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.

People in the industry are playing hard and fast, and whether those qualities may be considered a good thing is up for endless debate, but not right now. Right now I’m going to show some End of Year snapshots which are relevant to the blog’s purpose: wtf am I doing here anyway?

2025 was mostly extremely challenging, and mostly in helpful ways, but also featured a repetition of lessons which it seems I need to reflect on for additional forward momentum.

Let’s take a look at some of my core qualities as told by the oft-loved and oft-maligned OpenAi’s Chat-GPT 💟.

Your Year, Painted in Pixels

Very close, nice work GPT. While I do not have a 400GbE switch on my desk, I do have a few 100GbE 32-port switches in the racks, and occasionally 200GbE NICs and optics will float around the test bench.

The Architect Archetype ~ 3.9% of ChatGPT Users

It’s true! Over the 25 years of this career I’ve held architecture specific roles across the domains of Hardware Systems, Infrastructure Automation, Databases, and HPC Storage realms. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, going all the way back to 1985 when introduced to the 4.77MHz IBM PC, Model 5150.

Personality: Specialist, Planner, Conceptual

That’s fairly accurate, more so if we add “spatial reasoning” to a list of cognitive methods.

“Thinks in structures and systems. Uses ChatGPT to design elegant frameworks and long-term strategies within a domain.”

A Datacenter in the Living Room?

Close in accuracy, however the “living room datacenter” is more commonly located in a home-office room (when living in an apartment), or in a dedicated area of the garage with HVAC filtration + dedicated 208/220/240V power, and the requisite automated cooling systems (usually Tripp-Lite units with duct-blowers). For systems at home the machines are often bought as separate server components along with a 4-5U chassis + rails + multiple sub-50 decibel large-format 120-180mm fans. Systems with high RPM 40-80mm axial screamers belong in a proper colocation facility.

How about that Homelab - is it in a constant state of flux?

Yes, mostly. It’s often helpful for proof of concept tests, hypothesis validation, and running benchmarks without having to drive to the DC or go back and forth with Remote Hands requests. Plus, lots of fun going on with hardware at home, but sometimes results in broken nails 😔.

Messy cables? Sometimes. Labels? Sometimes.

The homelab is often rebuilt: storage devices, fiber, dac, cables, and test clusters revised.

Homelab, sure… but how about those colocation photos instead?

As we’ve seen, some of the server hardware lives at home in my 25U shorty-racks, some is across the bay at a datacenter where big-loud machines require CRAC style cooling, and some of it is spread across the globe at other colocation facilities where The Providers have megawatt and gigawatt infra capacity. My personal infrastructure is a hybrid design, utilizing everything from embedded systems to multi-GPU hosts to public-cloud virtual machines… so, let’s see a bit more…

• Recent datacenter photos: https://prose.winterschon.com/a-recent-datacenter-colo-visit/

Your Chat Style

The analysis says… well, it’s fairly accurate for a description of being in-person as well as at the keyboard during remote meetings or daily chats.

Technical or otherwise, usually this is consistent. I’m often chatty, verbose, attentive, talkative, opinionated, even positively bubbly at times. Unless you catch me on a day where those qualities are supplanted by the clouds of quietly recalcitrant moods - the type which are grounded on a dualistic view of existence best described as Stoicistic-Nihilism, having been sourced from far too many post-traumatic stress events endured.

Your Chat Style: Direct, technically precise, often layered with humor and a critical edge, mixing structured reasoning with conversational spontaneity and sharp observational wit.

Your 2025 Chat Stats

Hold on now. I’ve used em dashes since 6th grade English class—so if seeing those in my writings is giving an impression that I use LLMs for all of my authoring is quite incorrect. For all of those people who don’t like them I have a solution: go to the settings section and set your rules and move on with your life. 😏

• Total Chats: 720
• Messages sent: 4,861 (not tokens, messages)
• Chattiest day: September 5th (why? we’ll need to see…)
• Images generated: 3 (Sora kinda sucks)
• Em-Dashes “Exchanged”: 1,882
• Top Messages Sent: 1% (percentile)

Regardless of those stats, even with my use of ChatGPT’s advancements with their “Pro Account”, most of my Ai/ML occurs on self-made infrastructure. I don’t rely on closed source, I don’t like closed source, and I don’t like non-democratized intelligence services that are just in it for profit. My career was built on Open Source and this current infra uses tooling like Ollama, Open-WebUI, vLLM, llama.cpp, CUDA, PyTorch, ROCm, and many other examples of collaborative ingenuity - free to use, free to improve, so please contribute if you can.

Three Big Themes of 2025

1. Building Ultra-Low-Latency Systems (true)
2. Experimenting, Measuring, Refining (true)
3. Engineering Meets Everyday Life (true)

Thoughts on 2026, Ai Industry Trends != Rules

Working in the Ai/HPC/ML industry, an observable fact is that the majority of consumer-facing Ai companies are still trying to figure out this new landscape, how it works, why anyone should care, and how to monetize whatever it is that they’re focused on.

Most will repeat the errors of the past, most will fail, most will malign the tech while misunderstanding nearly everything about the topic; and that’s fine. That’s the routine in Silicon Valley, but it doesn’t have to be.

1. We cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s methods, and that is a simple fact. We need the core technologies involved with Ai in order to resolve the massive amount of tech debt from earlier generations, but we need to stop expecting the same success from the same methods from the past; this is not the same world as 10, 20, or even 5 years ago.
2. The current anti-Ai mentality in mass-media is occurring despite companies like IBM, Cray, Fujitsu, BullSequana, and a handful of others with Top-500 dominant postures being focused on Ai-enabled Supercomputing, HPC, and acceleration hardware domains for well over two decades. These clusters have been active at research facilities with names like CERN, Technion, and of course the DoD and Military labs. These clusters keep us safe, they advance human understanding, assist with solving otherwise unsolvable problems, and are used to maintain the systems and functions our current world relies on for security and the advancement of human potential.
3. Ai is not just chatbots, it’s not limited to multi-modal agentic buzz-words, but that’s a tangent for another day. Datacenters are not ruining the world like mass-destruction of rainforests just so people can eat more cows. Conversely, we have an entire section of the Supercomputing industry focused on green energy and resource efficiency. Medical advancements, brain research, climate science and modeling, cancer research, etc… all of this is and has been advanced by Ai - but it’s not from the consumer side and it’s not how the media presents the information. Gosh, I wonder what incentive the media has to engage in such maligning tactics?

How Do We Move Forward?

In spite of or despite anti-Ai sentiments, while the public-facing corporate marketing landscape fights for “Consumer Economy Dominance”, engineers and architects like myself are busy in the background innovating with (sometimes our own) Ai/ML systems and (sometimes our own RSU/ISO/BST* funded) heavy-compute big-data storage infrastructures.

People like myself do this because we love it (mostly, nothing is perfect), and because we want to improve the lives of those around us, not to simply make money and acquire material goods. These skills require compromise, dedication, attention to detail, and a deeply held desire to improve the human condition through personal investment of time, mentoring younger engineers, and the occasional runway.

TOGETHER WITH THE AIs WE WILL BUILD A BETTER ULTRON

Kidding, mostly. Ultron had some good philosophical points, but we’re not in Strawberry Fields or the BS about paperclips from unimaginative and uninformed bloggers; this is real life and The Terminator is not around the corner. Pass the espresso and let’s check the local-node TTFT and CHRs to see how SkyNet is doing. ❤️

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.