. I also always have with me a powerful flashlight so I’ll be fine as night falls.

I even downloaded the latest episodes of my favorite silly reality television show Love is Blind.

The only rule I didn’t follow was making sure I’d showered and cleaned up the remainders of laundry and other things like dishes. Hopefully it won’t matter and the lights will come back on.

If not well I am posting my daily writing now in case I lose the capacity to post as obviously I have no internet but I still have cell tower service. Those tends to go down once their batteries run down and I’d hate to lose a day in my five year routine because I didn’t plan ahead.

Categories
Politics

Day 1828 and Collective Warmth

I feel lucky to have acquired an education that taught enough of totalitarian history that I feel I can paraphrase Walter Benjamin.

I’d used to say well we all know “fascism is the aestheticization of politics” because academics helped me to be skeptical about theory and Marxism.

Benjamin saw the logical result of fascism is to introduce aesthetics into political life. A hundred years later we have cultural war politics to serve as spectacle instead of transforming material conditions.

So I’m exactly the sort of person who came to the end of Gramsci’s Long March and wanted to understand Frankfurt School academics viscerally. I like to be on the ground when I learn.

So I am horrified to have spent my New Year’s in Sarajevo only to see a socialist taking on the mayoralty of America’s most important financial center.

To go from seeing the history of a hundred years of European continental war to watching bratty millennial nepotism play act at collective action is frankly not a positive development.

Millions of Europeans did battle with communism and in America we are so coddled the swearing in ceremony of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor is celebrated.

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. – Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address

If misery loves company then we should all suffer equally is a less aesthetic way of saying we are all in it together. Or as Sebastian Junger said “It was better when it was bad”

Categories
Chronicle Travel

Day 1827 and Year 6 of Daily Writing Begins

I didn’t feel like writing yesterday. That’s a weird way to start a commitment to a sixth year of writing every single day in public on this blog. I do intend to keep writing daily.

Maybe I should restart. My life was so full on the last day of the year, that the writing I had intended on doing on the last day of year five I simply couldn’t do. I fell asleep. It’s alright I had a beautiful synopsis of the emotions of the experience even if the links didn’t get passed may.

I felt the urge to sleep come on so strongly I wrapped up with a few “oh that happened too” sentences and I was out. Poof! Exhausted. Thankfully fireworks woke me up at midnight so I could ring in the new year.

I was midway into May doing a “best of” round up review by hand when that sudden “consciousness loss is imminent” feeling hit me. I’ve been driving the Dinaric Alps on an adventure that ended up in Sarajevo. I am sure I’ll write about the experience soon.

But now I have a meal and some unpacking to do. My 2026 is off to an interesting start. I’ve crossed three borders today. You can see how I might be tired.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Medical Startups Travel

Day 1826 and Some Best of 2025 Selections

Yesterday I wrote about the experience of my daily writing experiment rounding out its fifth year. It’s been a fun and often emotional journey that I find hard to fully capture. But I’ll attempt to list a few of my favorite posts of 2025 on the last day of year.

Healthcare and Biohacking

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

Day 1468 Deciding to Go HBOT and Starting HBOT

1567 and Turkish Medical Tourism

1565 and Elephant’s Eye

1560 and Getting an HBOT

Day 1517 and Blink Blink (First Incision of 4 Scalpel Incidents in 2025

Day 1503 and Managing Healthcare Projects from Mold to Hyperbarics

Startups

Day 1486 and Is There A Tech Right

Day 1510 and Turning Valar On

Day 1542 and Future Blind

Day 1572 and Reskilling

Media

Day 1485 and A New Pogue at The New York Times

Day 1581 and Lecturing at UC Boulder on Renegade Futurism

Day 1569 and the sky above the port tuned to a dead channel

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

Politics

Day 1484 and Montana’s Right to Compute Bill

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

Day 1578 and Dark Start or Energy Realism

Day 1576 and a NatCon Boomer Kicks a Townie Millennial Out of Their Hometown

Trends, Cultural and the Academy

Day 1484 and Zoomer Identity Violence Trend

Day 1479 and Liminal Industrial Transport in an Empty Frankfurt International Terminal Pod Hotel

Day 1580 and Learning By Doing or Embodied Learning for Humans

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

Day 1555 and Modern Machiavelli

And I got to about May and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to put more into the organization. I had 4 medical procedures involving surgery. My father died. My best startups all raised rounds to scale. You can find your own way from there. It’s been a hard year despite the wins.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1823 and Poor Percentages

I don’t know how much to trust my Whoop or Apple Watch at the moment but they agree that I’ve not had very good restorative sleep for a week or more.

I’ve never been the best sleeper and I sleep poorly when I’m on the road. I’m in the single digits for both REM and deep sleep percentages at the moment. And I seem to be spending a bit more time than I recall being awake at night.

There is something strange about being told by some electronic device monitoring your every move that you were wide awake when you don’t remember even a little bit of it.

I’ve been changing hotels and Airbnbs regularly as I make a pilgrimage across a strong mountain towns, so it’s possible I am unable to feel safe and secure enough to sleep deeply. But I’m suspicious that I’m awake as much as either device claims.

