I don’t know why, but my jet lag after the Thailand trip was absolutely brutal. Maybe it was because I was gone longer than usual. Or maybe it was coming from a hot and sunny climate to the cold and cloudy and gray Bay Area spring. Or maybe spending a day in the germ tube gave me a little crud to get over. But I was pretty much knocked out for the week.

I don’t like to get into work stuff here, and I won’t go over my general feelings over this, but we’ve fully returned to office now, so I’m back in SF five days a week now. I know 87% of the country already works every day in the office, but this was a big, sudden shift for me, and it makes the week seem like 17 days long, now that it isn’t interleaved with WFH days. The other bummer with this is they’re closing the parking lot at my BART station, which means either I drive twice as long and then take a train also twice as long, or I figure out some way to ride a bike or scooter or something to the train. But, see above about constant pissing rain and cold here.

I’m back to working a few hours in the morning before I leave, back into the swing of things with Atmospheres 2, I think. I didn’t work on it at all during the trip, and lost a week or two when I was back. But I’m working it. I feel like it’s maybe two months away, if I can keep consistent with it every day. There are a few other distractions, but I’m trying to limit them as much as possible.

One thing that briefly popped up was this idea for a nostalgia-based book about various dead technologies or tools I was around for when they first broke. Like I was trying to install Linux at the end of 1992 when it was still more or less a Minix add-on. Around the same time, I created my first .hyplan file, which was basically a homepage on this thing called the World Wide Web. There are lots of other stories like this from the early 90s, and I spent a weekend trying to brain-dump some of this. But the writing is so wooden and redundant that it wasn’t helpful. And there needs to be some way to wrap these stories up in a gimmick, a hook, a format. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it’s a series of essays on a Substack, but those become boring journalistic things with no point and end up feeling like evergreen SEO garbage on a tech site full of affiliate links. There’s also the thought of using them as the bones of a Summer Rain-esque novel or set of stories. But I really don’t want to write another book like that. SR remains unpublished for a reason.

I think the biggest conflict with this nostalgia-based writing is it drags me back and makes me think about what I now realize is an incredibly painful era of my life, and I have no reason to wallow in that timeframe anymore. And the neuro-whatever part of my brain gets really locked into this stuff, and I find myself spending all day on newspapers dot com researching things that make me mentally ill. It’s really not worth it. I need to look forward and not back.

I’ve also mentioned this before, but so many of the communities around nostalgia - retrocomputer folks or old toy collectors or classic car hotrods - end up becoming dangerously adjacent to politics and this bitterness about how America was great and it isn’t anymore. I really can’t deal with that shit at all. And I can’t spend my time buying old electronics on eBay and setting up a VAX computer in my house that takes up free space I do not have, when I’ve got a pocket calculator in my desk drawer that has an order of magnitude more processing power. I get that some people love this stuff, but it’s dangerous for me to get into it. So, next topic.

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This is another waste of time maybe, but I decided to mess with writing a Scrivener replacement. It’s not really a replacement, per se. I use Visual Studio Code all day every day, writing documentation in Markdown. And there are aspects of this IDE that I like better than Scrivener, like that the docs aren’t in a proprietary format, and it’s easily extensible. I thought about just straight-up writing the next book in Markdown in VSC, but I knew there were some bits that were missing that I need.

So, I started throwing something together, tentatively called jkwrite. It’s far from functional, and it’s probably not going to be usable by anyone but me, if I even finish it. But it’s been fun noodling on this a bit. The biggest problem, aside from that the more I implement, the more I realize I have way more to implement, is that I’m sitting in the same exact tools I use at work when I’m not at work. So I’m slamming VSC stuff into GitHub PRs, then getting to work and spending all day slamming VSC stuff into GitHub PRs. It’s like if I cooked Taco Bell food as a hobby at home, even though I spent 80 hours a week managing a Taco Bell. It’s an interesting distraction, though.

