The result of thoughtless planning is not freedom from consequences; it is becoming trapped by consequences.

As koans go this is one of my favorites, which perhaps stems from having trained mercelessly year over year in order to not simply do well in my formerly sponsored racing career, but to be capable of placing-podium at nationals for “24HR NORBA Cross-country Championship Series”. Before we get to that, some interjections are due.

Self-Defense in the Era of Endlessness

Twenty-ish years ago life was very different; I had not yet needed protection from a stalker, not needed multiple legal name changes, not needed to move every 1-2 years, not needed to take an FBI instructor course in “live-fire self-defense”, or needed to maintain corporate attire compatible with concealed-carry. There are many reasons for my not wanting to move back to CA, but daily life with hypervigilance in this state is simply a fact that’s not able to be debated. SF was my home, or at least where I felt most at home since the early 90s; and they let it fall into ruin - but politics are not the point here.

I “Respect The Chemistry” just as much as I “Respect The Bullet”; this implies that the weapon is always safety-locked and loaded, with a live round in the chamber. If you need to pull your side-arm it must be ready to fire and you must be ready to pull the trigger and accept the consequences. End of Story. When one fails to respect the bullet or the science then bad things happen: people make mistakes, reactors melt down, and people die.

Excuse my language, but reality exists and so do evil people who harm others on purpose. I never wanted to flag down a taxi full of post-clubbing-party people in the depths of The Mission at 3am, politely demanding through a partially opened passenger window for “Anyone! Someone! Call 911!”. I was also not a 2A advocate until I was held at gunpoint at 3am, but that is life.

PTSD Wrecks; Maybe More PTSD Helps? Nope.

Stripped of everything, robbed, wandering down 16th in complete system shock, vision and logic scattering from adrenaline, remembering the cold steel barrel he pressed against my back, then the middle of my sternum - then placed hard to the back of my skull while being told to “walk away and don’t look back or we will find you again”. They had my ID, cell, keys, and everything else*.* One of the two men held my arms locked behind my back, while the other held the gun with one hand. When finally, it was over… but it’s never been over, and it will never be over, the memory never goes away. Trauma does not go away.

Nearly half (45%) of women in the United States have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes(*). This includes 21% who reported rape, 20.3% who reported sexual coercion, and 39% who reported unwanted sexual contact. [*] CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.

The police never found the two men, but I was told that on this particular night I was not their only victim. “Fuck San Francisco” became the refrain, and some months later I moved to Colorado and worked remotely. My first purchase in Colorado was a 12g pump shotgun, then a Ruger SP101 snubnose .357 revolver, then a beautiful hunting rifle in .300 WSM, and then began amassing a collection of ammunition, and of course the required licenses for training and reciprocity-based interstate carry. Any time I left the house I considered one thing above all else..

“Was today a .357 snub-nose type of day, or a Glock 27 sub-compact .40cal type of day? hm, maybe the HK, or the Colt Mustang II.. “

This routine for leaving the house was impacted when I was forced to short-sell after the 2008 financial crisis; the house where I raised twelve huskies, the house where I kept one pistol-grip pump shotgun under my side of the bed (stagger-loaded, alternating 00-buck with rifled slugs). If someone hears a 12 guage pump being racked in otherwise turgid silence of a potential B&E, that sound says one thing “WRONG HOUSE. YOU SHOULD LEAVE NOW”. If the reader ever wants to know if a 12g gauge slug can blast a hole through two walls and still kill someone, then go look at ballistics-gel penetration testing videos on youtube.

Back to that Koan, Back to the Races

Some of my 24hr race events were arranged for 2-4 rider team-relay, some were solo, and then sometimes co-ed teams (rarely). Planning, purpose, goals, dedication, and endurance. Harder, Faster, Never Stop.

My cross-country 10-20mile lap times were in the Top-3 consistently, though there were so very few women racing at my level in the 90s and early 2000s, with some 1st-finisher grabs on my favorite solo courses.

This was, back in my day, kind of a big fucking deal; it was and it still is for those who engage in 24hr mountain races. It is not an endeavor to enter into lightly. One tends to have 2-3 race bikes, at least one ultra-light road bike for hill-climb training days (each ~$5-10K USD circa the millenium $/value), own multiple wheelsets, and be able to resolve technical issues while on-trail after the inevitable crash occurs (especially after going head-over-bars into the darkness during nighttime training rides and maybe breaking components or twisting/snapping titanium spokes).

Then there are the years of experience leading up to the point where one is capable of enduring the required amount of caloric burn on a regular basis; and then more so for twenty-four hours at race-pace. For my metabolic system in the early-20s through mid-30s, this was 1,250 Kcal/hr equivalent to 178-188 BPM peaks and 168-174 average BPM heart-rate.

All of these expensive aspects had to be obtained via ‘pro-deal’ discount by working in the industry - and so I did that, and worked in a local bike shop during most of my college years, and raced, and trained, and raced, and also lots of skiing, and laying out on one or another of the beautiful beaches around the East Shore of Lake Tahoe… tales for another day.

I was not racing anyone but myself, torturously wanting to outlast and surpass all of those memories, the events, the people, everything. There is a type of focus in ultra-endurance which makes that possible - until you stop, and then the reality of living with PTSD almost immediately returns.

When I was not training or racing I was attempting to rest, recouperate, and that modality never stopped - except for when I temporarily died a decade later.

Hypertrophy & Catabolism for Fun and No-Profit

This kind of fitness is hard anaerobic territory which induces catabolic muscle wasting. When the body cannot access sufficient oxygen and sufficient reserve fuel resources it begins to burn muscle protein as fuel.

Least of one’s worries being body fat (“what body fat?”, back then I was cranking hills while leaned-out at 12-10% BF during training season, and leaning out to 8-6% at the end of a race). The body does not bother with reproductive functions at that stage, which was mostly irrelevant due to my genetics - though I did not yet know the full story on that front at the time. Too many chromosomes? Too few? Some manner of extremely rare condition? Who cares.. just go faster. Never stop going faster.

Dipping below 8% generally induces a state where organ tissue starts to be negatively impacted - the liver is hit especially hard, and is metabolically consumed. This survival mechanism has a hard shutdown limit. Going below 5% often leads to rapid cardiac failure, heat-induced seizure from elecrolytic deficiency, extreme dehydration, and eventually cellular aptosis causing brain death.

Fun! Not really, but it’s fascinating? Yes, the things we do and learn when we’re young and don’t care about risks, or older and don’t care about risks, or are simply too reliant on fitness to prioritize off-season rest (that’s what Cyclo-Cross and Telemark are for, right? I won some of those races as well.. and my knees and neck hate me in my 40s). Besides, how can there be “off-season rest” if there is never an off-season? Indeed.

