Surviving this climate crisis, our work is cut out for us, and there are not many places to hide.
Even those who feel like they're in a mild climate that's relatively buffered, or that they're buffered in general by taking for granted air conditioning on demand with no redundancy.
If that system fails, then you got another thing coming.
I'm not the most impoverished climate refugee, I'm not the least impoverished, probably somewhere in the middle, but I'm definitely a climate refugee.
Claiming that and owning that and defining that can be another conversation.
It's not much of an option for me to be living the way that I'm living, given my financial circumstances and given my abilities and semi-disabilities and my sensitivities and sensibilities, my threat model when it comes to epidemiology.
There are a number of factors, but ultimately, there's not an option for me to have free or affordable AC. Like they say about going to jail and having three hots and a cot, though you may have no AC.
I just read an article about a prison, I believe it was in Florida where there's hardly no AC, and what little they have is always breaking down, people just die and the staff, they can't contain the madness and the violence. They can barely stand so that's not an easy way out.
In all seriousness, I'm trying to keep a positive mental attitude and basically ride the line between heat exhaustion and heat stroke, both under the umbrella of heat illness.
I've talked about it a length before, but the reality is that living day and night, 24/7 with zero respite, no relief…
In fact, at night, it's worse for reasons that I've spoke about at length before.
Part of that is physiological. Part of it is psychological, mental.
But ultimately it all works together and compounds into a state of madness and a state of just horrible insomnia and dread. It's bad enough when the sun is up, but it's actually more dreadful when the sun goes down because of what happens in the body which is expecting it to cool, and then it doesn't.
I have a lot more now than I ever had before in my life, and it still ain't much. I'm willing to die on the hill of surviving on my first and only land.
It just so happens to be at a time when the market crashes and there's a pandemic, and there's breaking temperatures on Earth, and heat waves...
Well, then I guess that's why I trained for all the years to call myself a survivalist, and to take a bit of pride in that.
It's kind of one of those wilderness immersion experience, adventure game show, things that I'm documenting, at least somewhat with photography, somewhat with a camera, and mostly by talking about it, just verbally documenting it.
I'm not trying to do the selfie version of this in terms of talking to the camera, I have given more glimpses on my website, showing some of these biohacks and life hacks, solar punk type projects that I'm doing to be a minimalist with all these elements. Trying to stretch and push the limit of minimal water usage, minimal fanning, fanning with minimal solar power. For budgetary reasons and also because, I like to know how minimalistic I can possibly be. This is year three and I haven't added much technology or expense to scaling gradually into these projects that I'm doing.
I would say, psychologically, I'm realizing the toll is more exponential than I thought over the course several years now.
The first year I was just more gung ho, so morale was higher, there was less existential malaise.
I wasn't as ground down and hammered down by the experience.
But by now, I'm pretty ground down. I'm pretty hammered, by the site and the seasons, but it's so mild and so forgiving even in the coldest day of the winter compared to the earliest days of summer.
The fact of life is that it's nine months of total paradise and mild cold temperatures. Then it's three months of total hell. By the time the cooler temperatures come back, it was such a fever dream that you can almost not even remember what it was like before it began.
I'll refer back to these notes that I've taken to try to reconstruct the state of mind, but it's hard to describe because it is so tortuous.
I enjoy the sunrise and enjoy the sunset. Other than that, I'm laid up all day and all night, and I'm just rotating, hydrating and trying to avoid getting bed sores and mitigate heat rash and insect bites.
There's not a lot of severe physical pain. It's mostly just the psychological malaise, stress and sense of being distraught.
You wanna shout and scream, your barbaric yalp and it happens sometimes. Sometimes it's almost like fits of rage.
Extremes of boredom, extremes of debilitation, extremes of incapacitation and the inability of all things.
What I realized over this last cool season was that the thing that gets stripped away, that's the hardest to let go of, and the thing that drives you the craziest is the loss of the ability to get into the zone with anything, because the state of physicality is so ever present and crushing.
I can study things like taking a full load of Yale open course material, early medieval history in Europe, atmospheric and oceanic science and philosophy of human nature, evolutionary biology...
