I’ve been taking a social media break for over a week now.  I was arguing with people, being mean, calling them names.  That’s not who I want to be.  I was right about the content of what I was arguing about, but does that really matter?  I can warn of danger all I like, but as a messenger, I get shot.  There are things which need doing, and they weren’t getting done.  Instead, I was consumed with rubbing people I’ve never met’s faces into their wrongness.  I took their fascist attitudes personally.

Fascism, is when the State is everything.  The State owns everything, proclaims everything, and provides meaning to everyone.  Thus, the State owns the children.  It can make them take whatever medicine it wants.  It can teach them whatever doctrines it wants in whatever schools it wants, and the parents have no say.  The State can kill whatever babies it wants, can sterilize whoever it wants, can dictate who gets married, can feed or poison whoever it wants, can enslave or conscript whoever it wants and is the biggest or the only employer.

I know people who believe that that is the kind of society they wish to live in.  I know Christians like that, Muslims like that, atheists like that.  I know people who believe that all dissent should be crushed, all creativity punished.  I know people who believe that there is only one right way to live, and they know it, and everybody should be forced to live like that.  That, of course, was what Lucifer tried to do.  In the beginning, Lucifer wanted everybody to be obedient and go to heaven in the end.  All one big centralized package of salvation, and God rejected it.  One bank to rule them all, denied formation.

Instead, we get nobody saved.  Everybody in the entire world falls short of the glory of God.  It is so very pervasive, that I’m beginning to think that it is a design feature, not a bug.  What if God deliberately designed us as failures, as evil, as self-centered yet sacrificial?  What if God deliberately placed in our hearts the yearning to be part of something bigger, while knowing that the bigger thing would be highly destructive and corrupt every time?

Is there something Hegelian about setting up the false dichotomy of Fascism versus Anarchy?  If God actually saves nobody or everybody, does free will even matter?  If individual choice is a moot point, then what about entire nation’s choices about who they are and what they want?  Does that matter in the eyes of Mother Nature or the solar sunspot cycle?  Clearly, I question too many things.

I know that centralization is a model that works only in the very short-term.  Antibiotics work, if they are used sparingly, and then they cause greater harm; either by gut microbiome destruction, or by creating conditions for antibiotic resistant superbugs to arise.  Vaccines and pesticides suffer from similar failures in the long-term with overuse.  Quantitative easing and bank bailouts are the same.  Standing armies are the same.  Bloated government bureaucracies are the same.  Let’s not even talk about State religions.

Every year, I read through a bunch of predictions for what this year is going to be like, in general, for the planet.  This year was no exception.  Uniformly this year, the predictions have been pretty bad.  They run the gamut from economic collapse, oil embargo and tanker wars, to starvation and mass illness.  The reasons for these predictions are many and varied.  Usually, I’ve been able to find somebody who says that the can will get kicked down the road another year and the problems won’t be faced until next year.  Not this year.

This year, even the major think tanks are predicting population decline in the next ten years.  That’s interesting.  They usually don’t give reasons for their predictions.  If you’ve been watching, it isn’t that hard to fill in the blanks.  Start with something innocuous, like people are excessively rude to each other on social media.  Then extrapolate out from there.  People who live a long time do so because they’ve got a social support network that enfolds them and reduces the risk of ruin in their lives.  It’s not the diet.  Well, sometimes it is the diet, but you know, people eat what their friends are eating, which brings us back to the social support networks.

When you feel attacked, this changes your neurotransmitter levels, which causes cascading effects in your biology.  When you feel like you don’t measure up to your friends who are visiting island paradises in their vacation photos or doing awesome in comparison to you, when your parents are narcissistic assholes, when your “worth” is based on extrinsic factors instead of intrinsic ones, when you can’t win no matter what, then your health will decline.  Does this culture of hustle sound familiar?

People need food and water that isn’t poison in order to expand their numbers.  They need their babies to survive birth and childhood.  Throw in climate change, the loss of oil per capita, some diseases, a bunch of heavy metal poisoning from various vectors, a growing lack of trust in government, in scientists, in the medical profession in general (third highest cause of death), and an economy that brings a lot more uncertainty, and maybe you can see how all of these things come together to produce death.

