He is looking down at the belay, staring into mein stricken augen blaue, then with a booming gutteral force of air his voice explodes with “ROOOOOCKKKK!!”; the call to arms of that universal activator which says, “fucking move now!” - to which one’s autonomic system - that complex network of neurons and axons governing every cell goes into overdrive, with norepinephrine and adrenaline blasting through dopamine’s enzymatic conversion to maximize the “Fight or Flight” instincts which must be concurrently acknowledged by higher-order consciousness while not succumbing to bullshit that will absolutely get a climber killed - reactive-only-action.

Reactive response exists in contrast to a specialized and challenging to acquire-adapt-improve skill set which allows higher-order consciousness to shunt autonomic signals via a process of sensory-aware sensory-fuckoffedness cognitive control mode - the name of which might not have a formal name at all. It’s simply what I learned while climbing mountains without ropes and not trying to die; so maybe it’s called the "Try Not To Die Method of Getting High"

Dopamine is converted into norepinephrine by the enzyme “Dopamine Beta-Hydroxylase” (DBH), which is located inside synaptic vesicles. Conversion occurs after dopamine is actively transported into the vesicle, distinguishing it from earlier synthesis steps which occur in the cytoplasm.

Norepinephrine is then converted into epinephrine (adrenaline) by the enzyme “Phenylethanolamine N-Methyl-Transferase” (PNMT).

This final step takes place in the cytoplasm of chromaffin cells in the adrenal medulla and requires S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) as a methyl donor; PNMT activity is induced by glucocorticoids.

It’s an electrifying sensation as the mind detaches from space-time to operate in a slow-motion rapid response. Every moment, every unit of time, concurrently experienced in its duality - rapid movement in slow motion; if you know, you know, otherwise words will do this no justice to describe. Everything is now, and that now is perfect, and that now never wants to let you leave or vice-versa. It is not reproducible in a lab, or a capsule, or ETOH bound liquid.

Try as I might over the years to reproduce it via neuropharmacology it remains mostly (though not entirely) elusive; bothering with this only by the time I was no longer able to climb, nor to ride, row, ski, or engage in any of the momentums which have tethered me so strongly to this thread of existence. That thread is slipping now, faster, with one trajectory ~ and I am no longer roped.

That state of now existed in moments hard fought, sometimes not won - but in retreat to safer conditions - a battle that exists in the mind, driven by the body, always coming back for more. Why else would two people rope up to climb a “wall of rock and ice that did not exactly need climbing”? It was not for food subsistence, nor tangible profit, but for health - not “have a whatever every day for cardiac health” - for health of the mind and body. To experience that leading edge from start to finish, in slow and then fast and then into the now of tunnel-vision focus; where nothing else mattered, the vertical calling.

Not Interested in Outpatient Care, the Treatments Don’t Work

This level of time-aware physical detachment, amplified cognition, boosted sensorial awareness, is perhaps the most beautiful psychologically addictive “in the good way” states of being to experience. Definitely better than the morphine drip in the ICU, the Dilaudid drip in some other ICU, better still than the Fentanyl patch during the months of long term outpatient recovery. I don’t want numbness; I don’t want death; I just want to be back on that wall.

ROCKFALL! MOVE! NOW! FASTER!
Brace the rope-holding shoulder to the wall, lock the rope-holding hand downward, set two foot-holds active, ensure three points of contact, and never let go of the belay rope - even if you’re using a GriGri style auto-locker. With a hard slap the rope’s little slack slams upward, grinding your rigging; tight quickly means the first piece held, snapping staccato means pieces are pulling out. Screaming upward after a moment, “FINISH THE FUCKING PITCH already, my ASS IS FUCKING FREEZING here!”

More rocks, more ice, keeps falling from above. His booming voice still echo’ing into the canyon in near-total darkness, the response in jest to my demands. With the sun still an hour away as we climb by headlamp, this is taking both more and less time in some sections than I had planned. The moon departs as the sun inches towards relevance. Tapping hammers at the final belay at twenty eight hundred feet, only one rope-length to go.

I lead calmly into the darkness, the “Great Unknown Yet Known”; we’ve been here before, a life of endless striving, yearning, never courting death, never to consider that it would come quickly. Then he died; not while his limp body slowly spun - still roped in the November breeze, and from those ropes he was retrieved, dying inside the Life-Flight rescue helicopter as it took his blood soaked viscera to wherever - no one survives a fall like that.

Neck Strained Skyward as Gravity Induced Andesite Impacts

Towards the rigging, towards exposed hands, rock and ice are falling at terminal velocity. Those rapid muscle-memory actions I’d practice in the dark with eyes closed as a teenager (first a figure eight, then a double, then a clove and prusiks, memorized actions hundreds of times over and over in the dark, and other knots with time).