Harder, Faster, Longer, and Never Stop

This mantra has stayed with me for as long as I can remember. One of my earlier memories of my father involves a mostly one-way conversation focused on me from his eyes to mine, with words sourced from deep within our shared-well of frustration and shared love for existence..

You don’t know when to stop, do you? When will it be enough?

I couldn’t have been older than ten years, so whatever it was which spurred such authority postured statement-questioning, there was only ever going to be a single answer.

Whenever I want it to be enough.

I have never lived half-assed, never taken the easy way out, and never avoided pain out of a sense of fear. Occasionally I sought it out, the things which caused physical pain - not for reasons of self-harm, but out of a mixture of first-person experiential curiosity mixed with the desperation to feel something, anything, to remind me that I was alive.

The events of my childhood were not always pleasant, and I did not always tell those of whom who should have known - what all was happening, or being done to me. At those ages the mind is still developing concepts of personal boundaries, emotional limits, self-awareness, social concepts of ‘right and wrong’, and cognitive capacity for the internal dialog and sense-of-self.

The mind is maleable and easily led towards fraught conclusions of okay-ness. I was not ok, but I stayed silent, because no one ever truly listens - that was the lesson.

What is This About Ten Percent Body Fat?

What does 10% look like, you may wonder? Here’s what 10% looks like from my mid-30s. Some pics are post-gym session. some are post-3hr rowing, some are after a nice 3-4hr ride in the mountains.

After I failed to have a child in my first marriage, and after DV ended it (no one hits me a second time or the ring is removed forever).. I left the mountains again and moved back to San Francisco to focus on my career. Arriving under-weight, abused, miserable, and lonely, all I did was ride and work. Raining? Ride. Fog in the Marin Headlands? Ride. Insomnia at 2am during wind-sheering on the Golden Gate bridge… RIDE. Can’t ride? Gym time, smash weights.

None of that mattered really. Nothing matters when your twin dies in front of you, and before the year was over I was in a coma, hooked up to life-support machines.

Then I re-learned how to speak, to walk, to feel emotions, and how to love all over again… but it took a long time.

4hrs of riding or 4hrs of rowing - oppositional muscle groups that don’t make you faster at either fitness obsession

That’s Exceedingly Sad, Why Discuss This?

Sadness is an emotion, a reaction, a biochemical response to sensory perception, nothing more. Memory of traumatic events is often inherently unreliable due to the state of shock, and the mechanics of neural processing of sensory inputs .. well.. if you care to read more about that, the associated document is very detailed.

Memory consolidation processes in the striatum go through a sensory filtering process with multiple layers of modulation of input.

A Knee Injury Induced Course-Correction

When I was thirty seven, no longer racing mountain or road, I switched to solo-crew (despite not liking boats). I had to keep doing.. something physically difficult, something challenging, something to keep the blood pumping.

When training I loved seated rows, mid-rows, reverse-tricep pulls, trapezius everything – vertical and 45-degree pull-downs, and everything else which inevitably results in striated delts and eight-pack abs. Give me a cable machine with ball-ended-ropes, a sit-down water-rower, and a set of 5-25lb dumbbells in 2.5lb increments and I was the happiest I’ve ever been in a gym. I never bothered with “max weight” or “3x3 sets”, that’s better for bulking. Instead, it was superset-burndowns for muscle group rotations, with 24-50 reps per set, with core crunches in the hundreds at a time.

No one cares though. Not really, unless it’s to tell women that muscles are for men and “why do you want to do that anyway?”. Because it feels good, and when it’s done correctly it’s healthy.

I can never claim to be “natty”, not because I love steroids but because my endocrine system is missing parts entirely on a physical level. Everything has to be prescribed and supplemented - everything. One month without all of it and I am not alive; and not by choice, but by the simple medical reality that I should never have made it to adulthood. I have been broken since birth and I am fully aware of the implications with which I’ve had to govern my medical life, my tangible existence, and the extreme cost of being required to do so.

Why? Because “women who can’t conceive are irrelevant”, and because “I am not a profitable healthcare patient in America”. Those two operating principles are primary reasons for constantly leaving the country and never wanting to return. Every time I’m back here it’s a matter of 2-5 years before the medical industry fails to sustain my “unique neuro-endocrine needs”. Crossing the border just to get the medication that my body should be able to make on its own; the resources that so very many people don’t even know the names of - and take it for granted that their autonomic systems keep the’ol heart beating and lungs breathing. Please don’t take those systems for granted.

None of it matters because I don’t have a choice. I can make the most of it and whenever I can, I go as fast and as hard as possible until nothing is left. That is my life well-lived. It’s taken me to the summits of countless peaks, down nearly every double-black run in the Sierra and Rockies on telemark skis, and into the wilderness depths of peaks and valleys in winter and summer to simply leave humanity to its unlimited amount of problems which I am not able to solve. That last part is challenging, because I love solving complex problems (ref: career, neurology, physiology, genetics); another aspect I’ve had to adapt to.

What matters is that I keep breathing and keep going. So that’s what I do, and I guess most of the time I’m pretty decent at it, or so it goes.

On Self-Awareness of Limits

Training for 24hr mountain bike races involved 4-6 days/wk with sunrise-morning rides on the mountain passes involved with each summer’s 120+mi thigh & lung burning electrolye depleter known as ”The Death Ride - California Alps”, interspersed with long hours in the saddle at night, riding sections of the "Tahoe Rim Trail", almost always solo, and occasionally "The Downieville Cross-Country Classic" for good measure.

You cannot simply ride a lot and win. Understanding the mechanics involved with one’s metabolism, endocrine modulation, internal cycles required for mental and physical rest & recovery, a combination of immediate + long-term + short-term project planning, and the ability to be intimately familar with ones maximal-limits and failure-modes: all of which requires metrics collection and data-analysis for VO2 capacity, hold-limits for heart-rate, patterened respiration to optimize training for aerobic and anaerobic ability, tracking blood glucose levels, wearing a chest-strap for 24/7 ECG, the list continues.

Success in the ultra-endurance world is a mixture of genetics, mental and physical capacity planning, self-actualization, self-awareness, dopaminergic drive + desire + reward system modulation, and clear-headed awareness which informs all forward movement and progress toward a sustained and unrelenting goal. Usually these qualities are found at the Olympics, but my genetics would have banned me from global competition even back in the 90s when I was actively competing, for my blood carries two sets of 46 (the curious may search for this), and for this reason I must supplement everything, and this medical reality is a blocker not to regional, or state, or local - but WADA is another story.

So, inescapable maladies and compensatory treatments aside, my genetics were perfect for that kind of racing, and I happily made the most of those years. I missed that time of my life severely after moving from Tahoe to San Francisco to start my career in tech. I kept riding, but not racing.

My race against time would come sooner than I knew, sooner than anyone could know at the time. It was an inevitability of consequence.