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More dental drama, although this was sort of voluntary. I got another tooth crowned, a lower molar that’s been on the list for a while, and I wanted to burn the rest of this year’s insurance, so why not. This was a two-parter, with them cutting down the top of the tooth, doing some imprints, and putting on a temp crown that I was sure I was going to lose while eating. Went in yesterday and they actually couldn’t get the temp off, had to cut it in pieces to pry it loose. The new crown is on there and feels weird, very glossy and bigger than the old tooth, but the old one had too much metal filling and was lower than it should be, with a sharp edge on one side. It’s fine now, but the painful part was paying for it, on top of the other crown I got done in January.

I still go to my old dentist at Tanforan Mall. I’ve written about this already, but that mall is dire right now. They’re timing out the leases and getting ready to tear the whole thing down to build a biotech campus. I did a quick loop two weeks ago, and brought in a Canon 6D with no problem, since the inside of the mall is almost entirely vacant. It’s extremely depressing to be in there now. The Target is still going. And the Petco is still there. I went to Petco last night, and that’s also very sad to me. I remember going to that Petco on the way home from the vet with Loca in the carrier. We had to get some medicine or something, but I put her carrier up to the mouse cages and fish tanks so she could watch them. So it’s depressing to go there now, knowing the whole thing will be gone soon, replaced by a giant metal and glass tower housing the research team designing and patenting a competitor to Skyrizzi, treating moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis. Time waits for no man, I guess.

Working on a new book nook. This one is for Yaowarat, the Chinatown in Bangkok. Kinda weird to be building a model of the place I just visited, but that’s fun. Lots of neon signs.

OK, so April’s big trip was Bangkok, Thailand. Let’s get into it with the giant dumb bulleted list:

