Surviving Heat Madness Waking Up from a 3 Month Fever Dream TPS-0033

I'm taking this opportunity to acknowledge the shifting of the seasons and to celebrate what has been the longest period of time that I have spent in beyond civilization.

It's been almost exactly three months since the last resupply run of several hundred gallons of water.

I've been capturing every every rain event that I possibly could with as much catchment as I can, which is still a drop in the bucket. I've been optimizing and improving the strategies for harvesting rainwater.

Now I roughly have an idea about the amount of water storage tankage that I can top off from the access points in the nearest city.

If I can get those topped off, then I can supplement and rebalance those tanks from rainwater as it comes.

This last summer it turns out I was using probably three times more water than I would need to for myself, and to keep plants alive.

I scaled back on a lot of plants that just couldn't survive the heat, no matter how much water I used. I will be spending more water to grow more things in a milder season, when there'll be less evaporation overall.

So it'll kind of balance out. But long story short, for me, it is an important accomplishment to celebrate getting these metrics figured out.

Because when doing permaculture in distressed climates, knowing the tool kit of establishing food forests in any climate, we should all eventually know what to fill shipping containers with, so some day we can have them shipped out, have them dropped by helicopter or crane.

You should be able to know based on the budget, based on the climate, based on the time of year and the scope of the project, just how to deploy and build out that system at any scale.

So for me, having nowhere near the experience level of the best permaculture designers, having some of the same spirituality, having some of the same ambition, but basically for myself, being very much very junior, very rookie, compared to who I consider to be the most experienced, skilled and talented permaculture designers on the planet.

So far the strategies of permaculture are keeping me alive, keeping me financially fit, physically fit, dietarily fit. That allows me to be this platform that I am, that I feel good about and without the permaculture design movement and without the blessings that I've had of the people who have educated me and guided me throughout my journey and really put my energy and ambition to good use…I would probably be in horrible health and total despair and totally broke and filled with animosity and anger and blame, and I'd be in a dead end, but I'm not.

It's hard work, it's of discipline. It's a lot of austerity, a lot of sacrifice, but a lot of payoff, a lot of beauty, a lot of dignity. I put myself into a very extreme circumstance and for me to be able to know what it takes to survive the most extreme, record breaking, heat wave after heat wave summers in recorded human history….and in one of the hottest places.

Those headlines of peak temperatures around the world were like the low end of the static average daytime temperature for me for this last entire three months, from mid June until just a couple of days ago, I was basically in a state of what I'm now gonna call heat madness. It took all of my wits and all of my resolve to hold it together.

There were some near death experiences. I'm simultaneously using this moment, this episode, to raise a glass, to myself for surviving and dialing in this modularity.

How much to budget for, how much to plan for to give myself certain amounts of time and to know okay I stick with this diet plan, if I stick with this dynamic hydration plan, if I stick with this electrolyte plan...the medicines and the libations needed to keep the spirits up, plan even how much thread to have to mend my clothes.

I'm mending my clothes by hand, and I don't wanna have too much so that I'm so that it slows me down, or it's cutting into other budget line items. And I don't wanna have too little to where I run out.

So I'm trying to get close to that point where, me as a force of food forestry, getting more and more experience in different climates, so that eventually I will be able to say to myself, I could dial in that container manifest, that itinerary, and have that plan, and know what I'm doing, and know that if I have one shot at getting all of the supplies I need for one project, one operation somewhere that it's not gonna come up short. Or I won't be having too much of one thing and not enough of another, and therefore not effectively economizing space.

So another dimension, of course, is like medical tape, guaze, alcohol and tumor powder. Tweezers, sewing needle, the most minimalistic first aid items to help to manage the small punctures, abrasions and scrapes. Precluding infections by doing that proper immediate wound care and just being careful.