An Evolved Definition of Leadership

Over the years I stopped racing. I stopped riding solo nearly all of the time in favor of riding double, accepting more invitations to group rides (working at FitBit was interesting, but I expected more fitness obsessed people like myself).. and I remembered that leadership is not limited to “Those Operating Above”, nor is leadership well-defined by situations involving “Topping from The Bottom”.

Leadership is about shared awareness and shared problem solving. Leadership does not occur in a vacuum and it certainly does not occur out of happenstance. Leadership is a choice, insofar as Free Will is anything more than a convenient explanation for guilt and sadness: blame must go somewhere, yes? Not always. Sometimes shit happens and there was nothing that anyone could have done differently.

Successful Leaders Define, Design, and Drive Shared Goals

The future is not ours to inherit, but to build together. Life advances not through ease, but from asking better questions;
Ones which embrace complexity, challenge assumptions, and strive for success. Visionary leaders build the future; Our Future.

The Inevitable Return to Consequences

So, back to the Koan. Hyakujō’s Fox inevitably realizes the lesson.

A former head monk says that an enlightened person does not fall under causation. Because of that wrong answer, he says he has endured five hundred rebirths as a fox. Hyakujō’s corrective answer is not that enlightenment escapes causality, but that one “does not ignore causation.”

For leadership, the reading is direct: a leader who believes they are above cause and effect—above feedback, incentives, dependencies, timing, or consequences—has already become the fox.

The result of thoughtless planning is not freedom from consequences; it is becoming trapped by consequences.

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.

Cellular Echoes, a Multi-generational Legacy of DES

Having touched on this in the first post, this section is intended as a refresher. Partially this is intended for raising awareness to a problem which affects millions of people born during the 1950s - 1980s, when DES was administered to pregnant women via medically good-intentions but without awareness to its long-term effects on the mother, children, grandchildren.

Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a carcinogenic endocrine disruptor, has multi-generational adverse effects through disruptions to the neuro-endocrine system and DNA mutations impacting cellular and hormonal development. These mutations can manifest as cancers, metabolic disorders, reproductive dysfunction, chromosomal abnormalities, and chronic neurological conditions (migraines, tumors, lesions, dysautonomia).

This genetic legacy is a backdrop upon which my life was built, which resulted in innumerable divergences of a normal-healthy path, from fulfilling desired physical expectations, procreation, and so much more.

A Reset to The Rules of Engagement

Memory is a skill we easily take for granted, often assuming it accurately captures reality as it unfolds. We’re taught that our experience of the present occurs in real-time, yet in reality, there is a slight delay—signals must first travel through the nervous system and undergo processing before being encoded as memories within the brain’s dura mater. Memory is the brain’s intricate mechanism for translating sensory input into meaningful emotional and behavioral responses, shaping our understanding of both internal and external worlds.

This complex neurological system depends heavily on balanced neurotransmitter function to accurately encode experiences and guide our daily lives. Severe trauma, as seen in PTSD, profoundly disrupts this delicate neural language, permanently altering pathways—especially dopaminergic circuits—that influence emotion, cognition, and behavior. Once formed, these trauma-induced changes can become deeply ingrained, often irreversibly affecting one’s neurological landscape. Coping with severe PTSD thus requires lifelong adaptation, reinforcement of coping strategies, and an ongoing, difficult journey toward acceptance.

Fragmentation of memory can be understood as a memory disorder that includes subjective and phenomenonological facets directly impacting the ability of an individual to recall memories in an integrated and holistic way.

In my seventeenth year I would drive to SF at night to take photos before dawn. Over the years this favorite city of mine became a source of severe and lasting trauma.

The impaired person usually suffers from physical damage to the hippocampus. This may be due to the result of trauma, such as post-traumatic stress disorder… consequences, such as oversensitivity to some stimuli, impulsiveness, lack of direction in life, impacts to existential awareness, emotional dissociation, and often a distorted perception of oneself… requiring the patient to mask their concerns and despair.

Together We Drifted Toward The Void

Eventually, the lifeboat fell apart — the house of cards collapsed. Across the eras of a beautiful yet fractured life, layers of trauma accumulated, intertwining at the point of my near demise, when in the same year I lost my twin. We had endured those early years closely together, though our paths were not always aligned or identical. By this point, the cumulative losses had become immeasurable and insurmountable.

We experienced diametrically-opposed impacts from DES exposure, chromosomal deficiencies echoed in reverse, genomic sequencing showing the maps and flags and arrows all pointing to the wrath of diethylstilbestrol. Everyone has their limits, and we knew so very well where the next decade or two would go, the advanced treatment path involved; the trajectory was bleak and disheartening. Some may judge one’s rational, data-driven decisions, fully respective of life experiences, to be inherently irrational in their moral views. Many people since have levied their opinions, but they were never forced to walk this path.

A Life Without a Mirror

Consistent with the existentially spiteful patterns of non-consensual trauma upon my body, the EMT tasked with saving my life had slit my throat open length-wise, rapidly and jaggedly in an emergent (ie absolute emergency) airway incision. This severed half of my vocal chords, permanently paralyzing that amount of vocal functionality. My brain was already off-line, in global ischemic state, lights out. There was no pain, there was nothing. I was gone.

Memories are mostly lacking from that month, though photographic timestamps provide one view, a phone held while walking, a mistaken shutter press. The askew pupils indicate a rare and severe side effect, the result of ongoing treatment having been fully insufficient. Once more, healthcare providers had failed in their long-term care. After this, nothingness.

unplanned, unexpected, the last photographic memory

Body moved to the ER, the OR, the ICU. A second, larger, circular incision was made in my throat, the first haphazardly sewn closed in zig-zagged scars. My limp unconscious form was hooked up to life support machines. Days passed, a week, then more. Slowly, neural matrices enervated the consciousness to reboot, to resume an awareness of our shared reality.

A pinhole of photons appeared, and from the vast darkness every cell was screaming, oxygen and a feeding tube through the stoma hole in my neck, rhythmic pulsing-machine breathing for me, the only solace a button taped next to my hand for morphine - “press to release”, into the IV line. Apparently I was alive.

The pinhole of light widened, forcing outward the timeless nothingness, replaced by pure all encompassing light, then shades of grey, then shapes, without concept of meaning or definitions.

“Life will only be more difficult now.”

One result of the coma was that broad sections of life, of memories, events and persons, places, experiences.. were simply gone. The variously affected zones and thalamus projections, and some functions of the posterior parietal cortex, they simply did not wake up with the rest of my brain.

I will never remember all of the memories which I have lost.

