Hell Quarter Season 3: 90 Days of 24-7 Heat Torture while Lone Wolfing Fort Security TPS-0064

Acknowledge the fact that I'm entering the third round of debilitating heat 24/7 for three months straight.

There will be very few moments of relief between now and mid September for me, as as it has been over the last the last two summer cycles that I have been at this location with no AC and minimal shade, minimal power.

A very humble and small scale solar power system, three marine batteries and only a few hundred watts of panels.

I would like to scale that up, but probably not to the point of running even the lowest capacity AC unit. I've done a lot of research and development and study on ancient technologies, working with water and air, and a sort of alchemy between those two in the absence of the ability to really deeply burrow underground and be a cave dweller of sorts, or a deep burrow dweller where I could really avail myself of the cool temperatures only a few feet beneath the surface of the of the Earth.

In most places, year round, there's pretty stable, human friendly temperature. Obviously, there are creatures underground you'd have to compete with and be concerned about but at this point, given the state of the economy and my net worth, I'm not even doing any more window shopping as it were. I've stopped torturing myself with browser window shopping on what would be the most elegant potential way to macgyver, some means to retreat underground to avail myself of those moderate temperatures, even if just for a few hours during the peak heat of each day.

To have a hybrid subterranean and terranean existence. There are animals that hibernate in some environment that's hospitable for them, and just go into a deep meditation for months and don't even barely move, if at all, and are able to be frozen.

I know there are some aquatic organisms that just go into a sort of cryogenic meditation for the season, where they're frozen solid, but there's some molecular dance that they do, some kind of alchemy they do to get through it.

I'm in solidarity with those animals that just adapt to extreme whether and temperature, adapt to extremes and just embrace the suck and deal with it.

I've built out a few partially successful experiments, but what I've discovered is that it will just take more investment and more solar power and more battery banks.

It's not financially impossible. It's something I would try to limit as far as extravagance in that department.

I hope that my trust documents are well preserved with my legal counsel and my successor trustees, and the rest will be history.

I'm prepared in more ways than I ever have before.

Today is a better day to die than yesterday, and tomorrow will be a better day to die than today.

In terms of the way I'm doing this sort of Swedish death cleaning. If you look that up, it's this concept of, if you're an empty nester, which I practice, what I preach, I'm a visectomized population minimalist.

I've always been an empty nester, and I always will be an empty nester.

But for those who are, with all due respect "breeders", if they're making a best effort to be holistic about it.

I have people in my life who I respect their holistic parenting efforts, and there are people in my life who I feel are not stepping up as much I'd hope they would.

I'm here to stay out of the way of the people who are taking on that responsibility.

But for the purposes of defining my knowledge from reading just one article, it's not like it's part of my heritage or anything, but this Swedish death cleaning sub culture, I suppose, whatever there is to say about it anthropologically, it's this phenomenon where being death positive is one way to put it.

People would say, if we don't have a full family in this house, maybe we should be more minimalistic about how much flare there is all over the place.

Maybe we could get rid of things we don't use, box things up.

Ultimately, whether it's just purging things to be more of a minimalist and have less stuff and clutter beyond...anybody can kind of purge clutter now more easily than ever with the platforms on the Internet that make it so you don't even have to do a garage sale. You can make QR codes for everything and put them on some app and get rid of them...however people are doing it these days.

Back in my day, there was a bit of overhead and a bit of energy cost to setting up a yard sale and probably ending up with a lot of it still having to be a burden.

My understanding is that they're doing is they're making it easy for their family, picking up some of the slack of the burden that will, by default, land on their heirs, or whoever is closest in their sphere.

Knowing that, there's no excuse because you don't have the excuse of taking care of and raising your family now, if you're an empty nester, then it makes sense that while you have all of your cognition and all of your physical ability, that you should streamline your physical existence footprint in your home, not to make it be as barren as a jail cell or a hotel room.

Make some sense so that at least files are organized, things that you're going to hand down are very clearly marked, like a tag hanging off of them, maybe just set in a manner where you have some sort of inventory.

