Tag: Travel

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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.

Categories
Aesthetics Chronic Disease Travel

Day 1816 and Bedding Down

Having put no small amount of effort into preparing to be quietly away from the world for Christmas, I have made myself a very cozy in the chosen retreat.

Preparing for a closed world means I’ll have the freedom to close down myself. My body has been a bit up and down as it usually goes s these days so I’d like to log as many hours in restful response as I can.

Other activities I’d enjoy would be bathing in a warm tub, going for peaceful walks with no one around and reading for hours on end. Which seems manageable. It’s a time for prayer and contemplation.

My only wrinkle is the lack of available prepared food. I mentioned I’d be rather remote. And I did pack as much as was feasible

But if I can’t manage a few days of cooking simple meals like pasta and chicken that would be pretty sad. I’m lucky to have relied on that part of my life being handled by others as I do find the idea of cooking to be almost as tiring as the reality.

All of that moving around on hard kitchen floors as you juggle timers and fire is not a favored activity for someone with spinal issues. Still I’m optimistic if I stick to a quiet routine of reflection, rest and prayer maybe I’ll manage. Or perhaps a miracle will occur and I’ll be fed literally and spiritually.

Categories
Preparedness Travel

Day 1815 and Preparing for a Closed World

It’s unusual for stores and restaurants in America to close for a holiday. We’ve got rare cases like Chick-fil-A which observes the Sunday sabbath.

America don’t have national day of rest every Sunday like say Germany does. We have shift work and many faiths and nationalities so the days and hours off depend entirely on who you are and how you work.

Maybe it’s a woman thing but knowing a a day of rest in which the whole world comes to a stop always seems to mean an extra day of work. We must prepare for a closed world.

I’ll do loads of laundry, clean the house, do all remaining errands & shopping, and attend to the fuel knowing that if everyone is off then I must be particularly on. I’ll tap into my inner prepper and double down on my to-do list just as I do before storms.

Especially given my variable (occasionally fragile) health if I am to survive things being shut comfortably I need to put on my best Boy Scout act. Be prepared. I don’t care to pile on additional risk if I can mitigate it with a bit of work.

I used always shower before a storm just in case the water and power go out. Sadly I’ve lived through major disasters like Hurricane Sandy and Boulder’s devastating prairie fire. Nothing helps you maintain optimism in a bad situation like being in clean.

I’m thinking ahead to being somewhere a little remote for Christmas, where it’s unlikely that restaurants, gas stations or grocery stores will be open for the season let alone Christmas.

About the only thing within driving distance that will surely remain open is a monastery. Maybe if my preparations go well I can make a trip to visit with an offering to whoever else might come to worship in the far wilds.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Travel

Day 1800 and On Steroids

I’ve been on the move, and in wet, rainy, and polluted weather (in other words coastal cities) where I tend to do the worst.

It is frustrating to see nearly five years of work in my journals and tracking amount to very little in the face of wet moldy environments.

It’s not a terribly pleasant topic for day 1800 and makes me feel as if I’ve made little to no progress on moderating my immune system.

I’m particularly upset as it’s bad enough I chose a steroid course. I am too afraid of getting an infection. I loathe prednisone. It works so well. It is like a hammer on inflammation.

Prednisone crushes every inflammatory condition instantly. Red itching oozing welts in a matter of hours. But I can speak from hard experience that even though it stops a cytokine storm in its tracks, it leaves you crazy and fat in quite short order.

I am simply terrified of picking up a skin infection as I’ve had a doozy of a year dealing with them in areas delicate and unusual. It’s been horrifying to have issues with eyes, an incision site and abscesses in even more personal areas.

It seems safer to use the hammer before an area of open skin can be found by an invasive species just looking for somewhere wet and broken. I pray it was the correct choice.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1791 and Hack, Hack, Cough Cough

One of the oddest post pandemic norms we’ve come to accept are the hacking coughing fits we pretend are normal parts of public transit.

By public transit I don’t just mean just subways or busses. I’m sure they suffer from this issue as well.

But rather our most expensive version of public transportation, air travel, is riddled with passengers clearly infected with one variant or another of a respiratory illness.

Now I get it. It’s not cheap to fly. A cold coming on won’t stop you from going as you paid a lot to travel. Everyone is on the road trying to make their way to family, friends and community. It is hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to get from here to there.

So as you stand in long boarding lines where people queue seemingly at random in groups 1 through infinity, you see various flavors of sneaks, cheats and idiots bottlenecking the mess.

And then you hear the coughing, hacking, sniffing, sneezing and other variants of ignoring the body’s strain.

I am prone to skin infections rather than respiratory ones or this trend would worry me more. I generally don’t mask unless I’m stuck in tight quarters. Sometimes I wish I had. Dealing with Chicago and the sweating, panting, running, struggling human masses, I feel I should have.

You still see depending( on the city, its demographics and its politics, a range of mask wearing. The elderly are often masked. I see frequent flyers wrapped up tight in the good N95. There is quite a lot of masking and I think it’s a good thing.

Maybe these maskers know something. They must be used to persistent cold and flu season and understand some folks who don’t care about their impact on others. Masking must work well enough to be worth the hassle for some.

I hate to bring up the old awful politics of the COVID era, but we should have learned a thing or two from Asian nations who politely mask themselves when ill to benefit their fellow citizens.

Wouldn’t that be an impressive thing to see? Americans caring about each other’s welfare. If I have a cold, it will be because I was too stupid to mask up. But if I get a cold I promise I’ll mask up to avoid passing it on.

Categories
Travel

Day 1790 and On The Road Again

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving is a weird day for travel. If you could get the whole week off, chances are good you already traveled over the weekend. If you couldn’t swing the time off, you are probably running with the masses on Wednesday.

Those only taking one day off of work is a bit of a no man’s land for transit. I am oddly in that camp this year. For many years I worked Black Friday and simply didn’t consider any portion of the week a holiday.

I’m lucky that the Bozeman airport is one of the most pleasant airports in all of America. I breezed through security with a golden retriever puppy behind me and a chocolate lab puppy in front of me.

Part security you have gorgeous views of the Bridgers, friendly people, hilarious warnings to leave your bear spray behind, and a spot to get a wood fired pizza before takeoff that is actually good.

The woman checking my bag in said the record was 30 confiscated in a day but the most she had personally handled was 5 of them.

Even more exciting was finding I’d been upgraded to first class on my commuter flight. Sometimes you do just get lucky when you hit the road.

Categories
Preparedness Startups

Day 1783 and Good Days In Bad Times

I have spent a lot of time in various states of concern, sadness and frustration this year. Which is too bad, as so many incredible things have happened to me. We passed a right to compute law. Valar Atomics took “accelerate” way more seriously than most.

It’s hard to balance knowing the future won’t be anything like the past, but still having to make decisions made on that being the only data you’ve got. Engaging in governance and investing in energy seem like sensible ways of approach a strange future. Organizing energy is civilization 101 stuff.

I can predict a world with increasing chaos but how it will affect demand for things like energy, compute and decentralization are directional bets. You know it’s coming but how and when? And the downsides are hard to consider. Nobody ever thinks the entropy will apply to them but it’s already begun.

Every time future shock gets me I’m surprised I’m managing an imitation of Cayce Pollard at all. I’m practically a poster child for “sensible takes about various concerning challenges” as I get asked about various eccentric revealed preferences.

The Fourth Turning is coming about and we aren’t ready. I use short hand like the Churn, elite overproduction, The Sort and other minor terminologies and schools of thought to signal to others. I understand this to be my best way available way signal. But who knows as the humans retreat from shared networks it won’t stay that way.