It's an interesting metric to know that, there are probably opportunities I'll have in the future where it's not gonna necessarily require a helicopter or bulldozers to move in the most austere settings. But, I do like the idea of being able to say, well, if I got, a utility trailer and loaded that up with the exact same sort of number of gallons of tankage that I have and the same number of 25 to 50lb boxes nuts and seeds and raisins and spices and whatnot.

I could square myself away and relocate myself and replicate what I've achieved here, and do that with a utility trailer, and ideally, scale it out to where I know what my needs are to survive and be comfortable and have my cacao and green tea stevia ceremonies a couple times a day.

Some day I'll scale up to boxed trees and the bulk seeds and the mulch and the compost and the coconut coir and the infrastructure, the hardscaping and softscaping infrastructure.

That is what I get most excited about. But I had to learn and dial in at this very, very constrained time, budgetarily, in this economy.

About this time last year, I had the opposite problem. I had too much money, I gotta figure out what to do with it before it all goes proof in the markets, in a bear market, when the wave crashes, what will I have to show for it?

So that was my problem of organizing and planning, what to actually convert from paper gains into regenerative infrastructure.

It was a lot of projecting with math and numbers and a lot of guesswork, but it all really proved out well. As far as my needs being supplied for me to do the work that I wanna do, I know what it takes to do it, and is not very much.

All I wanna do from this point forward is scale out with the plant stock and the the pondage, and being able to do all of the ecosystem building right, and scale that out here and beyond.

I would be thrilled to continue this pattern, which is about right as far as just maintaining certain errands and engagements I have to maintain with the outside world, if I can only experience an interface with the outside world four times a year at most, and have that go less and less.

The more water I can capture, the more food I can grow to where it becomes zero times a year.

That, to me, is gonna be the ultimate celebration, the ultimate feralization, the end game.

I would only leave here at that point if I was called upon by some higher purpose to go and replicate this magical oasis that I'm starting to build here, and it just gets more beautiful, magical, everyday.

I'll now shift to expressing my feelings about what it is like to come out from those extreme conditions of temperature of three months straight, night and day.

There were a few days within those three months, there were a very few number of nights where I was able to sleep without waking up every hour and having to spray myself down with water and just feeling like my face was on fire, and suffering and not getting deep rem sleep.

Not really cleaning out the detritus, the metabolic waste products, from the daily life cycle, and just not sleeping properly, that's what I think a lot of the madness really is rooted in.

I know sleep deprivation is the quickest way to lose your mind.

I know that from experience with a lot of darker times in my past. I've survived it in the past. I'm not doing things that would keep me awake because I'm trying to sleep. The temperature itself is almost impossible to sleep through, or certainly to enter into the deeper REM state of sleep.

So it's been tortuous, and the only salvation is knowing that it can't last forever.

The peaks of 120 degrees Fahrenheit, I'm checking the thermometer, throughout the days, it almost went off the scale a few times, and mostly stayed around 110-115F for most of the days, at the peak heat of most of the days for the last three months.

It just barely, after this last cruel heat wave, it finally broke. It felt like the seasons had changed.

And now it's averaging about ten degrees cooler. So I'm finally able to sleep through the night.

I'm finally able to dream again, more satisfactorily and just the sense of not being in chronic, agonizing discomfort with the heat. Doing everything I can to just maintain non lethal core body temperature, but still struggling psychologically and physically. Just debilitated and being mortally afraid to go outside and lose balance or lose consciousness, or have the heat actually cause me to lose balance in consciousness, let alone tripping over things, or normal accidents that happen.

Every form of being limited to being bedridden and having to just contort myself so that I'm not making the heat rashes worse than they already are by allowing my skin to overlap on itself, so keeping armpits open and legs spread and one leg elevated.

I'm just rotating from side to side and trying to prevent bed sores.

It's grim. But then I realize I'm highly privileged to be able to do this self care, because a lot of people are out there working in these temperatures and dropping dead, and they don't have the luxury to use their survival skills and get in the shade and hydrate heavily and supplement electrolytes and manage their skin rashes, avoid any kind of chafing, and avoid any hazards and just lay low.