More than just a last will and testament or revocable living trust or whatever you have that's in a document form.

Spring cleaning is something that we've all heard of. I don't know if it's lasted into this new generation, but to my generation, spring cleaning was just sort of almost like this new year's resolution kind of thing, where I don't know what the background is of it, the folklore of it, but people would talk about it.

I guess once it's no longer so freezing cold in a lot of places that you can actually move around more freely, and maybe things have been kind of piling up over the winter. So now that it's a little more forgiving in terms of temperatures, you could do some spring cleaning of your realm.

For a lot of reasons in the West, we're very death negative and lacking a lot of the death doula kind of Tibetan book of the dead style traditions.

We spend less time and effort preparing for the inevitable, psychologically and financially and logistically than other cultures that have preserved those traditions.

Make every day a good day to die and it'll be a better day to live.

That, to me, sounds very life affirming and not negative, pessimistic or low vibe.

To me, it's very high vibe, and it has a lot to do with not leaving a mess and just trying to be elegant.

If you need an excuse to downsize your excessive materialistic lifestyle, then at the very least think about who's gonna have to deal with it. Maybe it's a line item in your life insurance policy that you're gonna hire some company to come in, like professional movers after you're dead. I'm sure that's a niche.

I've never seen any advertising for it, but maybe it's bundled with all kinds of other mortuary services that they would do that for you.

Try to actually connect the dots between what's in a will and what's actually in the estate on a property.

I'm sure there are professionals who do that kind of work, but I think it's out of reach for a lot of people. Most people are pretty down to earth financially in terms of the statistics of the world economy.

So it makes probably more sense to be DIY and do it yourself.

I'm not attached to my survival for its own sake, the fight that's worth my life is the fight to establish permaculture food forests all over the world, in every climate.

I want to be able to get GPS coordinates, determine the climate type, the soil type, the human population considerations, political considerations, everything that will go into planning of any kind of dropping of any kind of elite unit.

Knowing what to pack into those containers…

Anywhere in the world, in a relatively short amount of time, assemble the packing list, the other slip sheets, the manifest, to palletize and fill containers with all the things that would be needed to create a climate appropriate designer, food forest permaculture installation anywhere in the world, scaled to the budget supplied.

I'm not doing desert survival only for myself and tempting fate with the heat, scorpions, black widows, rotating and identifying potential bed sores, chronic nose bleeds, fungal infections.

This is a living laboratory of research and development that can function as a base of permaculture operations.



There are former Green Berets who are currently building out fire bases for civilians to experience a knowledge transfer so they can get squared away and be fit to defend their communities.

The best I can do in the spirit of looking up to those folks and honoring them, the best thing I can do to be in solidarity with them eco guerrilla warrior, I can just be one node individually, myself, being the change I wanna see in the world, and living and pushing the limits of the research and development for this sort of concept, which I'm not proselytizing.

I'm just doing it because it's the card that was dealt to me and the card that I'm playing.

Nobody needs me to reinvent the wheel of desert survival, meaning I'm gonna go out and figure out how to extract water from plants to survive and eat bugs, and go as long as I can in some sort of isolated disaster incident where I simulate being completely cut off with no rescue communications...

I've trained in a lot of those survival scenario situations, but what I'm doing now is very much of a hybrid.

It's a very thin because I don't get to shower and I don't get to back to anything like AC or any creature comforts that you would get if you were to be a weekend warrior or whatever, go and be a survival camper and just do it for fun on the weekends. More power to all of those folks, I'm just an extremist getting by with what little I have and can afford.

Someday I will load containers with what I need to establish a permaculture system anywhere in the world.

I'm on this adventure because most people can't just say, I'm going to expose myself to the extremes of human survivability, or if they tried and they got to their wits end, they can afford to go back to the city, or go get a hotel, or even sit in a vehicle and burn fuel to run the AC in my vehicle, hoping not to die accidentally from carbon-monoxide poisoning.

It's a privilege to call it quits and retreat to modern high tech cooling infrastructure, but from me the experiment I'm in is in solidarity with the people who don't have any choice whatsoever, which could be more people as climate refugees increase.