Yet, at the same time, there’s trouble wrapping my head around the numbers.  Even the Holodomor did not bring the crash in population numbers on the scale predicted by various large think tanks.  How could this be?  The short answer is that it has to do with water.  Too little water, and everybody dies.  Too much water, and everybody dies.  Contaminate and poison the water, and lots of people die.  Clean the water too much, and death also results.  Control the water, and you control the world.  Except of course, for the problem that water is not something you can control.  Water is not a thing that can be centralized.  Attempts to centralize water always result in death, like lead poisoning from the lead pipes in the Roman aquaduct system.  Are the benefits worth the risks?

Greg Hunter has Mr. Skidmore on his show again, explaining that Catherine Austin Fitts is correct in stating that there is $21 trillion dollars missing from the Pentagon Accounting Budget.  Of course, there is always speculation on where that money went.  That probably depends on who spent it and what their underlying mandate was.

If I were a military minded kind of person, and had that kind of budget, what would I spend it on?  I say military, because black ops has always been more of a military organization than a financial one, though the spiritual element has always been present.  Well, The Secret Space Program is an obvious place to spend it, with Antarctica being a nice staging area for that sort of thing.  However, that’s not where all of that money went, because if I were a military minded person, I would want multiple methods of keeping humanity alive.

As above, so below, and we know jack-diddle about the oceans.  They’re quite the tactical blind spot.  So obviously I’d want some underwater tech as well.  If there’s a bunch of circles and triangles in the air that you can see on night-vision goggles, then surely there’s a bunch of stuff in the ocean as well, which is why the Navy keeps bombing the shit out of the fish.  If the stealth bomber is decades old, and submarines are also decades old, what new underwater tech is out there that we don’t know about?  There’s the Virgin submarine that went down the Mariana trench.  There’s a bunch of underwater internet cables that need protecting and repairing.  What underwater bases are there?

Did we genetically modify humans to become mermen?  We genetically modified the crops, corn, tomatoes, hairless rabbits with human ears growing out of their backs, glow in the dark worms with jellyfish genes.  We cloned sheep, and other things too.  It’s not too far of a stretch to think beyond mere Bene Gesserit breeding programs and into genetically modified humans.  Smarter, or dumber, or more compliant, or better able to withstand nuclear fallout, or able to spend more time underwater or underground or in space without as many deleterious effects.  Although, water makes a pretty good fallout shield, which is why I’m speculating about those underwater bases.  If they could build the English Chunnel, don’t you think they’d make more than one?  Don’t you think a military minded person would spend some of that $21 trillion on such things?

So now we have more than one Seed Vault, to prevent extinction due to extreme climate disruption or alien invasion or giant meteor to end it all.  We have the Vatican Archives being moved, and this is old news.  We also have a bunch of people doing genetic testing via various online options, and we have a bunch of frozen eggs and sperm around the planet.  I just think there are some rather interesting opportunities and options in that vein of thought, if I had money.

If I had that much money, I’d invest in alternative forms of energy production and capture.  I’d also invest in the tech to clean up environmental hazardous waste spills, not just nuclear.  I would also spend a bit to invest in studying supernatural phenomena.  More than they did with MK Ultra and the others, and more than demons and telepathy and remote viewing.  Aliens are an interesting place to spend money as well, even if they’re interdimensional or consciousness phenomena.  Even spending money on basic communications technology, and critical ritual and idea placement in Hollywood movies would be a good investment.

What, you think they’re just spending it all on gold to replenish Nibiru’s atmosphere?  Nope.  There’s a bit of a blind spot though.  See, military minded people tend to forget about farmer minded people.  They lack relationships with the land, the trees, and the fungi.  They’d neglect to invest in biodiversity, in something other than command and control monoculture croplands.  That’s not how they think.  Yet, at the same time, once the money is spent, it gets into the general circulation.  I wonder if some of them will invest in permaculture because it is associated with bunkers in the doomersphere.  I wonder if the tech that is used to grow successful illegal drugs will be exported to grow successful organic farms, with less water, with less potash because less oil and therefore less mining and less transportation.

The money is there.  If you had $21 trillion to spend to ameliorate climate change, and reduce the risk of human extinction, how would you spend it?

I have found that in order to focus on the present, I must have a clear story about my past, a songline to keep me from wandering too far towards selfishness and greed, towards hatred and suffering without the love and the discipline to give those things meaning and structure. Yes, some of my ancestors were atrocious capitalist assholes. Some of them were rapists and murderers. Some of them were abusive, and some of them were abused. Most of them were quite ordinary, with honor and integrity and compassion, who did the right thing, for the most part. It was in facing the shadows of my past, that I could face the shadows of the present, and also of the future. I don’t shrink away from the pain and suffering, because it has context.