Jolted back to the present, with immediacy I watch these hands move with trained-instinct, rapidly lashing axes to the wall. The “too large for now” chunks of October’s volcanic ash-stained ice smash into my helmet, shattering into the nothingness of the void below. Had I known the trajectory then, I would not have come home that day.

CyberKnife is a non-invasive, image-guided stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) system that uses a robotic arm to deliver high-dose radiation with sub-millimeter accuracy.

Key advantages include not being a “let’s shave part of your beautiful curls and cut a piece of the skull off, and then dig around till we find all the bad stuff!” type of treatment.

• Non-invasive radiation with no incisions, anesthesia, or recovery time.
• Fewer sessions, typically 1 to 5 visits, compared to 40+ for conventional radiation.
• Outpatient procedure allowing patients to resume normal activities immediately.
• Effective treatment for inoperable or complex tumors previously considered untreatable by surgery.

To Live and Die and Live Again

I am not a proponent of the concept of Free Will. I’m not exactly “against it”, as that lacks ontological accuracy and is slightly confusing, rather my experiences have defined limits which lead in fractals, concurrently, threads converging occasionally, splitting again.

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.

The relocation process was not originally planned for anything except a single move from California to Washington. In nearly equal parts this was for a change in medical care and for family proximity.

After an unexpected economic event occurred, partially a result of Washington state’s tragedy of a medical system — somehow more broken than in California, the sum of external forces imparted a requirement to take a very nice job offer in Chicago. Events occur, the new medical care is amazing and “omgosh this long period of intense treatment is coming to a close!” And then it did not, but was paused, resumed, paused, resumed again, and again, until eventually the prognosis evolved “medication resistant”. The endocrine and neuro-endocrine systems do not fare well to being bounce-tested every 3-6 months, eventually the systems revolt in their own manners and ways and means.

In the short run, we had comprehensive relocation covered from Washington state to a temporary corporate apartment in downtown Chicago for a month, then moved to a regular apartment on the waterfront for one month (unfortunately next to an eviction-tbd tenant who fights with the police when they arrive (which was every time that I had to call 911 between the hours of 0-3am)). This forced us to move to another floor in the building, incurring additional cost and then… let’s simply say, “Thanks 1000M!”.

No Stability, No Consistency, Chronic Sleep Deprivation

The Chicago winter is somewhat boring, cold, and tedious, though often very beautiful in the ways of winter storms and one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. Patience endures.

I love the winter, but generally that opinion is informed by my years of living in the high mountains, owning a lifted Jeep or busted-up vintage Range Rover, of waking up early, going backcountry skiing at the local pass, or cross-country at the local resort, or perhaps simply snowshoeing with my dogs - back when I had my dogs. When the cold is useful and fun, then I love the cold. Cold with nothing to do out in the cold is mostly a pretty view, but not-so-fun.. and not fun is simply Not Fun.

Also sleep; pretty nice to have a subsistence baseline, I’m not asking for 10hr nights or even 8hrs - as I usually subsist on 6hr/n endlessly. Reduce the 7-day cycle from 6hrs to 3-4hr and sleep deprivation kicks in after about three to four consecutive days, and then shit gets real fucked real fast - the bad kind of fucked. The kind of fucked that sends one to the ER, and I don’t like being in the ER, and I’ve been to the ER too much.

Just as we moved into the quiet apartment and life was able to start stabilizing, the [~~~redacted due to confidentiality clause~~~], went and got all sideways and screwed because non-disabled people (not me) are mostly assholes to disabled people (me). Fortunately, our startup is still doing well, has its runway, has its hardware, has its colo racks, has its distributed infrastructure, but unless there’s a new standard job then it’s time to move according to economic opportunity.

The original title to this post was, Things I’ve learned during the last interstate multi-timezone relocation [§]. So, let’s continue.

Some of the Things I’ve Learned from Constant Moving

Advice: don’t do that unless you have no other options. I did not have other options.

1. Verizon is an affront to all that is decent [*]. It’s never a good deal, never, ever, ever.
2. Corporate landlords are mostly horrible, often run by faceless drones without a soul.
3. The ADA will absolutely not protect disabled people regardless of legality of circumstance.
4. If you haven’t worn it in the past two years of seasonal weather, get rid of it, donate it.
5. A terrifyingly high percentage of American families are two steps away from potentially becoming homeless, often resulting from the national “Healthcare For Profit” industry.
6. The last year of experiences were not all negatives; there were many wonderful events and memories during the same period.

• [*] Goodbye phone number for the second time, goodbye Telegram login, goodbye SMS as 2FA, hello SIP “oh SMS outgoing compatibility? no not like that.”
• [§] This was the fifth relocation addresses in a 364 day period, across three states and two timezones.