With those vacant memories, gone too were my former abilities of speech, the ability to walk, to hold a cup, to feel emotions, to focus further than the end of the bed in the ICU, to understand the passage of time. So much was lost.

looking upwards, on an IV drip or two or three

“She may never be able to speak, to walk, or leave the hospital, if she wakes up at all.” - Neurologists, Attending to the ICU

As it turns out, the experience of Global Cerebral Ischemia induces substantial changes - that special “off switch” called “no more oxygen today”. Global Brain Suffocation. Flatline waves. No respiration. System Shutdown. Those scars on my neck - from the respirator stoma and the EMT’s emergency attempted endo-tracheal intubation - they are still present and in the mirror every day. Every morning upon waking, the scars are there, a forever reminder of the Void, the Loss.

Eventually I did relearn how to walk, to speak, to conceptualize the passage of time, and how to exist without those old blocks of memories weighing me down. I learned how to confront what remained, which helped with working through the newly faced medical trauma from the events of the ICU and temporary non-existence.

How did my brain wake up at all? No one had answers. Years later, periodically asking new neurologists, still no one knows. Since waking up, it has never been easy.

When Trauma is linked to Identity

The Self, one’s internal identity, with its link to the past, images of the memories, the joyful moments mixed in with all of those years of pain. It’s a jumble of words and phrases after a while, meaningless. How can one move on when they are no longer fighting an internal struggle against their past? It would seem simple, easy. Perhaps so. Perhaps the temporal lobes, with their functionality and dysfunctionality which results from PTSD, would benefit from additional research; this is my course of action, to reprogram the reactions, reprogram the responses, and to heal the mind and body via positive feedback loops.

a lovely animated gif of the brain’s Frontal Lobe, left cerebral hemisphere

On Consideration of Complexity, Treatment Modality

Neurology is a complex subject. Emotional intelligence and the cognitive underpinnings of its origins and capabilities, these are a complex area of study. The simplest description of the science which describes the manner in which the human brain gathers, processes, stores, and recalls memories is also a complex subject. So much complexity, how to make sense of it all?

Conceptualizing one’s existence after waking up from an event where death was assured, had your throat sliced open with a scalpel, connected to machines to keep your offline brain oxygenated, and then eventually to reintegrate into society’s fabric of shared existence — after returning from the Void of endless nothingness — that is a Complex Circumstance, one which requires a combination of neurological, psychological, and philosophical continuity of care. In America we do not have that as an option, not on any regular insurance plan, the patient must fend for and advocate for themselves.

What then are the options? Is ‘dopamine agonist’ based therapy the only choice? Certain not. It won’t even be recommended by a therapist because it would require enrolling in human trials for the subject, and that’s often far too involved or often unavailable for many patients.

So, one may read this and think and inquire..

“Surely this is a bit extreme, unproven?”, while others have inquired, “why not try the research methods for MDMA, Ketamine, Lysergic Ergolines, or A or B or C or another instead?” Or what about DBT or CBT or EMDR?

Sure, sure. Perhaps in the literal words of one truly genius level therapist..

“How about instead of taking ${critical medication}, you just imagined what it would be like to have these therapy sessions while taking the medication, you know - without taking it?”

The answer to all of these queries is that I have been through every possible and available treatment pathway over the past decade and more. Some have been life changing and positive and beautiful, others less useful, some fully a waste of time. Some therapists have caused additional pain with victim blaming, tearing holes into the tattered fabric being repaired, those horribly malicious people — they do exist, and that in itself is a depressing fact for people seeking care.

Visual Remembrances and Photography as Healing

One of the methods which I’ve found most useful, lasting, and capable of more than words may define, is to repair these old images. Not in an “exposure therapy” manner, but in a restoration of the mind’s emotional response to their evoked memories.

For those who have not immersed themselves into the study of cognitive neuroscience, or found solace in the philosophy of causal-determinism, the concepts around neural-programming may sound like science fiction. Fortunately, our current era of medical science offers the fiction of fifty years ago as an experienced reality - right now, today.

This method involves taking a prescribed ‘dopamine agonist’ medication, which causes the brain to activate dopamine receptors throughout many critical pathways. Once the medication reaches a necessary level, then my gaze is returned to the those slides. Hours will be spent digitizing, processing the images for color correction, repairing film damage spots, and normalizing the ICC profile, normalizing levels, adjusting histograms via curves.

dopamine, the first of the three catecholamines

Human trials for this method are not common. There is no profit to be made by the pharmaceutical companies with drugs which have existed for decades, using personalized treatment which varies by individual (and is therefore difficult to quantify without substantial similarities between patients - and I am not a common patient).

For those curious, I’ve included various embedded links within this document, but here are some additional readings which may offer insight.

• The mesoaccumbens dopamine in coping with stress
• Dopamine D2/D3 receptor agonists attenuate PTSD-like symptoms
• The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in PTSD: Pathophysiology and treatment interventions
• Limbic response to stress linking life trauma and hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis function

Why are we talking about the “hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis”? Because the Hypothalamus controls Dopaminergic activity, and the Pituitary gland (which controls hormone secretions) is deeply affected by Dopamine levels rising or falling.

In this meditative mode of visual analysis, amidst silent revisitation of trauma-informed responses, my intentional flow of thoughts attempt to concurrently apply a revised emotional mapping to the associative matrices within; to reprogram the damaged links via new dopaminergic pathway etchings - made possible by the cognitive intensity of this combination of meditation and medication.

It feels like removing rust from a long treasured heirloom, to see the glint of its origin material, its remuneration now complete.

Eva preparing for neural-programming — a self-photo facilitates awareness of Dopamine levels - visually represented as “Dopaminergic Flush”, a stateful readiness for successful treatment

The Great Reprogramming of Dopaminergic Pathways

The mechanism of action involved with this medication facilitates the process of creating new neural connections, by linking sensory data from visual information processing circuity to the emotional response relationships involved with memory recall; all of this occurring via complex actions of the brain’s dopaminergic pathways.

During this treatment process my thoughts wander and I don’t push back, just let the feelings occur and move forward. It’s a form of Zen in some ways, letting the emotions exist without holding on, without “desiring a lack of desire”.

Time and distance is required for reprogramming the mind’s emotional recall, for forgiveness. The process is possibly never complete, but it’s a beautiful experience to find oneself on the other side, able to look backward and see the beautiful ways that once were.

I see those youthful eyes, consistent across each image, reminders every time. The earlier years retained an innocence about them, harboring damage too deep to acknowledge, express, or let forth. Now those moments can be set to rest, and in whatever way it may heal, it offers solace.

eyes reflect with a minor smirk, thrust into the present from so many years passed

Carrying around my father’s old Pentax ME Super 35mm film camera (digital did not yet exist), I would learn the ways and means of translating one’s vibrant sensory world of tangible, visible, and audible queues into a reflexive snapshot of a single ellipses of time.

Film photography platform of my youth, the glorious Pentax ME Super

The science of film, its correctness of inter-related momentary ordinals, exists as a knowable object in its own right; defined by functions which can be modeled, simulated, and counter-adjusted according to objectively determined interlocked sliding scales of equilibrium equations… the science of light was logical, beautiful.