As we wade through the slow grind of summer, through a Mars retrograde which makes everything just that much more difficult to accomplish, I find myself questioning why I would even write.  I like writing.  It isn’t that nothing is exciting anymore, far from it!  It just feels futile, or less important than other things.

I find myself bickering online more often.  This actually works pretty well at sheltering my family from the worst of my inner bitchiness.  I’m not taking things personally, and I can step back from any fight.  I just feel contradictory.

There was a meme of two guys standing around and talking.  One had a t-shirt that read “Revolution Now”.  The other had a t-shirt with “Incremental Change At A Time That’s Convenient” on it.  One guy says to the other “We’re not having much luck either.”  Yeah, I’ll bet.  Change comes on its own timeframe, not yours, and it doesn’t take the form you had envisioned either.

In the Near Term Human Extinction community, a lot of people are stuck in despair.  Granted, a lot of regular people are stuck in despair too.  However, the common phrase bantered around the NTHE community is “Action Is The Antidote To Despair.”  Well, I have to say, no it isn’t.  An enchanted worldview is the antidote to despair.  The two guys standing around with t-shirts should really try “thoughts and prayers” next.  You have no idea how ironic it feels for an ex-atheist to say that we need more thoughts and prayers.

When you can’t act, when your actions are futile and don’t change things, and when you’re stuck, the antidote to despair used by my ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years wasn’t action.  It was magic.  It was all kinds of different magic.  From talking to your ancestors and explaining your grief, your rage at them for not protecting you as they swore to do, to talking to the spirits of place and explaining your disappointment in their care for their places overrun with toxic chemicals, to the good old fashioned cursing of those who clearly need cursing, to the basic warding of your house and family, all of these forms of magic work on your own consciousness.

You know full well how effective confidence is at convincing about a third of the people to go along with your vision without question.  You also know how confidence changes how animals behave towards you, how they can sense whether you intend to harm them or not.  Despair and confidence are opposites.  You know how Derren Brown acts, what his body language conveys, and you know how a mentally defeated person acts, and what their body language conveys.  You know that humans are ritual creatures, and you know that changing your behavior actually comes before changing your mental status in a lot of cases.

If you know that you are going to crash and burn on your present course of action, then you have to fly lower.  Don’t fly towards the sun.  Fly towards the shadows instead.  That means different things to different people, but then, magic is like that.  It never was one right way to read the tarot cards, after all.  It never was one right way to baptize, and it never was one right set of beliefs that are true.

Yesterday was a long day.  I drove my girls to summer camp, and it took about an hour and forty five minutes to get there.  The way back home took four hours and ten minutes.  On the way to the girls’ summer camp, I noticed that traffic was stop and go for over 25 miles going the other way.  I had advance knowledge of what I was getting myself into, so I strategically placed food and water and a cell phone within my reach.  That was the first time I’ve texted from behind the wheel, which is what you do when your vehicle isn’t moving for over 5 minutes and the cars in front of you have already done the slow sauntering Chinese firedrill and gotten a couple items from out of their trunk.

Meanwhile, a bunch of friends are commenting on the six planets that went retrograde, and how their lives have been impacted by the kinds of obstacles you’d expect.  These things happen.  Astrology is a funny thing.  People who only see their own lives are understandably underwhelmed.  Nurses in ERs, on the other hand, have long since stopped thinking it strange when a string of October birthdays present to the ER with head or heart injuries in one night.  Proper risk management strategies should have you acting as if the planets actually do affect your life, so that you can prepare for it.

What would you do if your car broke down?  What would you do if your car ran out of gas while parked on the interstate highway?  What would you do if your child got sick?  What would you do if you got sick?  Everybody gets sick eventually.  One can only hope that it was a nasty cold instead of a heart attack or cancer.  Yet cancer happens to somewhere between one third and one half of all people, so you need to be prepared for it.  Venus goes retrograde too, and one half of all marriages end in divorce, so you need to be prepared for that too.  Everybody experiences struggles in their relationships.  How do you give your spouse or other significant relationships space to work through their difficulties?

There are also bigger risks at play.  What if your country launches a nuclear missile at another one?  What would you do?  What is the nearest fallout shelter, even if it is the local bank vault?  What if climate change is accelerates a lot, and the sea levels rise 100 feet, and the major coastal cities get flooded?  Do you still live in a place which is lower than 100 feet in elevation?  Do you still live in a place where too much of the critical infrastructure is located lower than 100 feet in elevation even if you live at 500 feet above sea level?  What about major Earthquakes or Tsunamis or Volcanoes?  What’s your plan?  Yes, I have thought through all of these and have made plans.