• As always, this trip was booked just under a month before I left. No real reason on this one other than the pricing and timing of it, and it was a new country for me. I also liked Vietnam and Cambodia, so this was a logical next step. This would be my 25th country visited.
• Had an overnight red-eye to Taipei, leaving at 12:50am on a Friday. I left for SFO at about 8 at night, after waking up for work at 4am that day. I hoped that would make me black out and get a few hours of sleep. Of course that didn’t really work out.
• I paid too much for an upgrade to premium economy for the 14-hour flight to Taiwan on EVA. Dinner was, as always, completely inedible. With a combination of four different prescription and OTC medications, I got about four hours of sleep. I woke up to my neighbor vomiting profusely from motion sickness, which she continued to do for the last half of the flight. Power outlet was also dead. I inexplicably watched Good Will Hunting. No idea why.
• The Taipei airport is weird because the gates are all themed and sponsored. So like instead of B4, the gate is a Sanrio Hello Kitty lounge. I landed at 5-something in the morning and had about two hours, but the lounges were all insanely full and there were almost no other meal choices, so my Taiwan experience was that I ate a Clif bar and brushed my teeth.
• The four-hour flight to Bangkok was no big deal, except the guy next to me was wearing a Vision Pro and waving his arms around in the air wildly.
• Bangkok immigration took forever. Lots of Russian tourists. Lots of people who waited in line for 20 minutes and then realized they were supposed to get a digital arrival card.
• I had a driver from the hotel who showed up in a new Mercedes and drove like a stunt driver, but it still took an hour in traffic to get from the airport to the hotel.
• I stayed at a Marriott executive apartment in Sukhumvit, which is a sort of trendy district with lots of shopping and nightlife, maybe 45 minutes from “old” Bangkok with the museums and palaces and such. The room was nice, a 27th-floor corner suite with a kitchen, living room, and even a washer/dryer, which was a game-changer. It was comfortable, but was also horribly generic and corporate. Fine by me, though.
• First impression was that Thailand was much more like India than Vietnam or Cambodia. Bangkok is basically Bangalore but crammed into a quarter the footprint. Walking around, the streets were chaotic, full of traffic, and sidewalks required hyper-vigilance because of random edges and trenches and whatnot. Buildings were either ancient or super-modern. In Sukhumvit, over half of buildings were either American chains or things with ironic weird English names that were all chrome and glass.
• Second impression, after giving it some thought and spending more time wandering, was that Bangkok was a total vaporwave city, a cyberpunk backdrop where the street level was gritty and confusing, but the rest of the city was either old temples or climbing towers of glass and concrete.
• I was right down the way from three gigantic malls that all sit next to each other: Emporium, EmSphere, and EmQuartier. It was Saturday night and I hadn’t eaten a proper meal since lunch Thursday, so I searched for food, and immediately got The Fear. Everything in the malls were hawker stalls and food courts with lots of people shoulder-to-shoulder and confusing menus of foods I could not figure out, way outside my wheelhouse. I finally gave up and ended up at a McDonald’s, just to get some food down before I got back to the hotel and blacked out from jetlag.
• Oh, also made one of about three dozen stops at a 7-Eleven next to my hotel to get some of the basics. Thailand’s 7-Elevens are notorious for their crazy assortment of Asian foods and skin care products. There’s very little in the way of western sodas or candies, but I was able to get enough Coke Zero to keep me going for the trip.
• Went to the National Museum and the Grand Palace as a try-out run with public transit. They have two train systems, one underground and the other elevated. They’re both excellent and probably second only to the ones in Singapore.
• The only problem with the trains, which was a consistent problem everywhere else, was the general super-cooling of full-tilt AC. Outside, it was in the mid/high-90s with a humidity of 60-80%. But go in a mall or hotel, and it’s like 64 degrees. Going back and forth between the two was disconcerting. The heat honestly wasn’t bad though, maybe because of the winds. I didn’t wear shorts the entire trip, and it felt like the heat broke quickly every night, instead of the New York or Vegas situation where triple-digit temps linger for hours and hours after the sun sets.
• The malls were absolute madness. Ten stories tall, mazes of towers and walkways and large stores; Asian food courts and American chain food and gourmet grocery stores. The second night I ended up at this mall that had a Maserati dealership on the third floor, next to a Porsche showroom and a Lamborghini gallery. The mall itself had a supercar parking lot. Some of the stores had odd English hipster-ish names, like a clothes store called SOUP. Everything was glass and chrome and spiral walkways and indoor waterfalls and manicured trees. It looked like a 24th-century city inside.
• I took two photo classes. The first was a walk through Chinatown with a Dutch photographer and another guy from Portugal. His work was absolutely amazing, and that was intimidating to me, because I’m way more timid about photography, and I’m mostly taking tourist snapshots. Super great teacher, but sometimes there’s a lot of value in learning what you don’t know, and that’s what happened. It was pretty awesome walking around the dark recesses of Chinatown, poking through tiny temples and cramped machine shops and bakeries and such.
• The second class was a night class, with an instructor and a fixer, and we wandered around Chinatown and Yaowarat, the neon-lit main thoroughfare. We used a tripod and got some great long-exposure shots of the main crowded tourist drag and the tail lights passing by with the giant neon signs overhead. We also ducked into some alleys filled with hanging paper lamps and cut through the 24-hour flower market, which looked amazing.