The spatial-dimensional complex of neurons and axons within my young mind was growing rapidly, desperate for knowledge, experience, adventure. So much of that mindset was searching for answers, finding beauty along the way, often in spite of the many stumbles and tragedies intertwined.

On Genetic Inheritance and Endocrine Disrupters

Looking back on those years, I see patterns arise, ones which describe the ensuing years in predictable ways, in their benefits and concerns equally mixed. I was not a canonically ’troubled youth’, rather my troubles were genetic in origin — now identified as ‘Generational DES Syndrome’.

[*] DES = Diethylstilbestrol is a carcinogenic, xenoestrogen, ATPase inhibitor, endocrine disruptor. Linked to a variety of long-term adverse effects in women who were treated with it during pregnancy, and in their offspring, and further affecting the F2 generation of grandchildren.

In simple terms, this causes DNA mutations which are carried forth into systemic neuro-endocrine development, cellular expressions both causative and compounding, as the body develops into adulthood. Whether these cellular mutations result in cancer, neoplasms, meningiomas, metabolic dysregulation, sex and growth hormone disruption, reproductive sterility, chromosomal defects, or combinations of those and other grievous maladies, the possible impacts are vast in quantity and scale — and still being studied.

Some patients lead generally normal lives, ignorant of the cause for their condition, while others experience an unnecessarily early death. In-between these extremes my life has coalesced, wavering between periods of intensely healthy highly-competitive endurance athleticism to months of debilitation from chronic nervous system collapse. Some of my most memorable resting moments were the cumulative hours knocked-out from exhaustion and asleep inside the cold, dark, rhythmic magnetic thumping of a MRI tube, or the pulsing energy waves inside occasionally very warm CT scanners.

DES has disruptive effects which exert negative feedback on the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis (HPG axis), suppresses the secretion of the gonadotropins, luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), and suppresses sex hormone production as well as gamete production and maturation.

Looking back on DES and its impacts within my genetic programming, I can see where it derailed an otherwise normal childhood, where it imparted physical and existential questions for which no adult or physicians ever had answers, and how those early years drove me further into an adulthood focused on amassing knowledge of systems theory, neurology, endocrinology, genetics, biochemistry, and decades of exploration into modulating the steroidogenesis process occurring within these veins.

Coincidentally, I would later learn that endocrine specific cancers were rampant in my mother’s side of the family - likely also from intergenerational DES effects. Over the many years, my endocrine’s HPG-axis would crash in more than one dimension via multi-glandular failures, a pituitary hypophysis neoplasia diagnosis would arise, diagnostic concerns into suprasellar meningioma, and eventually the cumulative effects would lead to the conditions which resulted in my near-death and coma.

Youthful Adventures, Expansive Landscapes

Scaping together enough for a second-hand Manfrotto tripod and lenses for a near-mint Nikon FE2 - the camera I received from my father for one birthday so long ago, that period was when my heart fell in love with the beauty of capturing moments in time. Youthful innocence was at a peak, everywhere held introspective beauty in some manner - if it was framed subjectively well and maintained The Rules.

rain arrives along the Western Slope of the Rockies

Then there was the glorious selection of film: the richness of Velvia 50 - perfect for landscapes but too rich for portraits, the ever-so-accurate Provia 100, the old classic Kodachrome 64, occasionally the normality of Ektar 100, and on occasion spending time without color at all - but oh let me show you Agfa’s superpanchromatic Scala 200, the most uncommon of them all.

I loved this era of film for its uniqueness, it’s vivid ability to capture reality in a way that was lacking in prior decades - eras of advancements in technology which defined the ability for people to capture the present tense and carry it into the future, with accuracy, realness, and tangibility that we will never have with today’s digital options.

the slide films of my youth, vivid colors, rich contrast, a life before the digital world

I loved this era of film for its uniqueness, it’s vivid ability to capture reality in a way that was lacking in prior decades - eras of advancements in technology which defined the ability for people to capture the present tense and carry it into the future, with accuracy, realness, and tangibility that we will never have with today’s digital options.

As with everything immersion worthy, I studied photography via encyclopaedias, library books, documentaries, and by asking a thousand questions. Who best to answer but Elke, the co-owner and an early role model at my local professional photography shop; one which housed an amazing collection of vintage cameras and lenses - many that I would imagine forever out of reach: Leica, Hasselblad, Rolleiflex, Zeiss.

My perspective in those times demanded that the best memories surely must be captured, regardless that slide film was expensive. Each shot was a cherished and planned capture, yet still one were lucky to have 2-3 usable results per roll of 24-36. Fantastisch. I loved every minute of the process.

Of Landscapes and Studio Lights

These slides became a timeline, closely selected and optimized photos of my adventures, my travels: the tragedy of storms and the silent motions of rain, landscapes and sunrises and sunsets, mountains especially loved and well traveled. Of peaks climbed, valleys explored, off-trail backcountry wanderings alone in the autumn, and cold snowshoeing adventures with Vati too.

Then the studio. Learning about black and white film, darkroom techniques, rear-projection lights, soft-bounce filters, shade-booms, and multi-flash timers connected to a remote shutter that I could hold in one hand - the original selfie method, before the term was ever coined. These self portraitures were mostly a private occurrence, an experiment to record an ever-changing existence which often felt unknowable and painfully everlasting, other times its opposite.

long adrift in lostness, many found in my eyes precisely who they wanted to see

Conceptualization of Self

In some ways it was photography which helped me work through the DES-affected hormonal years of explosive emotions: the Conceptualization of Self as an evolving modality. How could one build a schema involving periodic memory without tracking the memories? And what better way to have reference to those than with film?

So, along with landscapes I captured my visage; an evolving physical form of perpetual wonderment and wandering cognition, deeply felt emotions, all wrapped up into a warm body with occasionally ice-cold blue eyes - constantly changing and growing through the years.

a single spoken “please”, but no one was truly listening

From the Outside Life Was Wonderful

Unfortunately along the way there were events of intense and prolonged trauma which led to a deeply felt hatred for nearly the entire era of youthful memories - not for what the photos were, not for who I was, but for the memory’s visual associations with the events of the era in which the traumas occurred.

I had no ability to heal from the events at that time, and so to my young mind those events simply could not exist, lest it were to be that I did not exist. It was one or the other: acknowledge the trauma for what it was, how it had shaped me, and chose to suffer the wrath of my own willing hands. Or instead, I would rather to erase all of it. Erase the moments from my mind and never think of them or refer to them or believe that they were real; to erase part of my experience with life. Years later that wish would be granted, an outcome in ways impossibly unexpected.