What do you do if there’s a major epidemic of communicable illness?  I had friends who were exposed to SARS, and quarantined in their house for a week or two.  They were prepared for it, and had enough supplies.  What do you do if there’s a major stock market crash?  What do you do if there’s a major stock market moon shot while the housing prices all get cut in half and mortgage rates triple?  What do you do if the major breadwinner in your family gets disabled and loses their job and their health insurance?  What do you do if YOU get disabled, if your driver’s license gets taken away wrongly, if you get sued for something you didn’t do, if your identity gets stolen?

What do you do if you get really sad or scared?  Everybody gets sad or scared in their lives.  Why would you be any different?  How do you draw purpose and meaning from the pain that presents itself to you, from the risks you succumb to?  Everybody loses their identity at some point in their life, forgetting the very essence of who they’ve chosen to be.  Are you going to remember what it was, or maybe forge a new one made out of stronger yet more flexible stuff?  Being prepared for what life will inevitably throw at you makes it less shocking when it inevitably happens.

There’s a part in the middle of The Princess Bride movie, where The Dread Pirate Roberts does a battle of wits with Vizzini.  He supposedly puts iocaine powder in one of the two goblets of wine, and then Vizzini tries to get Wesley to give a clue which goblet it is by talking loudly about it and watching his body language.  Of course, Wesley has the perfect poker face, because he poisoned both.

There are plenty of poisoned choices in the world.  Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.  Presidential elections certainly comes to mind.  There are also plenty of educational and healthcare decisions that also fall into this category.  That’s the way life goes sometimes.  The Giant’s Drink (Ender’s Game) comes up a lot, and sometimes the only way to win is, as W.O.P.R. discovered (WarGames), not to play.

The current game going around my failbook friends right now is accuse the POTUS of treason.  I’m aghast.  I’ve got enough of a chess player’s cold-hearted logical sense of things to know when I’m being played.  See, I know full well that Russia funded Clinton’s campaign.  So did Saudi Arabia for that matter.  So if you accuse Trump of treason, then you must accuse Clinton of treason as well.  See?  This is a poisoned choice, and on multiple levels.

As time goes on, I come to respect Trump’s decisions more and more.  When you are a business man, you talk with your enemies, you do business with them, just like the second Seldon Crisis in Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation Series of books.  I’ve read enough history and science fiction to know that his choices are constrained, and he’s making really good choices between the poisoned ones he’s been given.  He has skin in the game, so why wouldn’t he?

Yet, his choices mean little in the grand scheme of things.  Isaac Asimov’s concept of Psycho-History is a good one.  Individuals are not very predictable, groups are somewhat predictable, nations are plenty predictable, and the entire globe?  Very predictable.  You can write a computer program to crunch the statistical numbers and see where things are going.  I know of at least two people who actually did just that, and have seen fantastic predictive results.

The thing is, though, if a computer program can predict the outcome of a very large group of people all making individual decisions, can see when a monetary paradigm will collapse, can see when a people lose faith in its government, can see when real estate prices will rise and fall, when the sunspot cycle will cause crop failures, if it can do that, then any one human’s chance of changing the outcome of the trajectory of civilization is so close to nil that it is almost completely impossible.

I have no more control over the trajectory of this civilization than I do over how many oil wells get drilled this year. I’m young enough to still feel the desire to control everything centrally and fix the evils of this world. Yet, how can I, when I don’t even control my own emotions and actions all that well? And if I can’t do it, then what hope has a group of doing it? Much less a nation?

Of course, it never was about self-control. Control is the wrong paradigm. A better way to see things is as an invitation. Instead of ordering people to stop doing death culture stuff, the only thing to do is to invite them to do something better, something more connected, more rooted. That’s a difficult thing, though, to invite the pain back into my life, and to be willing to live with it as part of my essence, of who I am, along with the joy. I don’t have anything better to do.  Yet, is this also a poisoned choice?  To avoid pleasure and to seek pain?  To decentralize and to stop planning a better order out of chaos world?  Perhaps there is a third way, that is neither the death of too much order nor the death of too much chaos.

