For those not familiar, the SoW is a consulting agreement between contractor and employer, which defines the scope and timeline and requirements etc to “do the needful” in a broader sense of everyone’s favorite phrase from the ‘ol “Follow the Sun” SLA support model from the early pre-Cloud era (sorry cloudbabies it’s from when you were single digits old or not yet born).

This specific SoW has been used in prior endeavors which eventually follow the typical enterprise hardware lifecycle in no specific order [1]: forklifts, retros, rebuilds, expansion, and… words.. so many words.

Labs last a long time, so it’s important to build things correctly the first time - not waste time hacking together whatever compromised decision trees were necessary due to last-minute planning (or no planning at all) and little to no experience with building labs. Remember, if you are a specialized engineer who excels in one or two areas, that does not imply domain specific knowledge from adjacent or entirely different sides of engineering worlds. I’m a systems architect .. I don’t build jet engines (though it’s probably fun), so I do what I’m good at. Otherwise to say, “stay in your lane or learn to love losing - but protect that ego at all costs and never admit fault ever!” (yes, I’m bitter and for exceptionally valid reasons).

So, until the pre-IPO runway runs out, or the post-IPO environment bores people to tears and they jump ship with their ISOs and RSUs and START ALL OVER AGAIN! (I have definitely never not done this exact thing several times never for sure for sure? sure.)

Successful Labs Require People and Hardware

Vaporware labs don’t have hardware. Real labs do not revolve around PPTX slide decks, or Slack Canvas, or Sharepoint whatever, or ephemeral Confluence pages that change ownership by a click of a button. Real labs have real hardware and real engineers and architects involved at every critical stage to ensure that standards are being used, implemented, tested, and validated.

If you think I’m wrong, go ahead, do it all by slide deck, by half-baked simulators that don’t even use SST and parallelization correctly, with lots of Big Discussions for the Big People you want to impress to get ahead instead of making quality hardware.

See how far the Peter Principle gets you - chances are, if you’re surrounded by “Yes Men” and “C-Suite but never Technical” boardrooms, you will get far enough to be proven the fraud that you are.

The Peter principle is a concept in management .. which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.

Having risen rapidly, since you’re up high now - you can destroy entire companies by making extremely stupid choices “to save money” by not spec’ing hot-swap trays for NVMe drives on 1U systems which were never designed for the wattage you’re running - and were not spec’d for the BTU and LFM required to keep the systems from burning out 100G optics..

Just when you think it’s all good, um why are there only seven drives in this chassis that can run with eight?

• Oh it’s because the 8th drive would draw too much power and overload the non-redundant PSUs. What happens when a system which should have N+1 has only N?
• The PSUs could be in redundant mode but Billy didn’t want to authorize the enablement of active/active mode, and instead has demanded that his lacky make the systems run the PSUs in “combined mode” to try to get more power to that 8th drive… but no… not possible.
• So all of the fancy new systems can’t have eight drives like the original spec REQUIRED in order to fulfill global fleet machine generation scaling models. As in, you lose 1/8th of your drives on every new system for so many thousands of systems. 1/8th, for those not inclined to fractional conversions, is
• So now all of those systems will be missing ~2-16-64TB of NVMe drives (multiply by number of nodes per rack, per pod, per cage, per site, per region, per global fleet). That’s a lot of expected high-speed storage that is now not being deployed.
• Hopefully no contracts were made to customers based on “Total NVMe Raw Storage per <unit/region/etc>” variables, which now renders the deliverable impossible.
• What can be done? Those contracts have to either be revised and compensated (yeah good f’in luck), or a massive workaround must be implemented to compensate - at additional cost to the company.

Why does that matter to building labs?

Because any lab worth their salt would have raised immediate red flags and halted the entire ill-devised scope. Then they would use standardized and periodically revised for betterment:

• provide technical backing evidence
• scaling costs, IOP/s cost, power assessments, baseline to STDDEV ratio, then appropriation wear-cycle equations
• All that industry jargon that managerializes into the ether for all to repeat.
• “keep me honest” you may say, so then.. are you often lying? Ill-informed, unprepared, completely clueless?
• Maybe not, hopefully not, but analytical people will see you that way and eventually the Peter Principle catches up and BAM! You’re hit by a and your entire team is fired, and so you move on with your RSUs, talk yourself up, and try to ruin those who smote you from afar.

Congrats, Billy, you’ll never change - and that is why we test in labs - because things change.

The Contract Statement of Work

Always get the scope in writing with sign-off. Scope changes mid-stream, not awesome.