• Took a day-long van trip up to the Ayutthaya temples and Ayothaya floating market north of town. There were six other people, plus a driver and tour guide, and I think I was the only native English speaker, although the tour was in English. We first went to Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon, and saw the reclining Buddha. Then we went to the floating market, and then to Wiharn Phra Mongkhon Bophit. These were all cool to look at, although I didn’t get a lot of historical context, and need to look things up now. At the floating market, I ate at a noodle shop and I think it cost like $1.61.
• Took a day trip up to the “death railway.” This is the railway built by the Japanese to Burma, as immortalized in The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is almost entirely fictitious, but the Burma Railway obviously wasn’t. I drove up to the Jeath war museum, along with three other people from Iowa and Wisconsin. After looking at the museum depicting the atrocities of the POWs being worked to death on the railroad, we got in a small speedboat and hit the Khwae Yai river and headed up to and under the bridge. This was a single-track iron bridge, and we went up and walked over it, which was slightly scary; OSHA is not a thing, and the railing was pretty minimal. After that, we caught a train going back for part of the way. This was a local third-class train half-filled with tourists, but half-filled with workers and students. The train had open windows, no AC, and just a few open-cage fans. The train wound into the mountains, past farms and across trestles, until we stopped in a camp on the river and ate lunch. I also got to walk on a trestle bridge on the side of the mountain and go in the Krasae cave, which has a small shrine in it. After we finished, our van was there waiting for us, and we headed back to Bangkok just in time for rush hour traffic.
• Oh, in general, when I wasn’t using the metro or on a tour, I used the Grab app, Asia’s competitor to Uber. This was key, because traffic in the city is so bad. Grab rides were quick, easy, and ridiculously cheap.
• The inevitable McDonald’s mini-review: I went the first time and just got a burger and fries, which was pretty much the standard. But I went another time and got only Thai items: a chicken bites with rice and the chicken was surprisingly spicy; some fried bread treat thing; a truffle cheese shaker thing with fries which was a neat gimmick, but any time you mess with stock McDonald’s fries, it seems wrong; and they had fried pineapple pies, which were amazing.
• Felt a bit sick after being stuck in cars with other tourists all day, so I found a wellness spa near the hotel and got a B-12 IV treatment. The clinic was a nice little hidden oasis in a commercial area, and they do an amazing amount of treatment there, including stem cell therapy, PRP, and everything else. A Myers’ cocktail cost about a third the price it would in SF, and helped knock out the start of the cold.
• The first big dinner was the Palmier at the Four Seasons. That hotel is beautiful, right on the river and landscaped and designed beautifully. The restaurant was… okay. Food was decent, but this was just a basic French bistro at a hotel, and not a big service-driven experience or anything.
• The other dinner was phenomenal. I went to Sühring, a three-Michelin-star German restaurant that was absolutely insane. The Grab took me to this neighborhood that was mostly small commercial places, like printing shops, but when I went in, it felt like I was hidden away in the hills of Munich. This was a twelve-course thing and the food was excellent, but the service was absolutely over-the-top. Like before they served the Kagoshima Wagyu, they brought out a choice of knives and explained the blade steel and handle wood of each one. Or when they brought out the absolutely perfect assortment of breads, they presented the sourdough starter for inspection. Everything was absolutely excessive and incredible.
• Every day, I would have a giant breakfast in the morning at the hotel, which was standard Western fare. Then I’d walk around in the heat and end up skipping lunch. Then dinner would, other than the above, be something dumb. Like I ate at two Gordon Ramsay chain restaurants; an IKEA; and a kind of crazy Japanese hole-in-the-wall in an alley. I did not go to Taco Bell.
• Took the metro up north to see the Royal Thai Air Force museum. It was almost empty on a Saturday, but pretty well-kept with a nice assortment of planes. I specifically wanted to go because they have two of the O-1 Bird Dog planes my dad worked on when he was in the service (although not his exact plane) but they also had more than a few F-5s there, which they still operate. Same with the F-16. The Thai Air Force went through a crazy progression of hand-me-downs from the US, Sweden, France, Germany, and others, trainers that operated as attack aircraft, or older attack aircraft used well beyond their prime. It’s an amazing motley collection of things I normally would not see. (I.e. the Rhein-Flugzugbau RFB-400 Fantrainer is a weird one that doesn’t come up much.)
• I was in Bangkok right before Songkran, the new year. If you saw White Lotus, you saw how this is celebrated: with squirt guns and crowds in the streets dumping buckets of water on each other. Sounds great when it’s 98 degrees outside; doesn’t sound as great when you’re hauling around camera gear. The first day of the New Year was the last day I was in town, so I did not witness any of this.
• Speaking of, I greatly simplified my camera haul for the trip. I only brought the Canon EOS R10 mirrorless with two lenses, an Osmo Pocket 3, and my phone. I wasn’t super happy with the R10 at times, but it was much easier to haul around.
• Trip back was through Hong Kong. I got there at 9:30 at night and had four hours, which was too short to leave and go wander, plus everything was probably closed. I think this was my sixth layover in HKG in the last 24 months, and the place is becoming far too familiar. I had an exit row but in basic economy with the most narrow seat imaginable. Also I had a bag with some Cokes in it in the overhead and a flight attendant managed to shift around the luggage and break them open, which was somehow my fault. No sleep on the way home, a very quick trip through Global Entry, and a long wait on luggage. My “day” ended about 30 hours after I woke up.