Existentially, it was a challenging duality. So the slide portfolio was put aside, boxed up, never taken out to review or inspect or share, and only occasionally forcefully ignored whenever asked about the subjects. The memories did not exist. The cognitive methods I learned became a hardened, steadfast technique, an emotional control unrelenting, and it lasted decades. No one knew anything, and no one needed to. Those memories were only pain (but they were not, my youth held so many beautiful moments, ones which I would only connect with decades later).

Outward Success Surely Heals Old Wounds

Years passed and milestones occurred, much as the loved ones around me had long expected. A standard life evolved. Marriage, a home, thoughts on pregnancy, depression, elation, stress, travel, and promotions, and everything being pretty good on the surface.

A blink of the eyes and there I am again: Bare. Lost. Alone. In the pure Darkness.

Yet family was there, friends were there, all of the markers of success and happiness were there. Regardless, trauma events from years ago were invalidating the potential for happiness in ways unknowable to the loved ones around me. No one could ever know. The memories could not exist, or I would carry them to my grave.

years so often idyllic, if not for the unspoken undercurrent

Concurrently, an undercurrent of escapism, a subtext to the patterns of wants and needs, this was all despite the abundance, and it was that undercurrent which became a rushing and inescapably deep tide. The memories become an unwanted passenger, a little non-angel perched on the shoulder - whispering reminders in the most inopportune times. A foil to the good times, intertwining themselves deeper, demanding either solace and release or self-destruction.

Trauma at the clinical level, the kind which arises from unspeakable events in youth, or wartime combat, or being assaulted at gunpoint and left stripped and alone in the pure darkness of 18th & Florida St at 3am; those somatosensory memories become etched in the mind. Maybe more than one event is etched, maybe there’s too many to describe.

Bleeding out in a sodium-halide bright white tile-floored bathroom, a stainless steel drain on the floor in the middle where the redness of life circles and downward flows. You slip in the blood, bare-footed, abdomen held in one hand, reaching-grasping with the other, screaming voicelessly in full-system shock.

Prose exists so that I do not forget the beautiful moments, memories, and meandering thoughts. Its intention is to facilitate a greater degree of accuracy in referential recall, for my own purposes, and to share one person’s experiences via photos and writings about where the many actions took me along the way.

Still though, Why?

Because of the coma, and the life-support machines, and everything involved with rebuilding cognition after being brought back to life. There are years of events which may never be recalled, whole sections of life which I’ll never fully remember having lost. Perhaps it’s better that way, but I will never know in either case, and that’s okay.

Priorities shifted, and now the freight train never stops. Sleep is difficult, rest can be fleeting, both bringing a challenging reality to the oft’ heard phrase, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Most people don’t know how that feels, and I do not think they would use the term so lightly if so.

I never want to forget this beautiful realm, its struggles and trials, kuschelig-weich süße küsse, the hugs and naps – and occasionally the complexities of corporate decision-trees too. This everything of being, in its infinitesimal grandiosity and minutia of glory, graced from Hashem or Lilith or the forever over-watching mountain gods too, perhaps?

On Spirituality or Nothingness

My sense of spirituality has no names and no demands of dogmatic mindlessness; it is this everything of every-day and every-time that I close my eyes to drift back into the nothingness of the Void. The nothingness of everything is always there, carrying me, calling for an eventual return, but not right now – give me one more day, one more adventure, one more embrace. Then, in-so-the interim of variable time, I may share them with you too.

Time and Timelessness

So then, this site is in some ways a grasp on the finite experience of time. A catalogue of imagery and concepts and concerns and emotions which exist only for temporary purposefulness, or ultimately meaninglessness. I’m not sure which, but here we are, and often times it’s just for the simple enjoyment of writing. A game which my mind plays with grammatical phrases, of equations and variables made of linguistics, of inference driven convolutional intentionality from the frontal-temporal lobes and dopaminergic pathways.

Since waking up those many years ago, a commonality of mind has been to focus on the present as much as possible; an exercise in occasional futility combined with a mostly Zen aligned stateful detachment. Day-to-day involves a meditative awareness of the senses while distanced cognition-threads process a long-held buffer of Parasympathetic Nervous System synapse firings, neurotransmitter floods and waves, accelerated DAT transport queues.

From the Void

From the void you awaken, into this body from which consciousness departed some lifetime ago. Inside the void all is null, an absence of existence, sensory nothingness, until the timelessness becomes a single photon of light. In an unknown span of time it expands, drawing consciousness back into the this shared realm of existence, back into the world of the living. From that void, an endless timeless realm where pain does not exist, the conscious mind “awakens”, and as it does the senses begin to scream in electrical amperage everywhere there is Aware.

The light expands and becomes the world, gaining contrast, and with that light appear shapes and structures without color. At first all is gray-scale, until slowly color dawns upon the senses, eventually distance and depth are concepts once-more, but there is no other sensory world. Scent, sound, touch, space and time, all remain back in the void.

Burning Searing Oxygen

Emotions, that conceptual link between awareness based feedback loops and knowledge of experiences did not come back immediately, if only to say that there was one binding sensory flood of continuity: anger laced despair. When the conscious mind re-appeared sufficiently to respond to its awareness of circumstance, the first thing I noticed was the burning of oxygen in my lungs - fed by tubes from the respirator machine, controlled by computer at the bedside.

Next was the burning in my neck, where the tubes were routed into a stoma - not through my mouth or nose - rather than the second incision crudely sewn two inches higher in the tracheal zone. An EMT had to slice open my throat for respiration, and through one set of vocal chord nerves the scalpel went, an emergent surgery on the floor in the dark of night. Only later, at the ER/OR was the stoma incised, the vertically sliced tracheal chasm zig-zaggedly sewn. The nerves never healed, and so my voice is soft but often fails, worn out as the day progresses. One set of muscles doing the work of two, but often not sufficient for anything at all.

Over time the senses came alive, mostly to their former capacity, except for memory. With memory it comes in chunks, as though an array is rebuilding, scanning, but often finding nulls. Short term memory was gone, with the weeks prior to the coma almost entirely missing from recall. Over time, STM Consolidation - the process by which our brains receive sensory data and filter/sort/prioritize aspects and elements and concepts of time from short to medium-term, then assessing and contextualizing and cross-referencing these into long-term memory. That process has improved with specialized medication and meditation, though this is a neuroscience topic for another day.

Hyperalgesic-Nociceptive Reaction Instinct

In the earliest days of awakening, still horizontal in the ICU, as my head would nod-off in a morphine haze (so much pain), the autonomic system would take over, and one or two hands would immediately race to attempt their forever game: trying to tear the hoses out of the stoma in my neck.

Surely, that did not go over well with the ICU staff, and eventually whenever my tired eyes would drift, a nurse would restrain my wrists to prevent the next autonomic attempt - those tubes HURT. Regardless, that type of physiological action was determined to be a neurologically positive sign which indicated that parts of the brain were coming back online for instinctual action (reduce pain immediately, even if doing so unintentionally ends breathing machine hookup).