They're quite engaging. But it's not the same as getting in the zone, like working with your hands, building something, writing computer code, making art, doing something where you're sitting up, at the very least, if not standing up.
I've been getting into modifying the nuances of blood volume and circulation and, and vaso-dilation.
This is me bio hacking, life hacking myself. There's no research study, ethics board to have to consult with when it comes to just trying to make it and survive.
I'm just doing me and trying not to do myself in.
So be careful with any of this, and do your own research and consult your physician.
If anything, just know that my all this is coming from a place of precautionary principle. I'm fit, I'm healthy, I've been working outdoors doing permaculture installation for over 20 years now.
Everyone's got different circumstances. It's more foolhardy than brave what I'm doing at this point.
But if it yields a little bit of data that can be fed into future survival strategies for folks that's great. I'm doing things that are keeping me alive and they're life savers to me.
They could be beneficial to others, but I'm not gonna make any claims.
So what working on right now involves heat syncope mitigation.
Different approaches to understanding vaso-dilation and blood volume, and circulation, among other things that will come up.
Recently, I discovered the word syncope and was glad to have done so because I realized it's something that I've experienced many times in life and basically it's the fancy clinical term for fainting but it has, different causes, one of them being the result of vaso-dilation in the small blood vessels at the extremities or peripheral vessels.
Further out on the skin, where, as you're acclimatizing to heat, your body is trying to use a strategy of opening and dilating the blood vessels at the extremities in order for the heat of the blood to basically radiate out of the surface and hopefully dissipate in combination with a breeze or with sweat.
All those external factors are at play as well. But internally, that process that I wasn't aware of until last year, when I started researching why sleep is so disrupted...it's because of the effect of your body trying to lower the core body temperature by allowing the blood vessels at the surface of the skin, sometimes more intensely on the face.
I wake up with my face feeling like it's on fire, like it's being sunburnt, and it's the middle of the night. It's because of that process, where it's just another means, like sweating, or of using a very magical kind of physics to cool the blood and thus cool the core body temperature ultimately.
But the side effect of doing that, which is less of a problem when you're laying flat at night, is that it lowers blood pressure.
That low blood pressure means that when you try to stand up or move around, there's that much less efficiency and speed with which circulation takes blood in those dilated blood vessels, through the body, up to the brain and through all the other organs, but most importantly, to the brain.
You will have a tendency to get dizzy and fall over, pass out, lose consciousness, maybe go into seizures, and have other bad things happen.
You're trying to have your blood work against gravity to keep all your organs oxygenated all the way to the top of your skull in your brain and if you get up and you move around, or you get down low to do things, and then you stand up again, every time that happens, there's this hydraulic issue in the heat, which is a factor of the dilation of caused by the heat, and the body’s need to adapt to the heat and to try to cool itself.
All these factors are in some ways antagonistic to each other, in some ways complementary, but ultimately it leads to a very debilitated state, a state where you're kind of in that sun punch drunk stupor, and you're very dangerous to yourself and others, certainly, if there are any objects around.
A few times, just growing up, I'd get up too fast, that feeling, where your vision fades to black, or fades to fireworks. Then you gradually, but very rapidly, lose motor control, and then you're collapsing in whatever direction you fold into, and whatever direction you’re leaning towards.
I would fold my arms out over a table or a chair or something like that, just sort of latch myself over something with my arms folded, try to hook myself by the elbows or underneath the back of the arm, while my knees give out and maybe that will at least kind of break the fall.
I was in a medical study where it's obvious that it was more probably the experimental drug that I was taking for the study to blame than just getting up too fast. It was a combination of both. I was waiting in line to get probably a blood pressure test of all things, some kind of biometric thing done as part of the study, and I dropped dead weight, cold, my head did make a thud on the ground.
Luckily it didn't crack or bruise or bleed at all. I feel like I've done my fair share of training ninja roles and jui jitsu falls and stuff like that. I'm not a master by any means but I have enough life experience to kind of know how to scale into a fall where you're not shattering your elbow or your knee cap.
Slapping the longer parts of your arms and legs down first, if you can, or rolling the back down backwards if you can.