The financial reality for me is that if I were to quit this experiment, I'd be homeless again at Los Angeles Skid Row. Maybe I could spend the heat of the day at the public library and figure out a way to bury my head in a book and take a nap without anybody knowing.

Maybe I could try to go to a fountain to rinse off so I don't stink the place up and get kicked out.

I would be what I was before, a high functioning yet mentally struggling homeless person, like a lot of my homeless peers, or houseless peers, vehicle dwelling peers.

If I fail here I'll likely be dead, and to me that's way better than going back to skid row.

Here I'm tactically advantaged. I wouldn't go so far as call it a fire base. I don't think I am heavily armed enough to call this a fire base, although maybe I would call it in all element base.

That's what I would call it. I will call it in all element base.

The beautiful synthesis of the warrior poet hippie, tipping my hat and saluting the Vietnam veterans turned anti-war activists.

The synthesis of the best of the hippie movement and the best of the highest integrity war heroes of the Vietnam era.

So, yes, let's evolve to where all the fire bases of the world, may they all evolve into all element bases, where we have tactical permaculture.

So here I am doing my all element base, without a lot of support, without a lot of guys to my right and my left, whose backs I watch and that my back is watched by them.

This is very much a lone wolf operation.

This is my third summer that I'm coming into now.

I'm using this opportunity to put on record for myself, for posterity, for future generations, to study my evolving relationship with the fight for sanity that is surviving climate change.

Whether you blame people or not, you're probably gonna die if you don't adapt. So everybody has to adapt, whether they blame humans or not for off the charts record breaking temperatures.

There's no guarantee that what worked for me the year before last and what worked for me last year is going to keep me alive this year.

I have some strategies that I did iterate upon.

As of today, I'm just beginning to re-institute my policy of wrapping fabric around my neck and around my head that's dipped in water and cleansed during each cycle throughout the day with a bit of a of a very natural soap.

It was introduced to me by a lover many years ago, it was probably one of the best gifts of my life. I would definitely never go back to a lot of the toxic chemicals and a lot of the skin drying formulas. There's an argument to be made not to be killing all of the microbiology on your skin all the time.

I use it very sparingly, but it has done very well for me to just clean wounds and, like the way you would use aloe naturally by breaking the plant open and rubbing it on your skin, or using honey to seal a burn.

Something very naturalistic, very ancient, primal, plants that are basically the the blood of the plant, just perfectly suited to provide an antiseptic and temporary, easily degradable barrier between the microbial vectors of everything on the outside world.

It's been helpful in a lot of ways. I use it when scalp gets itchy after sweating because of the sun and moving around anytime.

My sweat is my enemy a lot of the time.

Certainly, in the cold, sweat can kill you. You don't want to work up a sweat in freezing temperatures because that can make you dead real quick.

But for me, that's true to some extent in the cold months, but anytime of year, if my scalp sweats it's a problem if I don't wash it as soon as possible.

I keep my head shaved for the most part because when I exert myself to a point during any time of the year where there's a sweat, because I don't have enough water to shower as regularly as I would have if I lived in the city...

I have to do the sponge bath lifestyle. So this kind of very natural body wash with a little bit of water, that will keep a very hygienic scalp for me.

So I use just drops of that, mixed in a little dog food bowl of water, and I dip my head wrap fabric and make my little handkerchief style bandana out of it, and then I take a similar sized rectangular fabric maybe 2 ft wide by three and a half feet long...one of them gets dunked in that soapy water, the other wraps and ties around the first one.

That has been able to interrupt the bacterial cycles of growth that would make it smell like nasty gym socks after a few hours, I went through that, suffered through that.

Then I found the perfect balance, ringing out and cycling water through and adding those drops of that soap so that I would have refreshed good smelling, non irritating head wrap and neck wrap if I want to use another cloth for that.

The crotch, the armpits, the neck are places where the blood can be most effectively cooled. I wrap mostly the head and neck 24/7 to prevent risk of rash and skin problems in the other areas, though I would apply wraps to them temporarily in an acute hyperthermic emergency.