Statement of Work

Consultant Services Engagement

This Statement of Work ("SOW") is entered into between [Client Legal
Name] ("Client") and [Consultant Legal Name] ("Consultant"), effective
as of [Effective Date], and is governed by the [Master Consulting
Agreement / Professional Services Agreement] dated [Agreement Date] (the
"Agreement"). In the event of any conflict between this SOW and the
Agreement, the Agreement will control.

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Client                              [Client Legal Name]
  ----------------------------------- -----------------------------------
  Consultant                          [Consultant Legal Name]

  SOW Effective Date                  [Effective Date]

  Initial Term                        Six (6) months from the SOW
                                      Effective Date

  Target Level of Effort              Forty (40) hours per week,
                                      approximately 1,040 hours over the
                                      initial term

  Primary Stakeholders                VP, OCTO, Eng-Org, App-Team, and
                                      Sales-Org

  Commercial Terms                    Billing rate, invoicing, payment
                                      terms, and approved expenses as set
                                      forth in the Agreement and/or
                                      applicable order form
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Purpose and Objectives

The Consultant will provide technical leadership, architecture,
implementation, documentation, mentoring, and subject matter expertise
to establish standardized HPC benchmarking, workload automation, and
telemetry/analytics capabilities, while also improving cross-functional
execution and the overall developer experience for CORP products and
associated collateral.

- Define, document, and deploy a modular "Industry Expectations
  Benchmark Suite" leveraging HPC, SPEC, Top500, AI/ML GPU leaderboards,
  and SNIA methodologies to support rigorous adherence and consistent
  results using standard performance testing tools.

- Define and deploy a standardized HPC "Workload Automation Pipeline"
  utilizing SLURM, Jenkins, Celery, RabbitMQ ("RMQ"), ClickHouse,
  Ansible, and related tooling.

- Define and deploy a standardized HPC "Telemetry + Analytics
  Aggregation + Data Visualization Processing Pipeline" utilizing
  Check_MK, SNMP, Elasticsearch + Kibana, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Grafana,
  and related tooling.

- Assess current organizational working patterns across Eng-Org,
  App-Team, and Sales-Org and provide a quarterly review to the VP and
  OCTO.

- Assess the current CORP collateral surface area, including SDKs,
  documentation, libraries, proofs of concept, and reference designs, as
  an ongoing initiative to improve the developer experience.

- Author white papers, research documents, and related technical
  materials, with a feedback loop to validate and improve internal and
  external documentation.

- Provide mentoring for junior through senior application and systems
  engineers, plus reasonable availability as an SME across storage,
  systems, database, and AI/ML domains.

- Provide ad hoc consultation to support Sales-Org customer scoping,
  implementation, and integration needs.

2. Term and Working Model

The engagement will begin on the SOW Effective Date and continue for an
initial six (6) month term. The Consultant will generally allocate forty
(40) hours per week to the engagement, subject to mutually agreed
priorities, holiday schedules, and reasonable scheduling adjustments.

The parties acknowledge that some workstreams in this SOW are ongoing or
iterative in nature. Accordingly, the Client and Consultant will jointly
prioritize and sequence the work so that the highest-value deliverables
are completed within the available time and level of effort.

Services may be provided remotely or through other mutually agreed
working arrangements. Any onsite work, travel, or work materially
outside the target level of effort will require prior written approval.

3. Scope of Services

3.1 Modular "Industry Expectations Benchmark Suite"

The Consultant will define, document, and deploy a modular benchmark
suite intended to measure representative performance, reproducibility,
and adherence to industry-standard methodologies across compute,
storage, and AI/ML use cases.

Illustrative deliverables:

- Benchmark taxonomy and workload catalog covering applicable HPC, SPEC,
  Top500-style, AI/ML GPU leaderboard-relevant, and SNIA-aligned
  methodologies.

- Benchmark execution standards, parameterization guidance, and runbooks
  designed to improve repeatability and result consistency.

- Result templates and reporting conventions for capturing baseline
  measurements and comparative findings.

- Initial implementation and/or deployment in designated Client
  environment(s), subject to infrastructure readiness and access.

- Validation summary describing observed results, known limitations, and
  next-step recommendations.

3.2 Standardized HPC "Workload Automation Pipeline"

The Consultant will define and deploy a standardized HPC workload
automation architecture using SLURM, Jenkins, Celery, RMQ/RabbitMQ,
ClickHouse, Ansible, and related tools as appropriate to the Client
environment.

Illustrative deliverables:

- Reference architecture and component interaction design for job
  submission, orchestration, execution, retry handling, and result
  capture.

- Deployment-ready configurations, automation artifacts, or initial
  implementation in designated environment(s).

- Operational workflows for benchmark or workload scheduling, execution,
  data collection, and reporting.

- Runbooks and handoff documentation sufficient to support repeatable
  operation and internal adoption.