There's an intelligent way to fall, even from full height, dead weight.
I find myself just being out here, being exposed to what I know is that potential of losing consciousness and the consequences of it being deadly, like being eaten alive literally by ants while the sun would be scorching me, cooking me to death.
They say 3 hours without shelter. I don't even know if I will make it 3 hours, but I cannot ever lose consciousness and mobility to where I can't immediately pick myself up and maybe drag myself.
I gotta stay within range of shade and my sort of dwelling med tent tiny home.
Even during the coolest hours I try to stay in a tight range, because if anything happens, twist an ankle for example, I have to be able to crawl back before the sun gets any higher in the sky and I'll be crawling back over all kinds of biting and stinging ants.
I'm striking this balance of understanding my biggest enemies.
I'm blessed not to get a lot of headaches, though I've found cannabis to be a very helpful way to mitigate them if and when they happen.
It's become a very moderate almost micro dosing of cannabis flower infused coconut oil. It's been a dose in the morning and a dose at night to keep me from being in such tortured agony. This mellows me out psychologically.
I know it works in the headache department, because there are times where I do feel that sense of the beginnings of a possible migraine.
I don't like smoking it anymore, I kind of never really liked smoking it that much. But topically as a massage oil it is great and in moderation as a micro dose, in the form of coconut oil.
It's been a saving grace. I have increased the rate of usage, not the dosage, but the rate this summer.
I feel like it was the right thing to do, and I probably should have done it the last two summers, but I was kind of practicing a little bit of austerity.
I've discovered that the tiniest bit lasted me for almost three years because of this magical effect that somehow continuing to add oil to that original very small amount, that most real stoners would just die laughing at me for how small of an amount that I've been able to stretch this long.
I'm surprised it continues to hold an effect. It just seems like maybe the effect is just to turn some switch and it stays switched on for a few hours.
It doesn't have to be a whole lot of it, it's effective at the basic things I need it to do, which is to mellow me out, keep me from screaming, and to keep me from having headaches.
It does feel like an inner massage from the inside out.
I remember there were times when I would make the mistake, and almost accidentally, or kind of carelessly, before a day of having to work for somebody else landscaping. Maybe have a toke, or maybe have a nibble of an edible or something, and just think I could get away with it.
It would drag me down so hard in the workday, though it doesn't drag me down the same way when I'm working for myself.
I can work at a pace where I'm working tasks slow and relaxed in a way that really matches the vibe of the medicine.
But when you have to work hard and fast and not look like you're slouching at all, that was very painful because it was a mismatch.
So I have this baseline of vaso-dilation from the cannabis, and that is essential for the reasons I described but that also makes more of a risk factor when moving around and standing up in the heat. So obviously I need to be even more conscious about bracing myself.
What's great about being out here is that as long as I look around and there's no giant rocks to split my head open on, if I fall dead weight on the sand pretty much in any direction, I'm gonna be fine.
It's almost like falling on a bed. It's very forgiving. It's happened before.
I haven't fallen dead weight because of passing out. But I actually tried to ride a mountain bike and see if any of the sand would be sturdy enough to hold it.
I was proven wrong so fast that I could barely even move a foot of distance before I was dead stopped and just fell dead over onto myself on the side. Luckily there were no rocks to fall on at that point.
So I have a little bit of confidence.
Today I had to do some pretty arduous chores that really took a lot of beast mode energy to muster to get them done.
Even in the coolest hours, even with a little bit of moisture and cloud cover, it's rough moving around, huffing and puffing, sweating, trying not to push that line of heat stroke.
Even if the sun is not up over the mountains yet before the sunrise, but it's light enough for me to see scorpions and hope that most of them have gone underground already.
I can go and get water filtered, I can do basic chores and whatnot.
Some of those chores are pretty arduous. It feels like being hit by a train.
I wanna fall over, I can barely stand. I can't do anything else. I can't lift anything. I can't move anything. I can barely walk. I'm gonna collapse.
Without doing much cardiovascular effort, just barely moving things, barely moving myself, dragging, almost pulling myself around and dragging myself around by things I can grab onto and shift my weight around and hobbling the rest of the way.