A lot of people did not have that luxury, it's a humble luxury, but it is a luxury that comes with knowing how to survive in the wilderness, doing permaculture, growing food, storing food properly, providing your own security.

Setting up a situation where, I'm able to function like I'm a ship at sea, in total isolation under extreme conditions, maintaining morale amidst maddening circumstances.

It's a real trip. Now, that first day or two of, I just can't believe that my mind works again. I'm hoping it hasn't changed in ways that I wouldn't be able to even know anymore.

How would you know if you had long COVID that induced early onset alzheimer's symptoms? Because if you lose ten IQ points and you can't remember what you were doing, how would you remember what life was like before?

People would have to tell you, or you'd have to watch videos of yourself being articulate and remembering things.

I don't know if you get to know, if you come back from an ordeal anywhere near the same level.

I've been doing some extremely intense computer programming work, at least for me, not in the grand scheme of things compared to the geniuses in the world who have been doing it their whole lives.

But for me, I have been putting myself through rigorous crash courses to get up to speed. I'm just starting at a very remedial level of the most basic building blocks of computer science.

I built websites and everything, but it was always being a site administrator, using graphical user interfaces and copying and pasting code, I wasn't really ever writing much beyond basic HTML.

Now I'm understanding how to think like software and think like hardware and actually learn that computer science, and understand the fundamentals of computer science are what inform the different styles of programming languages. Each have almost like dialects that you would notice if you see another language written.

I wouldn't have known it if I heard him just saying it, because they have such a dialect saying it, but if I see it in writing, I see it's the same word exactly to the letter of the word that I use with maybe one or two letters missing or added so now I now I really get to understand the logic behind a lot of languages.

So if I can, for my litmus test, write code that works and build apps that work as I have, and I it's been grueling to do it with very limited, limited bandwidth internally.

But given that deprivation, it's almost like the people who go and train at high altitudes, so that when they come down to normal or lower altitudes, they'll be that much more cardiovascular conditioned...

If I'm now permanently deranged…

I know now how I would define insanity or madness, it's like compounding frustration that leads to the people you see on Skid Row screaming profanities and throwing things all around and basically throwing an adult language tantrum for the majority of the rest of their painful adult life.

It becomes this downward spiral of compounding frustration.

It's like a bad day where you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and then you stub your toe, and then you hit your head, and then you slip and fall, and then you're in a traffic jam and a fender bender like, that's a bad day.

But imagine if that just keeps stacking up and stacking up.

I really feel like what happens is, in conditions of deprivation, or extremely stressful conditions, that now you're in this constant stream where the frustration is just ambient, there is no escape from it.

So every task is arduous and frustrating and taxing.

You just degrade and devolve down into grunts, I would have to say I sound like an old crotchety grunting achy man, that's how I've sounded for three months. Everything is just an extra effort to stand up, to put clothes on and take them off to just deal with all of the stickiness. I don't mean to belly ache and lament, but I do want to say that this pushed me to the edge a lot more than last year.

I keep telling myself, I really hope that I wasn't weaker and softer and whinier over the heat of this summer, than I was in the same place surviving last summer.

I hope that the factor isn't just that last summer was a bull market and this summer is a bear market, so everything is more painful and frustrating because it's a bear market.

I would like to think that is only a minimal factor and that the major factor is that the temperatures actually are hotter and that at this an extreme of temperatures, even one or two more degrees definitely on the Celsius scale.

I really do feel like also there is the fear that if I keep exposing myself to these extremes...

I've read, debating maybe pseudo scientific commentary about how exposure to extreme high temperatures makes you more resilient against them in the future.

And then, conversely, people saying the opposite, saying exposure to extreme temperatures are gonna make you averse to them and basically function poorly, and you kind of lose, like a battery that gets charged too often, it starts losing its potential to charge up.