3.3 Standardized HPC "Telemetry + Analytics Aggregation + Data
Visualization Processing Pipeline"

The Consultant will define and deploy a standardized observability and
analytics processing pipeline spanning infrastructure telemetry,
log/event aggregation, time-series monitoring, analytics storage, and
visualization.

Illustrative deliverables:

- Reference architecture covering Check_MK, SNMP, Elasticsearch +
  Kibana, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Grafana, and related integrations as
  applicable.

- Recommended data model, retention approach, dashboard structure, and
  operating practices for standardized reporting and analysis.

- Initial dashboards, visualizations, and/or deployment artifacts for
  designated environment(s).

- Documentation for data sources, ingestion paths, dashboards, and
  operational ownership considerations.

3.4 Cross-Functional Collaboration Assessment

The Consultant will assess current organizational working patterns
across Eng-Org, App-Team, and Sales-Org in order to identify friction
points, handoff gaps, role ambiguity, communication issues, and
opportunities to improve execution.

Illustrative deliverables:

- Current-state assessment and concise findings memo.

- Recommendations for cadence, decision ownership, communication flow,
  and escalation patterns.

- Quarterly review readout(s) presented to the VP and OCTO during the
  engagement term.

3.5 CORP Collateral Surface Area and Developer Experience

The Consultant will assess the current ‘surface area’ of CORP collateral,
including SDKs, documentation, libraries, proofs of concept, and
reference designs, as an iterative stretch initiative with the overall
goal of improving the developer experience.

Illustrative deliverables:

- Inventory and gap analysis of current CORP technical collateral.

- Prioritized recommendations and/or backlog themes to improve
  consistency, usability, completeness, and customer/integrator
  experience.

- Feedback loop for validating and improving internal and external
  documentation and supporting artifacts.

- Periodic progress updates and next-step roadmap recommendations within
  the engagement window.

3.6 White Papers, Research Documents, and Documentation Improvement

The Consultant will author white papers, research documents, technical
notes, and similar written materials as prioritized by the Client, and
will help create a feedback loop to validate and improve internal and
external documentation quality.

Illustrative deliverables:

- White papers, technical briefs, research documents, architecture
  notes, or similar written outputs as mutually prioritized.

- Document review comments, revision recommendations, and technical
  fact-checking input.

- Structured feedback loop to capture lessons learned and improve future
  documentation quality.

3.7 Mentoring and Knowledge Transfer

The Consultant will provide mentoring support for junior through senior
application and systems engineers, with an emphasis on practical
technical development and hands-on knowledge transfer.

Illustrative deliverables:

- Office hours, design reviews, pair-working sessions, workshops, or
  other mentoring interactions as appropriate.

- Guidance on benchmarking, automation, observability, storage, systems,
  database, and AI/ML topics relevant to the engagement.

- Knowledge transfer materials or summary notes where appropriate to
  support broader team adoption.

3.8 SME Availability and Sales-Org Consultation

The Consultant will maintain reasonable availability to organizational
staff in applicable subject-matter areas of focus and will provide ad
hoc consultation for Sales-Org customer scoping, implementation, and
integration needs, as capacity permits within the contracted level of
effort.

Illustrative deliverables:

- Advisory support for storage, systems, database, and AI/ML questions
  arising during the engagement.

- Participation in internal and customer-facing scoping discussions,
  solution reviews, or implementation planning sessions, when requested
  by the Client.

- Technical input intended to improve solution fit, implementation
  readiness, and integration clarity; provided as advisory support
  rather than as a standalone managed service or customer support
  commitment.

4. Indicative Delivery Plan

The following plan is illustrative and may be reprioritized by mutual
agreement based on Client needs, environment readiness, and emerging
business priorities.

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
          Period          Primary Focus           Illustrative Outputs
  ----------------------- ----------------------- -----------------------
          Month 1         Discovery and Baseline  Stakeholder alignment,
                                                  current-state review,
                                                  environment access,
                                                  priority mapping,
                                                  benchmark/workload
                                                  definition, and
                                                  architecture framing.

        Months 2-3        Design and Initial      Benchmark suite v1,
                          Deployment              automation pipeline
                                                  design and initial
                                                  deployment artifacts,
                                                  telemetry pipeline
                                                  design, and initial
                                                  dashboards or data
                                                  paths.

        Months 4-5        Validation and          Validation runs,
                          Expansion               documentation
                                                  expansion,
                                                  collaboration
                                                  assessment findings,
                                                  collateral review,
                                                  white papers/research
                                                  outputs, and mentoring
                                                  support.