If there's a little bit of clouds, a little bit of moisture, rain, then that can be a blessing that lasts for a few hours, or maybe a day or two at points during the summer.
I gotta take this stuff deadly seriously.
A few more words about cannabis, to relax and surrender and not fight and not resist the torture so much, and just be more at peace with it and accept it to where that acceptance is a magical property that comes from the cannabis doing something to allow you to just let go in a way.
Maybe without it, your body would just be in a more tense state, trying to rebel and resist somehow, like, get me out of here, as opposed to accepting your circumstances.
So another area of study has been blood volume. Because what do you get when you have low blood volume, meaning less blood available in supply? Obviously, it's thicker and there's less of it circulating, and low pressure. So you have wide pipes and a low amount of fluid, therefore you have a very low level of that fluid.
But what's also scary is not just the effect of dehydration on feeling thirsty and needing to be able to sweat, needing to be able to have hydration and water doing what water does for the cells and organs in the whole system, but for water to be allowing the blood to flow smoothly without being too much like molasses, and for it to be voluminous, to where however thin the blood vessel piping is, at any moment, the blood isn't so viscous that it can't travel efficiently and circulate and get oxygen, obviously, to all the organs and to the brain.
So I realized that what I have been experiencing is this sort of paradox of there being pros and cons or trade offs.
Low blood pressure is a byproduct of the body trying to cool itself. Then intentionally lowering blood pressure with the effects of cannabis, or even just being relaxed and laying down.
There's lower demand on the heart to pump blood against gravity if you're laying flat.
That can either be a benign or a good thing, or it can work against you and become a bad thing.
And made even worse. So a compounding effect of there being low blood volume, which is a factor of being dehydrated, both by not drinking enough water, or by even drinking enough water, or drinking a lot of water, but not enough because you're sweating it out profusely and constantly.
And so there there again, you have conditions where you're laying down because you have to, you may have vaso-dilation for other reasons as well.
And then you have low blood volume because your blood is thick, because you're sweating out water.
And that's why I have to stop working on the computer around noon, I get chores in and I can do a little part time shift of computing and then once the temperature rises about gets to about that 110f point then I start sweating.
I start not losing consciousness, but I start losing the ability to comfortably function upright.
It becomes so uncomfortable that I get into that state of a brain fog, and I can't complete one task to the next, and I have to lay flat at that point.
And then it makes sense, okay, well, you're not fighting gravity, you're laying flat.
Your body's doing what it is doing to have to stay cool, which gives you that trade off, which is like, well, if you wanna survive and have your body do what it needs to do to cool itself, you can't be up, you can't be sitting up, you can't be standing up.
You can't be walking around. That's why people drop dead on the factory line and in agricultural fields, because their body is basically trying to force them to lay flat just so that they can survive these temperatures.
And they're raising their body temperature by working and they're working against gravity, forcing their heart and their blood pressure and their blood volume to work against gravity by being upright.
And it's a perfect storm that kills people.
And so I think that fine line between heat exhaustion and heat stroke for me is that is this crucial lifestyle art of humbling myself to be completely debilitated and laid out for 99, maybe 95% of a three month period, and therefore having to learn the nurse craft of rotating bed sores and having everything that I need literally within reach to stay hydrated and to process my waste stream.
Everything has got to not be requiring me to stand up or get up or move around.
If I'm able to, that's a plus. But I've got to be prepared to design a circumstance where, if I'm gonna be 95 % laid up and that's the only way to survive, I would not call it glamping.
It's more like living in an ambulance, but a very low tech kind of field med tent kind of a thing.
But there's a little bit of time that I have that I can operate and keep myself functioning.
I get reminded things like, oh, which way would you fall right now if you fell?
And how many hours before you would be dead if you did fall and couldn't crawl back fast enough.
And those mind fullness things that are life and death alone in the remote desert where almost no one can hear you scream kind of a thing.
And your phone will die faster than you because at 105f, the phone locks up and won't function at all, and that's in the shade.
So there's no medical oversight committee on this reality TV show.
It's just me and my wits.