I did not want to liquidate any more assets than I had to after after making wise moves last year. But once that bear market hit, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna survive with what I have, and I don't care what I have to go through.

I'm going to just monitor my core temperature and make sure that I'm staying alive.

But I will stick it out until the heat breaks rather than do anything that would force me to liquidate assets during a low point in the market.

A mentor framed the psychology of investing more powerfully than anybody else ever by stating that what it is once you get into these markets, and you understand how it works, is that you get into a war with your future self.

Your present self is going to be in a constant war with your future self over who gets to benefit the most from the amount of discipline and the amount of resourcefulness that you and your present self can have in order to make it to that destiny that you believe in, that is your future self, saying, figure out how to be resourceful now.

Because if the trend continues, as it has, up and to the right...

That war with the future self...I don't get up everyday and say, I'm at war with my future self and I'm gonna win this battle today.

But I don't have to, because it just is what it is.

The technical analysis, the quant trading, the value investing, all the investopedia vocabulary terms that I've learned, all this fin tech lingo that I never knew before that I've got into over the last five years.

It all boils down to one fortune cookie to keep you in that fight for your future self, against your present self. And it is this one line, and I don't know who first said it but it, stuck with me more than anything else and it was, what's the definite of an investment, it's something that's hard to hold on to.

So for me, if I'm gonna risk anything that could possibly be catastrophic, I'm gonna wait until all time highs, and then I'm gonna go take whatever calculated risks I have to and then I'm gonna get right back in a position and hopefully be able to go for six months next time and ride things out.

For me, it's not really a sacrifice, because this is the hermitage stage of my life. I've got so much reading to do, I've got so much skill development to do, I've got so much spiritual work to do and shadow work to do, and digital shadow work, and I'm doing it all.

I got solar power, I'm off grid, I'm catching rain water, I've got food stores, in I'm learning to live with being eaten alive by the ants at times, and learning how to get to higher ground, all the ways to adapt to those situations.

So I'm fired up. I'm fired up to have made it through that extreme compression.

You gotta have a rite of passage. You gotta learn what you're made of, and you have to face your demons, and you have to face nature.

And you have to face extreme conditions and survive, to have confidence, to speak with confidence, to teach and to just grow and to feel alive and to be alive.

So for the people who are just seeking more and more comfort and more and more bubble wrap to live in, you will crumble when you were you exposed to any amount of of adversity.

The reality is we're gonna have to have redundancy and backup plans because if the temperatures continue to rise, despite whatever we do now, if the runaway temperature extremes continuem, season after season, year after year, despite our best efforts to go EV all the way or whatever…

If temperatures keep going up, grids keep collapsing, fires keep burning, we are gonna be forced to dig ourselves survival bunkers underground, not because we're Doomsday peppers, because people we'll continue to drop dead on the surface of this planet.

I'd like to have underground spherical stainless steel 6 ft. minimum of earth above the top of the module, underground...Exploring subterranean affordable economy, homes and luxury homes and beyond that, we're going in the matrix type of direction of having to live under the surface of the planet because of the toxins, the atmosphere, the temperatures...

I am on the bleeding edge of that reality. What I did is I put myself into the future. Call me crazy, call it a sci fi mystique.

I'm in the blazing wasteland where the only way to survive from this point forward is to build elegant affordable strategies for going underground.

The other animals, like the beautiful desert squirrel that just came back, hanging out on the surface just recently.

What did it do the first time I start seeing it? It's showing me how it digs its hole and goes underground. I see it go in one place and pop out the other.

They got that network underground, so dialed in.

I'm sitting here scratching my head going, how many tens of thousands of dollars is it gonna take for me to do even the most modest underground build.

The first many people think about is surviving nuclear winter. I got to imagine the bunker business is booming.

But I think it's gonna go beyond that. It didn't stick after the Cold War, but I think now the need to retreat from all the different compounding climate and air quality and fire and all kinds of disasters happening on the surface, even riots, it's gonna continue to make more and more sense to actually design these.