If you have ice, obviously that's the best way to cool the wraps, but without having it touch the skin directly. Ice water is a better statement, there are reasons why ice on bare skin is ill advised compared to a an ice water or very cold water wrapped fabric. It should be clean, hygienic fabric going in those areas.

If you can cool the blood, you can cool the extremities, you can cool everything else.

I only barely started doing this, probably in the middle of last year's heat. It's very nice as the gradient of heat is beginning again to where actually it feels cool to do this now.

It actually makes me feel very good and very relaxed and very appreciative of the elegance of water and the physics of the evaporation that's happening.

But in within about the next 30 days and then for the next 90 days, it's not gonna feel cool. It's gonna feel like hot water in my hands as I prepare this and put it on my head, it's gonna feel hot.

But it will still have the effect, it will still create that buffer between life and death that I need and I appreciate that, it will get me through.

But it will not feel like a very nice cooling effect.

There's all kinds of science that I had to learn about wet bulb temperatures and humidity, and how deadly it is to be in a hot, humid heat wave because then your sweat is essentially useless, there's no capacity left in the air surrounding your skin.

The ambient air surrounding your skin is already saturated with moisture, therefore it cannot consume the moisture coming off of your beads of sweat. Therefore the temperature change that happens when the sweat from your skin gets sucked into the air and causes a cooling effect can't happen.

If that air is already saturated, there is no cooling effect and you die.

In the tropics you also have to be more vigilant against the increasing range of diseases, vector bearing insects.

To where I my heart goes out to all of the people roughing it in the tropics, because as beautiful as I've heard that it is, and believe it to be, and I want to experience it for sure, but if you're trying to do budget primitive survival, the desert can be extremely hot, but at least it's gonna probably not gonna be humid, and therefore countermeasures of water misting by various means that I've had successes that I'm building on, can be life saving.

To talk about my evolution of the water misting effect, applying water and wet damp cloth that's maintained with a means to keep it from getting totally fouled by microbes, and a small amount of fan power that I have during the day.

I can't sustain it past dusk because it's the batteries. It's a dismal economic ratio of the efficiency of solar panels to the efficiency of battery storage. I know there are some newer technologies that are improving battery efficiency.

I can only run kind of like a box fan or two during the day until the sun goes down and then the inverter starts screaming and that's the end of that.

I can't be fanned mechanically, electronically, in the night. There's lots of science to explore about it, but while nights are not necessarily as deadly, I think probably less people die in the night during heat waves, but more people lose their minds at night.

Because the psychological impact of not being able to sleep, your circadian rhythms kind of expecting to have some respite and relief from a hot summer day...

You can take a lot of being beat down by the sun as long as you're able to recover during the night, which for the most part, in most places, that is true, and only usually during extreme heat waves, does it cross the line where your body can no longer do what it needs to do, which is to intelligently drop the core body temperature to do some of the nuanced physiological processes that are beyond the scope of my biomedical knowledge to elaborate upon.

But there are physiological processes that happen during sleep that require your body to successfully engineer a process of dropping the core body temperature.

I think it was something like a couple of degrees below the normal operating rate to get certain tasks done.

I had the research more fresh in my mind when I talked about this last year but I'm gonna give a refresher, because if you're listening to this, and you are in a situation where you may have to think about a grid down scenario, where you're not living in the climate war the way I'm living in the climate war.

You may be thrust into it by a grid failure, and all of a sudden you're going back to this episode and dusting it off and saying, what the hell was he talking about?

We need to be cautious about the psychological impact, among other things, of night temperatures not dropping to a level to where healthy sleep can happen.

Your, your functioning, of your vitality on all the, on all levels gets degraded.

That's when I feel the worst, it can be very disruptive, to say the least, to have the inability to enter REM sleep. I wouldn't call it insomnia because I'm able to get bouts of sleep in.