The Knowledge Reset - via Reinforcement Learning

Of course, I couldn’t speak with the hoses still connected through the port in my neck, and once they were eventually out I still couldn’t speak. Either the brain didn’t remember how to contact the muscles, or the nerves controlling the voice box wouldn’t connect to the muscles - either due to pain or due to half of them being severed.

Eventually I would relearn how to speak, through a long and painful process over months, though it still fails on a near daily basis.

Inquiring with a specialist four years later, even experimental options would not apply, as the severed vocal chords’ nerves were too distant to reconnect end to end. Perhaps one day that will be resolved; until then my voice is soft and sometimes no-op.

Walking, all gone.
Dexterity by hand, also gone.
Balance, certainly gone.

The first time I was able to pull my legs over the side of the bed, while holding onto a nurse, the nanosecond either foot struck the ground, lightning surged upward — through the femur, spiraling along the thoracic spine, climbing into cervical vertebrae, and erupting through the cerebellum and corpus callosum, detonating across the cerebral cortex. There was no thought, no other sensation; existence narrowed to one unbearable truth: PAIN.

Electrical Signaling

In medical research and case studies there is a distinct lack of detail from patient perspectives on the topic of this process: awakening the somatosensory network of the Central Nervous System after a flatlined coma, not a medically induced coma, and not a short term coma. The CNS is an electrical system foremost, followed by chemical messenger pathways, both interwoven in a complexity which science has yet to fully model or simulate.

Part of not being able to walk, or to hold things, to speak, was the sheer inability for my brain to process the electrical signals unmoderated, ungoverned; in short, the signals were shorting out the sensory and processing equipment. Without sufficient memory the simplest actions and abilities are devoid of action.

Healing Processes

Part of the physical healing process was one of intense and ongoing patience and more patience and endless patient patient patience and more of being both concurrently in what seemed to be an endless forever. I was not a patient child; this was my least tuned skill set, but it is now my most etched-in-stone capacity, though everyone surely has their limits.

Sense of smell was deemed the least critical, as determined by whatever engines were managing the recovery process. Light sensitivity never stopped being a problem, to which no doctor has had answers. All of these abilities, so often and so easily taken for granted by so many, they form the foundation - the core of a person’s interactions with their world, and with those senses we define existence, what it means to be alive, what it means to engage with others, and by eventual extrapolation what it means to find and have purpose and meaning and definition and identity.

Referential Integrity

The ability to confirm the integration of data into the whole - not only a unit as its unique entry - but with its reference to which all else maintains interrelated definitions; Referential Integrity is not solely a term from the database engineering world, it is a way to see how the brain shapes the Self, how it infers meaning minute by minute from the individual experience with relationships (comparative, contrasting) to the whole of the experience. Our brains are processing and defining and redefining all of our sensory inputs trillions of times per day, moving memory chunks around according to some grander-than-awareness algorithm which necessitates the conversion of short term events into long term storage for retrieval years or decades later. This fascinating biological computer is the most beautiful and capable equipment which our species has ever come across - and so gods help me if I ever take that for granted in any breath until my last. The void is not going anywhere, it’s there always and forever, that much is knowable in my experience. So then, what purpose is there? The question has no definitive or singular notion to provide an answer; purpose is evolving and changing at all times, until there is nothing left.

Finally then..

So, philosophy of death and meaning and all of that.. in any case, Prose is a site for reflections upon a woven existence, one which has routinely provided awakenings into substantially altered facets of bicameral perceptions. These descriptions may not resonate with many, though this is not a site for mass consumption or awareness, and so that is okay.

In part, this site is an archive for those memories of fleeting years gone by, of present experiences which sooner than realized will forever and perpetually become that passing of time. Memories are a complex game, a puzzle of neurons - firing and transporting their transmitters to waiting receptors, remnants of the Central Nervous System’s programming as it was trained, over time and years - consciously and otherwise.. but that’s a story for another page, at another time.

[*] Unless there is no Free Will, in which case Causal Determinism implies that our consciousness correlates sentience as the role of an observer more so than one of pre-defined actional executor.

Yes, quite so, I miss the internet of the ’90s. The original idealism which prioritized being kind, helpful, welcoming, and infinitely curious about all things technical and complex and challenging.. instead we have mostly an internet where the experience has become “garbage in - garbage out”, and a wider array of assholerly than I expected to see three decade prior.

Nevertheless, we’re no longer in that era, and so here are my modern life accounts from a variety of networks. Often one may find my username existing as “winterschon”, though my active presence wavers and wanes - periodic silence, staccato quipped sarcasm and critique, and the inevitable return to torrential expressions. Can we have more Gopher, XMPP, USENET, and maybe even IRC + OTR over the ISDN.

Verification and Validity, Identity Defined

Generally speaking, if you don’t see a profile listed here, then it’s probably not a real account of my own. Do not engage and do not inquire to the unknown account - it only feeds the trolls and makes everything worse.

Ignore the Impersonators, Stalkers, Liars, and the Jüdenhasser Pseudo-Activists

Specifically, Twitter/X have the most egregious examples (which I am not back-linking), and of course their support team refuses to take those shitheel accounts down). If in doubt, please contact me on one of the networks below.

Can I send you an encrypted email instead?

Yes, and here is my PGP / GPG key from the MIT Keyserver:

• Personal GPG PubKey (A3E24F7A)

The Many Names of ‘Who Are You’?

Some people know me by one or two or four different names. I didn’t choose this life, so what else is there to say? People get married, divorced, stalked, adopted, disowned, disavowed, etc.. some people go into witness protection programs, some do not. Some get tired of doing so, and some must have online presence for their career - and for some there is simply no other choice.

Where is Madeline?

That’s my middle name. If you know me, likely you already know this, and if you know me very well, then you know that you know that you know that I know that you know this already. So double check your double-8, five-by-five, it’s too long passed and now’s TTGTFG - the endless slog, the Long Slow Distance, bekons just one more belay from the great beyond.