Overall, the trip was a nice break. I didn’t think of work at all, but I also did not write at all. There was no grand thesis of this, and although I saw things and learned things, there was no overwhelming catharsis like I had in Vietnam or Cambodia. I thought the trauma of the Death Railway would have some bigger effect on me, but the way it was framed or curated didn’t cause this. I shouldn’t complain. It was a great trip, but I’m struggling to fit everything together.

Still sorting out pictures, although a few have gone to Instagram. I’ll work on that, although I’m also wondering where I should be putting pictures these days. Flickr? Adobe? Anyway.

I write my books with Scrivener. I have since 2011. It has a daunting learning curve, and I feel like I used 10% of the features on my first book with it, and slowly gained maybe 2% per book. I’ve previously written posts here and here on tips and tricks. I’m not trying to make this a “make big money self-publishing your books!” blog, but I have a need to write this stuff down so I don’t forget it and can find it later. So, here’s another crop of answers for you. Caveat emptor: there are probably better or more preferred ways of doing this. I just beat things until they work.

OK, here we go, in no particular order.

Show the number of files in a folder in the binder

View > Outline > Show subdocument counts in binder. (There is also a View > Outline option at the top of the View menu, which is confusing.)

Show where the current scriv is in the binder

Navigate > Reveal in Binder. Or Cmd-Opt-R. Memorize that; I use it 50,000 times a day.

Exporting keywords

1. Create a blank text document.
2. Open the keywords (Project > Show Project Keywords, or Cmd-Shift-K)
3. Click the first one; shift-click the last one.
4. Drag them into the blank text document. This exports a comma-delimited text list of the keywords

Adding your own icons

1. Go to https://www.iconsdb.com and download a 32x32px PNG.
2. Right-click an item in the binder,
3. Change Icon > Manage Custom Icons, and add your PNG. Note the name in the menu will be the name from the PNG, so rename the PNG accordingly.

Wordpress import

• You can drag HTML files into the Research section of Scrivener, but not Draft.
• After they are dragged in, they are uneditable web archives. Go to Document > Convert > Web Page to Text
• There was a wp2epub plugin that would also do html, but it’s broken in new Wordpress versions, hasn’t been updated in 167 years.
• Tried WP2Static for this… it was slow so I stopped
• There was an XSL for this see https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=34656&p=223492#p223492 but it no longer works, I get errors.
• This is horrible but you could export Wordpress to Jekyll…
• Another option: https://wordpress.org/plugins/aspose-doc-exporter/ - couldn’t get this to work
• wp2static - crashes
• I might have to do this again soon, so stay tuned.

The delete comment bug

If you add a comment to some text, then remove the comment and edit the text, the hyperlink text comes back, but with no attached comment

Workaround: highlight the text, delete the comment, cut the text, then Paste and Match Style it back.

Background image

Scrivener 3 - change the background image in compose mode: Project > Project Settings > Background Images (this moved since 2)

Searches and collections

You can turn on and off viewing collections with View > Hide Collections and View > Show Collections. Normally I turn them off because it drives me nuts to have them there and waste space in the binder.