These are some bleak sleep times and I swear I wasn’t awake for 30% of my night. If I was awake you’d have seen me futzing about on Twitter. Well, at least I’d have read a book till I feel back asleep.

There is something up with my rest that makes me feel like I need to stay put for a litttle bit and get in a proper night of rest. My Whoop is showing me going from a more typical 4 hour range of rest down into the “wide awake” range of the Apple Watch over the course of the week.

And the Whoop seems to think I was awake as much as the Apple Watch did last night so I might need to accept that my brain is stewing in some toxic mix it’s not flushing through the sleep process. It also thinks I was in bed for over 10:30 hours but got barely a wink of proper sleep. My wake time was 30%

I’m going to take a break from the road trip and stay in place till I get my sleep repaired a bit. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to manage.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1822 and Frozen Mountain Time

I feel as if I somewhere between time and place as my present requires so much focus. My body and my mind are some distance from my soul though and I cannot seem sync up the sum of myself.

I spent much of yesterday at maximum attention as driving along mountain roads of variable quality requires focus. My body needed my mind on the job. My soul may have hidden itself away inside as I silently prayed the road would deliver me safely.

I’d enjoyed a few days of safety and quiet for Christmas and am now off on adventures that might be a bit more than I can handle. Crossing borders atop mountain passes is a bit of an adventure by any standard but add in ice and it kicks it up a notch.

Ice storms

I’m a little lost and potentially overwhelmed in my adventure as the logistics of making it from one city to the next becomes bogged down in challenging weather and road conditions.

Hotels aren’t quite as readily available as I’d hoped, nor are they priced for adventure. Between Christmas and New Year, it would seem everyone books ahead of time.

It’s one thing to toss a few Euro or dollars on a Best Western, but quite another to find yourself scouring Airbnbs on the mobile app as sundown nears and all you can see are $600 a night rundown flats. Inflation they say. Opportunistic nonsense perhaps.

Because really who wants to pay that much for a middling apartment in a small city just because you happen to be driving through on New Year’s Eve?

From the Alps the Rockies, variable pricing pops up at the worst times. And in principle I’d rather not book it. Maybe frozen mountain time should be enjoyed with a nap in the car instead.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1821 and All Stages of Water

I finished a seven hour drive through weather so moody and inconsistent I felt it’s changing by the hour. 

The day began sunny and bright but as I climbed into higher elevations, I quickly encountered what felt like every state and format of water in quick succession. 

Fog turned to drizzle which began to pour as rain which froze to the trees in sparkling ice till finally snow began falling. 

My intention had been to reach a remote nature preserve in the mountains known for its views but also the switch backs and hairpin turns required to make it up (and down) the elevation climb. 

I left as early as I could muster given the 4pm sunset that comes this close to solstice. I didn’t want my last climb up the hill to be in the dark. I barely made it by sunset.

Categories
Chronicle Culture Travel

Day 1820 and The Christmas Story Is About Systems of Record

The Christmas story is almost too layered to with truth to hold any but universal mythic truths this far from its historical origin.

We hear parables of the unexpected guest who arrives late at night seeking shelter. We are taught about the faith we must have in our families even when they ask us to believe in the impossible.

But today I think of how even two thousand years ago, Christ’s birth was a story about record keeping and census taking.

The Gospel of Luke (2:1) says Caesar Augustus issued a decree that “all the world” should be registered, so “everyone went to their own town to register.”

Imagine putting a pregnant woman on a donkey just to be sure you’ve got the proper tax regime in place. Empire is as Empire does.

In America the census comes to you. In Rome the census journey was the means by which Jesus’ birth occurs in Bethlehem, aligning the birth story with messianic expectations.

Death and taxes being the only reliable thing under the sun, I’d probably want my system of record keeping for a miraculous birth to be tied to such reliable means. Even then history isn’t quite sure about this specific census.

Why am I thinking about systems of record keeping on this holy day? Well I suppose it’s because on religious holidays days I have the space to consider what our future systems of record may be and how we will weave together the miracles that may show us the future of who we are to be as humans and as Christians.

Accounting and record keeping are relatively new inventions in the grand scheme of human development. Tribal knowledge assumed we could keep track. Empires needed a bit more structure and a lot more systems of record keeping.

What will we need as the nation state change and reform and the empires of this century are formed more by context graphs and nodal pathways than census takers and taxmen?

We are reinventing the living records of decisions we once traced through men of power and means but are now stitched through corporate entities, personal trusts, accounting norms and our attempts to find sources of ground truth we can all agree upon.

Trust and power dictated that in the past but now we need new ways. We must explain not only what happened but how it happened and verify it across decentralized systems in open systems even when much of our knowledge is tied in closed systems and protocols whose rules we’ve never fully articulated expect to a few high priests how they run run.

Technical documentation becomes precedent as Jay Gupta of Foundation Capital said in a thread. I bet he didn’t expect that to end up in a Christmas story either. Funny how life and history works isn’t it? Merry Christmas to us all. And may the day bring you tidings of great joy. Or at least a protocol handshake that is a bit easier than heading to Judea by donkey.