Where is Annaliese**?**

If you know me extra-more, from the sandstone expanses of Monument Valley, the Canyonlands, all of those falls on El Cap, the backcountry avalances we unstuck-ourselves from, to the summits of Sierra 14’ers.. then you may know my “what’s your wall name?”, or perhaps from the portaledges and frozen bivys and smashed scorpions carried-off in your stupid empty tequilla bottle (“no glass on the wall, asssssshoooooleeeee!”)… then Annaliese and Anja say hallo and hola and shalom from above and beyond the great so-long. 👋🌄💝

Industry

• Consulting Services: consulting.winterschon.com
• Ai Storage/Infra R&D: yukon.systems

Networks

• Mastodon (bridge):@eva@prose.winterschon.com
• LinkedIn (new-acct): linkedin.com/in/eva-winterschon
• SubStack: substack.com/@winterschon
• Instagram: instagram.com/winterschon

Asynchronous Comms

• Matrix: @winterschon:matrix.org
• Zoom: eva @\ winterschon.com
• Teams: eva @\ winterschon.com

Codes and Repos

• GitHub (personal): github.com/em-winterschon
• GitHub (startup): github.com/yukon-systems
• GitLab: gitlab.com/winternull
• CodeBerg (self): codeberg.org/winterschon
• CodeBerg (proj): codeberg.org/rfc1918
• CodeBerg (proj): codeberg.org/yukon-systems

Dots of (in)Consequence

Most engineers who come from a UNIX background, and maybe the newer generations who did not grow up using literal UNIX® [2], tend to travel their years with at least one personal repo for their range of ‘dot files’ - configurations for text editors, terminals, terminal emulators, shell configs, and so forth. Maybe that repo started out using UNIX’s SCCS, or the 90s winrar CVS, perhaps RCS, then SVN or Mercurial or Fossil, a big-check jaunt with Perforce, forced to use Git (it’s not great! quick, back to Perforce P4)!

Well you get the point, there are many ways to deal with challenges wrought by engineering’s evolving needs for multiple concurrent and distributed instances of source code control management. I’ve used all of the ones listed plus a handful of others, and while Git is less headache than CVS and SVN, it’s from the mind of a self-proclaimed dictator for life, and I don’t want to use it - but the industry demands ecosystem compatibility. So, the usual bitching aside, here’s my current dot-files repo.

• Dot-Files: codeberg.org/winterschon/dot-files
• Dot-Blumenkrieg [3]: codeberg.org/rfc1918/dotfiles-blumenkrieg

Technical Domains

• Hugging Face: huggingface.co/winterschon

Reference Points

• [*] If so, please message me via a valid profile from this page and let me know - as there exist impostors who’ve stolen my personal photos, professional likeness, and should be dealt with accordingly.
• [2] “The UNIX® trademark is owned by The Open Group, an industry standards consortium, which acquired it from Novell in 1993. It is used to certify that operating systems comply with the Single UNIX Specification {“SUS, that is suss..”}. The brand separates the trademark from any single company’s code, allowing multiple, independent implementations to be certified.”
• [3] Blumenkrieg translates to “Flower War”, and is mostly an inside joke about the near-immediate capitulation of Austria during the inevitable rearmament of the Kaiser’s German Empire as it evolved into the “Thousand Year Reich” which lasted about six. What kind of Jew isn’t capable of laughing at the ease by which the world looked on as my lineage and so many others’ were whole-sale slaughtered and exterminated at Mauthausen, condeming the part of my ancestral lineage to a brutal and inescapably horrific death - who had re-located at the time in Passau after escaping from Belarus pogroms.They all died, except for the very few who strived forward and managed to escape through the frosted-frozen Alps during storms of mourning and endless searching.

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.

A Tenuous Timeline

1) Some years prior to a decade ago, I joined LinkedIn, and a small handful of years ago I joined Twitter.

2) Along the way a serious incident occurred, resulting in PTSD from a bodily assault; the details of which require privacy. During associated therapy a HIPAA violation occured, eroding my trust in the medical establishment.

3) Periodically I would receive messages on LinkedIn from recruiters at the company where that man worked. I did not want to be reminded of the events, and would never work at the same company. These external intrusions into trauma memories were not healthy and they needed to stop.

4) Concerns evolved which necessitated telling that company to remove me from their recruiting database and never message me ever again.

5) The company removed my profile, and they asked if I wanted to be involved with an investigation, which I refused for the unfortunately common reasons:

• I did not want to relive events, especially after the HIPAA issue
• I did not want to discuss those memories with yet another stranger
• I did not want to become more of a target for speaking up

It’s a terrible catch-22, and yet it’s nothing new. This person needed to be prevented from ever contacting me or knowing anything about my life, requirements which the company could not ensure.

6) For safety reasons, I changed my legal name, then I moved, and started a new job. Then I enabled a service which monitors for identity theft issues and personal-info data leaks. Other precautions were made. The whole process is time consuming, emotionally disruptive, and fiscally burdensome.

7) Years pass. In the interim, LinkedIn’s “people you might know!” feature will routinely recommend that I connect with people who reminded me of that trauma.

• The feature cannot be disabled and profile settings do not help. Blocking people and profiles does not sufficiently help. Their algorithm always does this.

8) Years pass. Identity theft issues become a greater risk. Someone on Twitter steals my profile, impersonating me to sell web3 tokens or whatever. I report it, and Twitter demands my government ID - which I refuse to upload.

• Preferring a human interaction, I offer to bring my ID to the Twitter office and show it to someone in person, but no - they want the digital copy to keep on file, which will totally never be leaked in a data breach.
• I refuse to upload the document. They lock my account. I have not bothered since.

9) Years pass. A few weeks ago, I’m running a social media account audit and notice that LinkedIn has two unknown logins from another country - and I’ve never been there, nor connected to an ISP or VPN or service related to that location.

• I revoke the logins, yet they reappear a week later.
• My account has 2FA enabled, yet the auth logs do not show it being used.
• Who is behind these logins? What amount of personal info and connections and messages do they have access to?

10) After seeking help from LinkedIn’s support system, they now want my government ID, just like Twitter.

• They want a third party service (Persona) to scan it, and surely this will never be leaked (sure sure).
• They assure that this third party is very safe, that they only give LinkedIn redacted info (yet Persona keeps the full info?)
• Surely I should trust their entire system. I do not trust their system, and I will not upload my ID for it to be stolen or have any of the data used in some way to harm me.
• The result is similar to Twitter, my account is restricted with no access.

End Results and Oh Well…

So, goodbye LinkedIn, goodbye Twitter.

I cannot place my trust in these faceless social media corporations, the ones which never assume responsibility for data leaks, data theft, or the sale of demographics and usage meta-data. The common refrain of, “we’re telling you that we redacted your personal information”, means nothing substantial from these organizations.

These sites profit extensively from user data - we are their product for sale, and when that happens it can lead to extremely unsafe conditions, particularly if that data can be used for location tracking, enabling access which leads to physical violence, stalking, harassment, or other detriments by which women too-often experience the online world.

Sure, I could upload my ID and “just trust them”, but that would not make me safer; it would invalidate the entire purpose of protecting my body, my mind, my future. Handing them my trust, when they have routinely proven that they are not trustworthy, would render-pointless every hardship and effort towards safety and security which I’ve been required to endure since those events so many years ago.

By prioritizing my personal safety in both of these cases, the end result is that I am no longer able to engage and connect with people from my work life via the two most common business-centric social networks. The alternative is no alternative at all; choosing not to be safe is not a choice.

I know what it’s like to have my choice taken from me, and I never want that to happen again.