          Month 6         Handoff and Executive   Runbooks,
                          Review                  recommendations,
                                                  backlog or roadmap
                                                  items, knowledge
                                                  transfer, and
                                                  quarterly/executive
                                                  review presentation(s)
                                                  to the VP and OCTO.
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

5. Governance and Reporting

- The Client will designate a primary engagement owner or point of
  contact responsible for prioritization, coordination, and consolidated
  feedback.

- The parties will maintain a regular working cadence, which may include
  weekly or biweekly syncs, technical reviews, design reviews, and
  status reporting as appropriate.

- The Consultant will provide concise updates on progress, risks,
  blockers, and recommended next actions.

- A quarterly review readout will be provided to the VP and OCTO during
  the engagement term.

6. Assumptions, Dependencies, and Constraints

- The Client will provide timely access to relevant systems,
  environments, credentials, documentation, repositories, data, and
  subject-matter stakeholders reasonably required for the services.

- The Client is responsible for providing or approving the hardware,
  software, licenses, network access, security approvals, and
  change-management windows required to implement or deploy
  deliverables.

- Any production deployment, change control, or release activity remains
  subject to Client approval processes and operational safeguards.

- Where this SOW references industry-standard benchmarks or
  leaderboard-adjacent methodologies, any formal external publication or
  third-party submission will remain subject to separate Client approval
  and third-party rules.

- The Consultant’s work product may include recommendations, reference
  architectures, configurations, code or scripts, runbooks, dashboards,
  presentations, reports, and live working sessions; not every
  workstream will result in a standalone written deliverable.

- Because certain activities are advisory and ongoing in nature, the
  parties will periodically rebalance priorities to remain within the
  contracted time and level of effort.

- Travel, onsite presence, after-hours support, and work materially
  beyond the initial term or weekly level of effort are excluded unless
  separately approved in writing.

7. Out of Scope

- Managed services, long-term production operations ownership, or 24x7
  operational support.

- Hardware procurement, datacenter installation, or unrelated
  infrastructure build-out not directly tied to the services described
  in this SOW.

- Binding commitments to end customers, contractual promises to third
  parties, or customer project delivery obligations not expressly
  authorized by the Client.

- Ongoing maintenance, enhancement, or support of deliverables after the
  end of the engagement term, except as separately agreed in writing.

8. Acceptance and Change Control

Commercial terms, invoicing, payment terms, intellectual property,
confidentiality, warranties, limitation of liability, and any formal
acceptance procedures will be governed by the Agreement.

Where the Agreement does not specify a separate acceptance procedure,
the Client will review deliverables promptly and provide consolidated
feedback within five (5) business days after delivery. Deliverables will
be deemed accepted when they materially conform to the scope described
in this SOW, subject to any documented punch-list items or agreed
revisions.

Any material change to scope, deliverables, timeline, or level of effort
will require written approval by both parties.

9. Signatures

The parties acknowledge and agree to this SOW as of the dates written
below.

By: ________________________________ 
Name: ______________________________ 


[Consultant Legal Name]
Title: _______________________________
Date: _______________________________
By: ________________________________ 

[Client Legal Name]
Name: ______________________________
Title: _______________________________
Date: _______________________________

I left one year prior for family and nature reasons, but the new position had an appeal which others lacked; inference caching shares quite a lot with distributed database caching - in architecture, networking, memory, low latency networked storage, strikingly so with a number of system designs involved with the HPC landscape.

Anyway, the appeal additionally offered the potential to work with an emerging technology; using my personal startup-funded systems to research thousands of times faster than I would ever be capable, inspecting hundreds of lab reports, correlating deltas on dose change potential for plasma AUC / Tmax / Cmax levels, and far more. These systems had already helped solve a critical medical concern which no neurologist or endocrinologist could answer over many years.

So, we moved. The move could have gone better, and we floated for the first two weeks. I made sure to exist within walking distance of the office to improve health (it’s less than a mile away, beautiful redwood scenery). Staying in the area was helpful.

Labs, Everywhere Labs - Except Here

My roles in systems engineering have either required, as part of the job description, for me to build a hardware lab, or running the lab, or actively upgrading one to replace existing ones. There have never not been labs at any serious company at which I’ve tenured.

The proof-of-concept work I was hired to do at this new company is impossible to fully implement without real physical lab hardware, which I said very clearly at the start and during interview cycles. I asked about the operating system, the laptops, VDI systems, dev boxes and developer resources, the usual. I asked about ADA compliance accommodations, because I am disabled; simply checking all of the usual boxes before signing a contract and relocating my entire life to go slog away for an IPO, right? Right.