This is my third initiatory ceremonial kick off of the hell quarter so if the navy seals do hell week and freeze in water I'm gonna call it hell quarter where I spend three months being broiled in the desert, and still have to function, still have to be tactical, and still have to operate. Growing is half the battle, and I'm keeping my survival crops alive in extreme conditions.

I'm learning more and more what is capable to stay in the fight to survive out here, horticulturally speaking, there have been a lot of casualties of that war in my ecosystem.

My fish are surviving, whereas a number of water plants did not survive.

What is surviving right now in my little hanging garden above the island gardens, there's flax, cilantro, borage, mint, a fig tree. I also have a lot of ferments, and I guess, technically, to some degree some jar sprouting at a minimal scale.

A far cry from my bonsai food forest was during the milder months of autumn and spring.

There's some arugula and amaranth.

When the rain water fills my tankage, then I get to really ramp up what I'm able to grow.

But right now, this is the tightest water budget and the tightest irrigation schedule that I've been on since I've been out here, growing stuff, including myself.

It's rough to go from the comfort of being bundled up over the winter and the spring and having cool, crisp mornings, the gradient of going into the madness that is the midsummer right now, I'm in the worst part, which is still having a taste of the milder breezes and milder mornings, and having to feel them and let go of them.

It's like breaking up in a relationship and having to still talk about who's gonna come over when to pick up the sweater that they left in the drawer, or whatever, you still have to be reminded.

The most psychologically sustainable part of the year is the middle of summer where you've lost all memory of what it was like, you don't remember anything of what life was like before.

It was a 120F degrees during the day, and 105 at the coolest point through the night in the morning.

That's the reality. You just stagger from shaded med tent to shaded kitchenette tent and try not to collapse in between, lest you become ant food and rat food and all kinds of other food, that's the reality.

Try to avoid hyponatremia, the imbalance of electrolytes that will make you dead.

But at least during that midpoint, your ears are melting out your brain, you don't remember what it was like to ever feel cool, and nothing will be cool or feel cool for another couple of months.

So at least you're in that zone.

The final phase, I would say, is where, at the very end, you start to actually get the cool breezes and the cool mornings and the first layer that you put on and the first blanket that you put on, and the first dreams that come back, and the first sense of sanity that comes back.

That happens in my experience, mid September is when you start to get relief.

But it's the sense that in the middle, I've discovered that I have to be a trooper, I've accepted that.

I'm a little bit more psychologically resilient, but that lasts up to a point, and then you're starting to beg for the relief that comes from the breaking temperatures.

Whereas I was chasing and praying for the sun and cursing the clouds in the winter and getting up and posturing myself to catch the earliest and first sun rays, and just putting my hands out, stretching them out to be blessed by the first early morning warmth of the sun rays.

Going from that extreme of humility of sun worship, then the total polar opposite of cloud worship and rain worship.

The juxposition of the extreme of cloud worship and shade worship and breeze worship, you start yearning for that when you know it's possibly getting closer, as the seasons are changing and you look at the days. You look at the hours, how could it still be this hot?

Isn't this fall for everybody else in the rest of the world, or many places in the world, in the hemisphere, at least other than me?

I'm a little bit more pathetic in that phase.

I'm prepping myself a little bit psychologically, but it's all about positive mental attitude.

Water is life, it will keep you alive and even in the world war two Army survival manuals they said to do exactly what I'm doing and what I've done to survive these last two summers in the field.

Lay down in the shade, blast fans if you have them, keep the body moist with water, and be hygienically intelligent about the wear and tear on the skin in that state of moisture and take measures to inhibit the growth of any form of pathogenic microbiology on the skin or on the linens surrounding it.

My water is limited, I've gone to dry cleaning my bedding in the baking sun as a form of disinfection, because it's otherwise just a swamp of all my dead skin and all my linens, I pound out the dead dust and sand I let them bake after being soaked by me. So the sun becomes my laundromat.

So far I've been able to survive, innovate, and optimize. If I meet my maker, my affairs are pretty well squared away. My documents are in order. My revocable living trust is in the hands of legal counsel and successor trustees.

There's not a lot to fight over. It's very simple and humble.