Gordon Underscore White (is that the correct spelling?) contends that materialism as a worldview gets broken by desire.  He’s probably right.  Straight up materialism leads one to only do things which are good for the procreation of your species.  Under strict materialism, everybody should make babies, and furthermore, monogamy reduces the available genetic diversity, so that shouldn’t work either.  We know very well that reproduction is not all that humans are, that there must be more.

Here we have the monks and nuns, who don’t have sex, and don’t bear children.  Well, of course there are those stories of the nuns in the convents being raped repeatedly by the monks and throwing their hidden newborns into the trash heap.  Power corrupts, after all, especially hidden away like a harem behind walls.  Still, there are ascetic practices which do not concord with the evolutionary materialist worldview of everybody humping and procreating with reckless abandon, unable to stop themselves.

We know that fasting is a thing that people do, right up there with infanticide and abortion-promoting plants getting eradicated from the Roman hillsides through overuse.  We know that people can in fact not have sex.  See the herbivores in Japan, or the MGTOW movement.  We know, also, that the vast majority of sex that occurs is NOT for the purpose of procreation.  See period sex.

With this introduction, I can ask a complicated question: What do you want?

Oh you think you know what you want.  To be rich, powerful, popular, skinny, healthy, strong, part of a community of smart and hard-working people who teach you and are taught by you, always learning something new.  Is that true?  Or do you want sex?  Or do you want to be safe?  Maybe you want your progeny to be safe enough to grow up and have their own progeny, not as slaves.  Maybe you secretly want your progeny to all die so you can be free to do the things you could do if you weren’t tied down to a house providing for their upbringing.  Do you want to eat delicious food?  Do you want all the pleasure and none of the pain?  Do you want to play Halo or watch the entirety of the Game of Thrones or Doctor Who collection back to back to back?  Do you want to acquire some donkeys and chickens and pigs and turkeys and dogs and cats and grow a farm because it tugs at your soul to dig your fingers into the dirt and bring it to life?  Do you desire to kill a bunch of lousy people who have wronged you and yours?

What kind of capricious god would you be if you got all that you desired?  Would that be boring?  How would you learn to be benevolent, yet ruthless when necessary?  How would you ever face your fears if you got everything you wanted?

One of the tenants of Tae Kwon Do is self-control.  Self-control is not eating the entire bag of chocolate.  Deeper, self-control is being able to step outside of your fear, your anger, your shame, and feel the calm center of yourself more than those transient emotions, and to be able to make wise decisions from that calm place.  Deeper still, self control is also deciding which path to set your feet upon, which desire that you want to desire, which dreams to pursue even through the teeth of Poseidon himself, and which dreams to be cast off as not really yours anymore.

Is there a molecule which causes you to dream of your ancestors, or other living people and have deep meaningful conversations with them?  Is there a physical reason why people living on opposite sides of the world resonate with the same ideas at the same time, following the same philosophical paths?  It’s not enough to point to the dopamine and the serotonin.  Desire and fear are so much more than these molecules.

Why do so many people wish to break the world?  Why do so many people fear human extinction?  That’s the Wizard’s First Rule.  People believe that which they desire the most, or that which they fear the most.  This is the reason why people must fully understand, acknowledge, and embrace their shadow side.  The Litany Against Fear isn’t just for fear.  It also works with desire.  “Claim victory in your heart, and the Universe will follow.” – Babylon 5

This is why activism starts with meditation.  Ora est labora.

I have a mountain of laundry in my living room, waiting patiently to be folded.  I spent a week camping with my side of the family, out of the news cycle, out of cell phone reception, and not missing much.  Every once in a while, I wonder if I’m a screen addict.  Then I go away from all of them, and I find that I’m totally not.  My hands never twitch to check my phone that I turned off and put away.  I don’t miss the youtube videos, or anything else, so long as I have books to read or people to talk to.

I borrowed my father’s book to skim through.  He was reading The Benedict Option, and so was my fundie religious brother.  When I don’t have much time to read a book, sometimes I’ll start with the last chapter and work my way backwards from there.  I find it to be a more engaging process of reading a book, because the author expects you to have already mastered concepts provided earlier in the book.

As the campfire conversations turned to politics, after my oldest brother had left to go back to work, I found myself in agreement with my brother for once.  It is strange.  We don’t agree on much.  He’s anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, and everything else you’d expect of a Christian religious extremist who would never consider himself extreme.  Yet, his views match up rather well with Dmitry Orlov’s Communities That Abide.