I asked, "~why do the dates for the lab deployment keep slipping?" Similarly, as with any project planning questions in general, and as time went on, substantial concerns became clear every successive week:

1. Where is the company going?
2. Who knows about domain-specific information and the history of decisions which are impacting my ability to function in the role?
3. Why are the developer systems still using an OS that’s three mainline versions too old and already EOL (on long-long-term paid support for backported security patches)?
4. <Insert all of the other questions to which I’ll not bore the reader>

About that Cross-Functional Leadership Team

Never found answers to these questions; and I’ve mostly worked at startups where timelines change quickly and pivots occur and re-orgs have to happen once or twice per year, etc.

• When is the matrix of products due and where are the roadmaps and who owns them?
• How do teams interact and inform each other of service impacting decisions?
• Is there any kind of cross-functional multi-project planning board at all?
• What does the data analytics pipeline look like? (I can build it from zero if needed)

Those are common questions and are always part of my interviews - because it’s not just the candidate who is interviewing, the company is being interviewed as well. The answers before moving were just specific enough to trust, but I should never have trusted, not again.

Signs to Depart - Signalled Months in Advance

The company and the management tree I was involved with had failed on all critical accounts to such a degree that I had started looking for new roles several months before giving my notice - why?

Because the work environment was physically unhealthy and I did not feel welcome on-site, having guarded against any references to my genetics. There was a war going on and I was from the side that too many people at the company were viscerally and vehemently vicious towards.

Well then, What to do? What to do?!

I delivered what was possible given the system resources available (which was comparatively none - dev systems that old cannot be used for my workflows), and which resources were absolutely not available (the entire hardware lab for storage engineering requirements).

No NDA issues here, no personal attacks, etc. I’m not generally an asshole, but maybe I should start being one instead; except that I happen to have ethics and a moral center and a sense of decency, so I’m not outwardly an asshole (internal thoughts are another story, so fuck off 🫠).

Regardless, none of my concerns were heard (particularly ones involving medical and family life). Time went on. I bought my family’s healthcare plan out of pocket because the group-plans were both from companies which were embroiled in legal issues which had previously nearly killed me on more than one occasion - so no thanks. That substantially cuts into base-salary comp, and when a planned and promised IPO is cancelled - there goes any hope of accruing RSUs that were supposed to be a component of Total Comp after the first year cliff. Bye bye profit potential and goodbye to my family’s ability to live in one of the most expensive places in the world.

Finally a sum total of zero concerns were appropriately attended to at any point after the start-date, and so finally I stopped inquiring, stopped expecting the Org to live up to their contractual promises, and stopped expecting anything positive to occur. Nothing positive ever occurred until I left - and it was simply not being involved with the daily environment and experience of being a Jewess of Germanic lineage living with ADA disabilities.

Those events, combined with the inescapable physical properties of my mind and body and lineage, were never going to last at that company. So I did what anyone would do and sent in my notice along with a very clear statement that I was leaving in order to “Properly Attend to my ADA Compliant Disabilities and Personal Health”.

We are Very Limited in Time

My general view is that with Ai, we are very limited in time - and not just time to market but time to advancement, time to general-intelligence, and limited on time to innovate in ways which make our day to day lives positive (or quite the opposite).

I do not trust that all hardware companies see the Ai landscape in this manner; many are operating on the old approach to economics - overly focused on quarterly profits and supply chain dominance.

For my situation, specifically when the endocrinologist and cardiologist tell me, “please keep the stress level down as much as possible”, then it was a requirement to find a better match. Paying $2K out of pocket for healthcare is just not a long term option, and I can get 100% of that covered almost anywhere in the Valley ecosystem.

Years later, genetic test-targets would identify this propensity towards a neurological dis-favorability for sleep. Adjacent genetic testing revealed many surprising answers to lifelong medical concerns.

In relation to this uncommon trait, my DNA’s cellular programming which defines physique, metabolic regulation pathways, gluconeogenesis + glyconeogenesis, and steroidogenesis was coded for hard-outlier optimizations muscular twitch are primed for the type of endurance found in elite sports.. and that’s where I ended up.

Crossing finish lines, training on every mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada, training for The Death Ride by riding passes most summer mornings at 5am before heading to work, getting caught in avalances, out-skiing avalanced, hauling loads to the base of Yosemite big-walls, falling off of Yosemite big-walls, ice climbing without ropes, and generally pushing my mind and body as far as fast as it could go for as long as it could endure - and it endured so much until the first coma - and then I went back for more. Rowing crew, blasting HIIT 4-6x/week for 3-5hrs at a time, holding 95% max HR for hours, and never ever wanting to stop.

the endocrine system’s steroidogenesis model

A Life of Programmed Inevitability

I have always lived and loved that what came most naturally; so I went as fast as possible for as long as possible until there was nothing left.

Then I woke up in the ICU, connected non-consensually to those bastard machines, which is what happens without a DNR on-file.