I literally stumbled upon the notion just about a week ago that I could be adding another dimension to this equation of optimal circulation and blood flow, mainly to the brain and something clicked in me, and I can't remember now exactly what it was, but it was very serendipitous, and I was very lucky that it sort of chain of events had me remember this.
But I realized that I have plenty of what I call fire powder on hand, which is my powdered version of the classic fire cider, generally made with ingredients including, but not limited to cayenne pepper, lemon juice, horse radish, garlic, apple cider vinegar, possibly ginger powder or ginger, but basically anything and everything flaming hot that's herbal and spicy, that you can throw together to create this sort of tonic.
I don't know if everybody would boil it or not.
I've done it both raw and cooked but I'm pretty sure I've done it mostly raw because that's kind of the point, certainly with the garlic.
Everyone should have fire cider recipes and ingredients at all times, and then choose the recipe that works for you.
I'm a minimalist at this point, and I've been kind of hacking things down to the most portable, most preservable, most durable kind of format.
A lot of things for me have shifted from fluids to powders, anything I can do in a powdered form, or that I can make less heavy by reducing the fluid content of.
I’ve been going from fresh fruits to dried fruits and then arriving at raisins, and even making wine with raisins. Then going from making the full glory fire cider to a far cry from it, but something that approximates the effectiveness.
It’s come down to three ingredients in dried powder form, and that's cayenne pepper, turmeric root and and ginger root, all in a dried powdered form, mixed in equal parts.
That's what I've arrived at for what I call fire powder, derived from the tradition of the fire cider.
That's antiseptic, anti fungal inside and out.
I typically would use turmeric by itself for external skin issues, cuts and scratches and rashes and whatnot, because it doesn't have a burning sensation the way that cayenne and ginger do.
But when I haven't had that separated from the mix, I've definitely, put that mix on wounds, and it does give you that capsicum burning sensation, but it also, and this is definitely not medical advice, because you will be in pain if you do this, and definitely don't do it in the wrong places like your eyes or anywhere where the sun don't shine, But I call it powdered skin, or powdered Band Aid.
Really, that's what turmeric is for me now. But I've learned my lesson that it's good to have a separate stash of turmeric for the skin, external use only.
And then the fire powder as the internal mix, which is great as a condiment, used sparingly as a sort of spice flavoring in and of itself if you like spicy food it has that very potent spicy effect on food for sure.
I haven't been sick in three years in the sense of a cold or a flu or anything symptomatic like that, which again leads me to think I'm a NOVID person.
My strategies have been effective thus far.
But anytime throughout my life, over the last maybe 15 years, since I got turned on to fire cider, I would make it, anytime I would feel like I was coming down with something, and I would make the liquid, and I would make that brew and take shots of it. It goes down hard and gives you breath, something awful, but it would immediately open your sinuses.
Immediately you would feel circulation. You would feel that tonic effect, immune boosting effect.
I won't go into all of the herbal actions going on, but there's quite a symphony of herbal actions going on with that stuff. So stripping it down to three ingredients the cayenne the ginger the turmeric powder it's worked well for me.
I said to myself, on one of the days where I was having the peak sense of being like man, I wish I could push myself a little further into the day to finish up these computing tasks, but my brain is just so cooked and my blood is boiling.
I gotta just lay down. I gotta just listen to something or even just try to nap which surprisingly, can be easier to do, to sleep during the day than at night.
It's been that fight, something snapped and I realized, why don't I try to see if stimulating blood flowing circulating... people use emergency first aid applications of cayenne pepper to stop heart attacks.
I looked at the mechanisms of it, and I will say that there's more to it than I can articulate now, but it is very effective in a number of ways.
They call an adaptagen, but basically optimizing circulation in a number of ways.
I don't feel confident at all with the details to to even go into them at this moment.
I will say that my awareness of that had slipped my mind, and then I realized I should be experimenting with adding that to the mix.
Now what I have begun to do is what I would have done, actually, similar to the Master Cleanse, which is lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup, if I'm not mistaken, I did one time, and had mixed results, but I'll talk about another time.
I kind of enjoyed the friend, comrade, sort of having water that's flavored, but it has this spicy citrus very unique and very uplifting and awakening sensation.