He just wants the religious freedom to raise his children as he sees fit without Government Interference.  This usually means private schools or homeschooling, and there was much complaining about statist/liberal indoctrination techniques.  If you’ve been following Jordan Peterson much, you’ll have heard about some of these things.  Basic POSIWID says that public schools are not currently designed to teach people how to read and write and do math, otherwise there would be a lot more functionally literate graduates out there who could read bus schedules and could spell things correctly.  Even John Taylor Ghatto knows that public schools are designed to indoctrinate into obedience to authority, uniformity, and conformity to liberal notions of tolerance.  Public schools, of course, MUST teach tolerance, in order to divide and conquer the children for when they grow up, so they don’t form tribes and clans and effectively resist government taxation and control.

The recommendation my brother was talking about is not to take over the liberal college faculty, and not necessarily to build better Christian colleges, although that’s certainly one thing that can happen.  Not everybody should go to college.  Not everybody should take on that debt, true enough, but more importantly, not everybody learns that way.  Adam Savage is a maker, and doesn’t belong in college.  Mike Rowe talks about dirty jobs, and how there’s much more employment and satisfaction to be found in the trades.  He has also discussed how trade schools don’t have safe spaces and diversity training and speech/thought control.  Instead, they have people insulting each other with grins on their faces, because blue collar people can take a joke and dish it right back.  There’s something about working with your hands that makes you get out of your head enough to not get offended when somebody insults you, you fragile snowflake.

I’d like my children to grow thick lizard skin instead of being thin-skinned blubbering messes.  You don’t do that through identitarian means, nor through love-bombing.  Confidence, as always, comes from within, from trying and failing, and getting back up again and trying again.  That hard-won self-confidence can not be taken away from you like self-esteem can, because it comes from within, not from outside of yourself.  When you have it, you can dump toxic people from your life, knowing you deserve better, because you can identify who is toxic and who isn’t.  Lizard skin is a boundary.

I completed a long course triathlon in early June, and made the mistake of not using sunscreen.  The parts of my skin which had already burned earlier in the year were fine.  The parts of my skin which hadn’t seen sun, namely my shoulders and ankles, were not fine.  This is the first time I’ve burned so badly I got blisters.  Perhaps my mistake wasn’t sunscreen, but rather the lack of preparing my skin for spending that much time out in the sun uncovered.

You might ask, how does a person with a wonky autonomic nervous system complete a long-course triathlon?  That’s a good question.  It’s fairly straightforward.  Swimming isn’t a problem.  The most dangerous part is standing up out of the water without passing out.  The trick there is a bit of hyperventilation while continuing to run to keep the blood flowing to the brain as best as possible.  The second most dangerous part is right after the finish line, where I got the 20 minute shakes again.  For shorter distances, not passing out when they’re trying to take the timing chip off my ankle is always a challenge.  When I train, I always cool down with a walk.  Abruptly stopping a hard workout is a recipe for disaster, and that includes sprint pieces in the pool, and stopping at traffic lights on the bike.

I have a very hard time eating while exercising, because my stomach just doesn’t digest much under hyperadrenal conditions.  I managed 200 calories during the 56 mile bike part, and that was good for me.  In theory, I’m supposed to consume a lot more, but that’s just not for me.  I probably got 100 calories on the run.  I normally don’t train eating while running, because I just can’t.  Maybe that trains me to burn fat instead?  I suppose that’s possible.

Thermoregulation is a challenge for me.  Too cold, and my hands turn Raynaud’s white.  Too hot while racing, and I don’t sweat.  I swell up instead.  This has made running in the summer a lot more difficult for me.  Fortunately, this was an early season triathlon, so it didn’t get unbearably hot.  They offered ice, and I used it, stuffing it in my bra and hat.  I also dumped water on myself from time to time.

Part of me wonders how I’d do on a very low dose beta-blocker during a long-course race.  Would it make sweating and eating possible?  On the other hand, maybe I’d have to actually pee during the race.  That’s the up-side of the dysautonomia umbrella: never needing to pee during a long race.  It’s on the anti-doping list, though, so I don’t.

There are times when I look at this with disbelief.  I can’t possibly have autonomic nervous system problems!  I completed a Half-Ironman, and was the second female across the finish line!  How can anybody believe me?  Then I go out to lunch with my friends, and almost pass out after the meal, and my friends are so used to it, they don’t think anything of it.  Or I stand around in a kitchen with my friends and get handed a glass of water without being asked if I want any, because I’m leaning against the countertop again, probably with a paler face.  I don’t know anybody else who is at risk of fainting in the race packet pickup line, and not the race itself!