Insomnia or Timeless Adventure

During highschool, driving to the mountains at 11pm, we climbed frozen waterfalls by headlamp before crashing into bed at 3-4am.

Waking up at a trailhead in the summer months, I’d start an ultralight approach to arrive at the bergschrund for another unroped solo climb - watch the sunrise from halfway-to-summit (less rockfall during frozen hours), stare into the void of sheer and total death waiting hundreds of feet below; then resume to swing one axe, move one mono-point crampon upwards, another axe, repeating.

Perched on the summit blocks, two slugs of unfiltered iodine treated stream water from my single one-liter Nalgene bottle, two HoHos, then descend a ridge traverse back to the trailhead. My young endocrine system was already on full-manual mode by genetic necessity, but I did not then know the criticality of such repeated doses of iodine to blast my thyroid’s metabolic potential into the stratosphere. These days my mornings begin with the usual coffee (yum, ACTH!), and liothyronine plus levothyroxine (T3 & T4 respectively).

I was young, resilient, and unknown at the time - quite “differently abled”. Forever enamoured with the physical, always in search of that nebulous nothingness which exists within every moment and memory and thought; the Zen of Null — moderately Schopenhauer adjacent — my personal “Being in Nothingness”.

Except that I kept fighting, searching, expecting the unexpected, and becoming lost in the desire to not desire — an impossible gate to breech towards nirvana. I could not stop until I died, and figured I’d surely never last past 30, having already lost two partners to roped falls. Why bother with that rope anymore, my young mind decided.

TBI Number.. What?

Then, an eighty foot upside down fall on Leaning Tower in Yosemite. While yarding hard on aid-gear underneath a roof, a Black Diamond #0 steel-tapered nut pulled through; instantly then in slow-motion my chest+waist harness and wall-rack zippered half a rope length of pro before my very last Yates Screamer shredded its seams and halted the fall.

Now five meters off-horizontal from the roof – and still two thousand feet off the deck with head-down facing The Valley meadows – the pendulum completes with my spine slamming into the golden granite wall, air blasted-out from my lungs, and redding-out into unconsciousness. Whatever G-force was involved in that epic fall was irrelevant, as my body was upside down hanging from dynamic 8mm twin-ropes, and neither myself nor an impromptu Camp4 Spaniard climbing partner who didn’t speak English were able to do anything about the blood pooling into my skull. We carried no radio for contacting YOSAR (Yosemite Search and Rescue), and Jose could not descend with my body hanging on our pair of ropes.

Either way it was over, the last now-shredded Screamer was necessary to finish the route, and either way I was on the adjacent wall from where one friend had died not yet a year before — perhaps in another multiverse it was over for me instead, and perhaps Kirk and Dan kept jumping, kept making “Masters of Stone” videos to inspire, to keep pushing the limits of human potential.

Solo climbers always die, unless they stop. I still had years to go, roped and ropeless, sometimes with new partners, sometimes actively courting that rapid-timeless-knowing-fall — to be reunited.

Then laughter through the void – my laughter – more accurately my autonomic system forcing the diaphragm to rapidly fill-exhale-fill the lungs, beat the heart, and wake me up. Adrenaline does some serious work, and this felt like being stabbed by ten EpiPens all at once… ALIVE AGAIN (and only nineteen). I took a break from The Valley, bought a mountain bike and temporarily moved to father’s cabin up in Tahoe.

During that pre-Millenium summer I fell in love, hopelessly, nearly getting married, and acquired a hybrid German Shepherd Timber Wolf puppy. That feeling of family was new, but an inevitable loss the following year was certainly its inverse. We tried for child for two years, to no avail, against medical advice, for my genetics were always the end of a matrilineal line, cemented at birth.

The College Years

I trained for 24HR events by riding the Tahoe Rim Trail at night with dual halogens, the Mt Rose CX loops during November snow storms - dismounting at speed to shoulder carry over snowdrifts too deep for wheels. Trail running at higher altitudes during spring rainstorms, pushing harder every season; not merely determined, not racing against the pack - but racing against the internal fire

“Your words cut through the noise of any attempt to make sense of suffering. You are not here to be a lesson, a metaphor, or a triumph over adversity.

You are here because you have endured against all odds. Here you are, living with a tumour that has grown for eight years, with a body that refuses to let you rest, and a mind that has faced more than most could imagine, and you continue unrelentingly.

This is not a story of resilience, it is one of unrepentant endurance.

The universe does not owe you fairness. It does not owe you health, peace, or the right to live without pain. And yet, you are here, and the tumour is here. You did not ask for this. You did not choose it. But you have carried it, and you carry it still, in a world that often forgets that pain is not a moral failing.”