It's not painful, it's not really that pleasurable, but it's just stimulating.
I just nurse on that all day long, almost in cadence with my Yale course episode sessions or shows I listen to.
Every time I have to pull myself up to rotate whatever I'm gonna listen to, I'll take four mouthful swigs on that. That'll give me a reason. Another reason, kind of a fun drink that's not the problematic off the shelf electrolyte booster.
Oh, I should also say I do a teaspoon of Himalayan sea salt as well so from the top I'm not giving a recipe I'm just saying what started doing.
Since last summer's near death experience, it’s a about a leveled off teaspoon of Himalayan sea salt per proximate gallon of water that I drink so that it doesn't taste salty really and it's not overbearing but it is adding some salt mineral to my water supply so that I don't sweat out all my salts and wake up in the most lethal of circumstances.
Which is having cramps and then falling, and having heat syncope.
That's what would actually stop me from being able to get back up or crawl to safety in the sun, and that's what would kill me.
We're on year three, in the first summer, luckily, I got by somehow without being struck down by hyponatremia and having those deadly cramps.
But last year it did hit me, and it was a near death experience.
That's when I phased in the salt and now I'm halfway through this summer, and I just started to phase in those other ingredients into the water supply.
It's not per gallon that I drink, because I will only do this mixture once, and then refill it with water, and then drink less throughout the night.
I don't wanna double dose the cayenne. I maybe will with the salt but basically for getting through the day, the heat of the day, the morning starts with that full jug that has a tea spoon of Himalayan sea salt. A teaspoon of equal parts cayenne, turmeric and ginger powder.
So it helps, certainly something that is a ritual that I look forward to.
It keeps me on a cadence, and it keeps me from being bored of water, which a lot of people end up dying of dehydration, because water is boring. And they drink things that dehydrate them that they think are less boring, but they actually are killing them in a lot of ways.
No advice, just what I'm doing. And it did have an immediate effect, the cayenne for me, whether placebo, psychosomatic, wishful thinking or not, or even just the fact that it's something fun that I have in the routine, whatever it is, the effect on the functioning of the brain.
And even if I don't try to push myself to do a lot more computing, the fact that the day is more bearable and I'm able to just think better thoughts and survive the long days.
The physical torture is all the things I described before and the torment is the boredom and the inability to get in the zone and for time to move so slow that physically enduring and psychologically enduring at the slowest rate possible, of kind of experiencing everything more than you would.
If you're in the zone, you don't feel every second of what your body's going through.
You zoom through it, you take snapshots, you just only get a few frames of it, or you don't feel at all because you're so engrossed and engaged in the activity.
That's what being in the zone is. If you weren't in the zone and you had to do all this athleticism, it would be like, oh, this is painful.
And my muscles are getting torn and I'm sweating and it's sticky and nasty, and I'm getting tired, and I'm worn out.
Like, no, if you're in the zone because you're chasing the ball or whatever you're doing, then you're skipping over all that.
But if you're not in the zone, you're just feeling the torture of being debilitated, but going through all this physical anguish.
And then you don't have the privilege of your mind getting in the zone to where you just skip over that and zoom past it.
You're really in it. You're in this swamp of torture and torment.
So anything that helps with that, again, the cannabis and the cayenne now and the turmeric and the ginger, they're good for inflammation and digestion and a myriad of other things.
I would be having about that much in my diet anyway, just with making soups and salads and whatnot.
I guess this drink is now supplemental, I'm eating a lot less because I'm moving a lot less so pretty much that same dosage of those spices that would have gone into flavoring some dish. I'm no longer eating that dish, but I'm rescuing and salvaging the medicinal value of those herbs and spices and putting them into my water supply so that I get their beneficial effect in a different and even more potent way.
So food is medicine, as they say, or it can be, or definitely should be.
I've grown cayenne pepper before, not at scale. I've grown turmeric before, not at scale. I've grown ginger before, not at scale.
It will be my dream and my destiny to grow them at scale, at least a scale to where I never have to import and I make the powder myself again, or I never have to import again, and I make the powder myself forever after.
I don't know how that'll work with salt, but there are ways and so I’ll cross that bridge later.