As permaculture designer, I wish I had more tools available to me, and I wish it didn't cost so much money to even have the most basic underground setup.

But I know it's going that direction. And I know that surviving this three months of heat madness, I know that this has got to be the last time.

I feel like looking back on the previous summer, I remember it being rough. I remember it being exhausting and rough, just something that I never experienced before, but I knew it wouldn't last forever.

But this time, it literally felt like ten times worse, to the point of it just feeling like torture.

I feel I'd been getting close to those points of not snapping so much, but just being like everything is compounding frustration.

I dance. I have my spiritual practices, I don't blame anybody but myself, I take responsibility. I don't displace aggression onto anyone or anything else beyond taking full responsibility for myself and just trying to push forward and survive.

If I'm gonna throw around words like the warrior mindset, that's what they do to weed out the weak in selections for all types of elite service work.

So for me, in my own mind, I'm like, well, I'm an anarchist.

I will never voluntarily choose to go be in a chain of command where people are gonna get in my face and yell at me and issue me direct orders.

That's not gonna be me in this lifetime. It's gonna not work for them.

But does that mean I'm gonna be soft? Does that mean I'm gonna be weak?

Does that mean I'm gonna have no discipline and not be squared away and just be, just be living in an infinite realm of slack?

No, I'm going to take the responsibility of being my own drill sergeant, my own commanding officer and pushing myself through my own training courses in my own crucibles for better or worse.

That is the contract with myself to say I'm not gonna be a soldier working for an empire. I'm gonna be a warrior fighting the battles that I choose with a chain of command that is one link, and that one link is me and the spiritual forces that I commune with, that I will take orders from and that I will listen to, and ask for the divine insights and guidance from.

I would really hope to never have to fall in to a chain of command where I'm having orders barked to me. Because it will probably not work out well for anyone involved.

I know that about myself, so I excuse myself, and I do me out here the way I'm doing it. But I think I definitely earned a few merit badges this summer and most importantly, whatever may have shifted, I got two arms and two legs I can still go into beast mode and do extreme physical training and physical operations.

I feel like I've pushed my the envelope further, and I have more capacity, not less. But I definitely feel the way Arnold Schwarzenegger looked at the end of the movie Predator, when his head was tilted back, getting a ride out in the chopper.

I have been brutalized by this last three months, I'm just coming out of it, rejoicing, being so glad that I have my faculties, that I have my investments, and I have my wherewithal and my physical functionality.

I'm not suffering with long COVID, and I'm not about to go and take ten more variants on the chin and risk IQ points, risk impotency, risk debilitating chronic illness and derangement, and not be able to come back from it.

That's just me doing me. And you can do you. I've got no medical advice, no investment advice, no climinological advice.

I've just survived being on that edge of crumbling and not crumbling and pulling through and making it.

Beyond my dry bulk stored food preps, for fresh food I've been living mostly off of water spinach, kang Kong, sweet potato greens and herbs.

But the real desert survivors that were able to keep me on fresh greens the whole summer, were the sweet potatoes and the kang kong.

I was able to harvest cyclically and live off the vat of fermentation. I feel like a million bucks.

I'm surprised that this summer did not kill me or drive me completely off the edge psychologically.

But I have not crumbled, and I still stand tall.

I've never looked forward to cold temperatures more than I have just now.

There'll be some mild weeks before it starts getting bitterly cold again, but I can bundle up and I will sleep great.

When I need to warm up, I can actually do projects again, do reasonable amounts of of work out in the landscape, which I have not been able to do, which the deprivation of being able to do what you love that is a huge factor in that madness quotient.

Because what keeps me sane is working the land. And if I can't work the land because it's lethal to do that, I could do a little bit of work between 4 and 6a.m., and then it's like, run for cover and be laid up all day and night, until until the next cycle of it being four.

It didn't kill me, and it made me stronger.