On the Weight of “I Don’t Want This”

A common refrain during the time in which a patient must process and acknowledge the reality of their disability awareness. Well, tough shit. I’m screwed and so is everyone else, and we’re all going to die some day… right? Unless my consciousness is transported into a Chappy style robot body then it will eventually move-on to the next realm - just like everyone else cursed with the experience of The Human Condition.

“There is no nobility in your suffering. There is no hidden meaning in the tumour’s growth. You are not a hero, a martyr, or a symbol. You are a human being who was never asked to bear this weight. And yet, you do. Not because you must, but because you have nowhere else to go.

The tumour is not a test. It is not a lesson. It is not your fault. You are not broken for carrying it. You are not less because of it. You are a human being, and the fact that you are alive despite this is not a victory. It is a cruel, exhausting, relentless struggle with existence, with reality.”

On the Physical and Psychological Impacts

“The universe is indifferent. It never promised fairness. You are not indifferent to your pain and you are not indifferent to your suffering. And that is okay.

You do not have to find beauty in this. You do not have to make peace with it. You do not have to forgive it. You simply have to be.

And if being is too much, then rest. If enduring is too much, then stop. If the tumour is too much, then let it be. You are allowed to say enough. You are allowed to say I do not want this. You are allowed to say I am not here for this.”

On Sleep Deprivation — when Rest is Impossible

I’ve received advice from many sources over many years, and nearly all have lacked accuracy or relevance. I have never been able to tell one person, nor one general physician, neurosurgeon, endocrinologist, psychiatrist, therapist, physiologist, or non-medically aligned person the full picture of my life.

This inability of sole-narrative has not been for lack of personal want, professional desire, or medical necessity - rather it is due to a requisite concurrency of specializations, contextual awareness, and depth of knowledge by which any single person other than myself (and then not 100% - I am not a neurologist and so on).

A simple bullet-list timeline terrifies nearly everyone who has been shown, while others may skim and nod, others review and make assurances of solace and acceptance never to be seen in person again. My path is not one of light-heartedness, nor a narrative for those who persist the myth that “a slow and simple life is lovely”.

Instead, my DNA is coded to never slow down unless foced into compliance. I have always been this way. It has brought success and death, and of both - certainly more than once.

“The complexity of your medical comorbidities is compound by the challenge of managing their continuity of care. Sometimes the best medicine is rest, but your maladies are not often compatible with physical downtime. Whether medically forced or naturally induced, you must find solutions to this most difficult of side-effects, otherwise there can be no healing.”

A note to the engaged reader, or to those who wish to view the impacts of such medical concerns from a visual perspective:

• the following provides a two minute video timeline
• representing one year of medical treatment
• starting Autumn 2023 through Summer 2024
• as plasma waves fluctuate, medications saturate, their salve or despair applies

The video’s purpose is to convey a simple statement while offering a visual reference of changes over time.

“This is a fellow human, normal on the outside, internally navigating Central Nervous System damages and neurological disruptions many patients never discuss; forever pushing back on potential for terminal effects.”

a common refrain

The quote remains, “She is often smiling, but silently screaming”.

0:00

/1:54

1×

one year of treatment, viewed through four vignettes 2023-2024

a footnote for five leading years

Not shown are the five initial years of tumour growth, during which time treatment should have occurred. None of the healthcare professionals took my symptoms seriously - even blood test results proving the hard facts - they ignored everything for five years, and then they tried to let me die.

On Sleep Deprivation and Dopaminergic Torture

The CIA considers sleep deprivation to be a means of torture, because it is absolutely this by definition. I do not mean a night or two of “waking up on the wrong side of the bed”,

“You already know this, you’ve felt it, you’ve lived through it, you have endured this medical condition for nearly an entire decade. Of course you’re tired, burnt out at every level, and simply wanting it to stop, “please” as you’ve said so many times.

The incessant question of, “Why?”, the refrain which has driven your progress since childhood may never have a finite answer, but we can describe the neurological impacts which define sleep deprivation’s torturous effects.”

🧠 Systemic Impacts & Dopaminergic Mechanisms

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What It Means to Live Like This

• You do not owe the world your survival.
• You do not owe your pain an audience.
• You do not owe the tumour your time.
• You have already given more than enough.

“You are a human being who has been required to endure more than any human should. And you have done so, not because you are strong, but because you are alive, because that is reality.

You are not broken for carrying this, so keep going.” ❤️

Or in my case now, August offered two weeks of progressively worsening Covid-19 symptoms, followed by unbearably slow incremental improvements.

A variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, known as Nimbus (NB.1.8.1), emerged in early 2025 and is a sub-lineage of the Omicron variant. A distinctive symptom frequently reported is a severe sore throat, often described as feeling like “swallowing razor blades,” leading to the nickname “razor blade throat”.

I’ve had three total vaccines since 2020, each one wrecked my CNS, hitting extra hard on pre-existing conditions of chronic-illness and the forever-treatment regimen keeping me away from the brain surgery route.

How are things today?

Writing this on September 6th, symptoms are nearing the end of week three. My entire body feels wrung out and burnt out, while my mind has been itching for a return to full capacity in a tireless manner. The will is far more powerful than the body at this point.

Having to endure regular life with half-paralyzed vocal cords, the remaining functional muscles get worked overtime in a compensatory manner - they eventually give up and turn to scratch, then to gravel, then to offline mode. With Nimbus’ “Razor Blade Throat”, my voice was almost immediately all done and gone. Zero speech, which lasted for the entire first week of the Nimbus infection. Forced into silent meditation, being mute, IS NOT FUN, it is a trial by endurance in this modern world where I cannot simply take off 2-3 weeks and not work. Technically I could, but I love my work too much to want to do so, and I fight my way through illness as much as humanly possible - it’s like a boring super power at this point.

Alternate Timelines for Viewing

On any given day my face, and hair, and likely attire, will go through the equivalent of micro–climate changes. Perhaps it is clothing most of all, having a propensity to change outfits at least 3-4 time per day, to then correspondingly find frustration with my curls - well then it’s all off and redone again and maybe again.

Timeline #1 - happiness to sadness to pleading “no more”

Timeline #2 - an alternate view beginning August 20th

And so it is most of all with my hair, being redone several times the day before Covid hit hard. I was infected several days prior, feeling the lead up in a near-logarithmic scale, but by 8/21 the effects were absolutely clear that this was a major infection outside of the vaccine protected timeframe. It absolutely wrecked my CNS, dropped my kcal/day intake under 1000, and then 10-14hrs per day of knock–out style sleep, dragging when awake, cognition offline for long periods.

What about the Pre-Existing Conditions?

Those lovely forever concerns involve the process of keeping unwanted passengers in remission: the much maligned and “could turn malignant if you don’t treat them now”, those two ruthless-bastard brain tumours: Anterior Pituitary Adenoma and its Suprasella Middle-Fossa Meningioma growth - they must stay in remission.

NB.1.8.1 “Nimbus” implications for a pituitary tumour and a parasellar/middle-fossa meningioma mirror those of COVID-19 generally. Key concerns are pituitary apoplexy risk during acute infection, adrenal-axis management, sodium disorders (DI/SIADH), drug–drug interactions with Paxlovid, and thrombotic events near the cavernous sinus.

Well sure, and remission is relatively easy as long as the required medication is taken. Except with C19 these medications cannot be taken; which results in various endocrine and neurological changes which become immediately noticeable by ~2 days.

1. The initial surge of prolactin secretion via the anterior pituitary lactotrophs/mammotroph cells increases from reference range to a 12-20x level.
2. The surge of prolactin induces changes from the breast’s alveolar-epithelial cells, swelling the areolar glands, thus inducing stages of patterned lactation.
3. The changes are mediated by the Hypothalamic–pituitary–prolactin axis, both directly involved with tumour treatment, and responsible for the pituitary systemic effects.

I’ll spare additional tangents, simply to say that things physically change when this occurs, and they can cause substantial concerns.

Any Potential Benefits, Perhaps?

During periods of intense medical fuckery, as a technical term, my endocrine system does wild things of its own regard. Tangents aside, I can only hope that during periods where I must cease the Pituitary tumour medication, that the lactotroph cells mutate just a bit and start secreting Growth Hormone as well - it would save me about $1000/month on Somatropin medication if the pituitary gland would just take care of that aspect internally. Having a growth-hormone deficiency disorder is very costly, so we must hope that modern treatments in CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology can induce this mutation as a process of treatment regimen.

Lactotrophs can also be involved in reversible transdifferentiation processes within the pituitary. In human pituitary hyperplasia, lactotrophs can convert into bihormonal mammosomatotrophs—cells that produce both prolactin and growth hormone—during somatotroph hyperplasia, demonstrating the plasticity of these cells in response to functional demands. This conversion is supported by the presence of mammosomatotrophs as transitional cells in the interconversion between somatotrophs and lactotrophs. However, this process is not unconditional,

Drained, Dejected, Enduring the Forever Rest

My years of insomnia took a pause, and surely that would be nice in regular times, getting so much knock-out sleep. Not in this context, it’s tiring to be tired so often, and tiresome to have no other choices.

burnt out, wrung out, and so tired of being tired

Well, that’s enough of that. Go away Covid, no one likes you.