But, here’s how you use them.

1. Do a search on the project, Cmd-Shift-F
2. Search on something fun, like do a search on a keyword or a status
3. Click the magnifying glass to the left of the search term again. Scroll all the way to the bottom and select Save Search as Collection.

Now, that search is going to be in the Collection part of the binder. It’s also going to be dynamic. So for example, if you have a keyword for a character (or whatever) and you save a search as a collection, that collection will enable you to quickly pull up that list of documents.

Numbering problems

This is confusing, bear with me.

Let’s say you have a book that’s three acts and a hundred scenes in each act. You want each act to have a title page, and then each scene is its own deal.

Then let’s say you want number the scenes, like with a number at the top of each one. What’s going to happen is the title page is 1, and your first scene is numbered 2, and you probably want it to start at 1, right?

1. File > Compile
2. Select a Format in the left column (or create a new one).
3. In the right column, set all of the scrivs to a section type. For this example, I’m using Chapter Heading and Scene, plus Front Matter for stuff that’s not part of the book itself.
4. Click Assign Section Layouts. Select Scene.
5. (Tip: if you do this 19 times in a row because you keep changing this, it will always open at the first section type. You’re inevitably not editing the first section type. You open it, you’re in the first type, and it doesn’t look right, and you’re sure this stupid program burned you again. It’s because you’re in the wrong section type. Always click the right one first. This is annoying that it doesn’t persist your selection, but here we are.)
6. Pick a layout for the Scene. Hover over it and click the pencil in the upper right to edit it. Then click Edit Layout.
7. If you’re using a number and a title, click Title Options and in Title Prefix, put <$n:scene>. Don’t put <$n> or it will increment when the title pages are incremented.
8. If you want only a number, don’t do that. Go to Prefix, and in the Section prefix, put <$n:scene> and center it or whatever you need to do.

Start numbering at 0

We get it, you studied computer science.

Use a placeholder <$n-1> instead of <$n>. Or <$n:scene-1>. Internally the counter is still 1, 2, 3 etc. But when you display it, you are subtracting one so it’s 0, 1, 2, etc. (It doesn’t actually modify the value of the counter. It just displays it one lower.)

Yes, Scrivener doesn’t call them variables. They’re called placeholders. If you’re searching their manual, it’s called a placeholder, not a variable. I’ll use the words placeholder and variable once again so this actually shows up in search, like it doesn’t in their manual. Placeholder=variable.

How many comments are in my document?

grep -r "Comment ID" my-book-file.scriv/Files/Data | wc -l

Let me know if any of these are helpful or blatantly wrong. Like I said, I don’t always know what I’m doing, but I’m sure I’ll need to know the same exact thing later.

I went to show someone my web site yesterday, and the SSL certificate expired a month ago. (And every modern web broswer freaks out about that, and prints warnings and blocks everything and acts like I’m scraping credit cars and stealing identities, even though there’s nothing here that could do anything involving any PII whatsoever.) That shows how on top of things I have been here. I haven’t even thought about the blog in months. I mean, it’s mid-March and I don’t even think it’s 2026 yet. I’ve completely lost the thread on time. Anyway.

First big news is that we adopted two cats last month: Diego and Zuzu. They are brother and sister, from the same litter. But Diego is like twice as big. He’s all muscle, incredibly strong and fast, constantly moving. Zuzu is tiny, all fluff, and absolutely beautiful. Diego was pretty outgoing from the start, and has bonded more to Sarah, sleeping on the bed every night and following her around. Zuzu has been extremely skittish, hiding in the closet and always running away, but she’s slowly made progress. Diego is very protective of her, and they play well together, despite the size difference. It’s been great to have companions again, even if they’re tearing the house apart at 2am every night.

I have to admit there is a slight bittersweet feeling if comparing them to Squeak and Loca. They were both very cuddly, especially in their old age. And Loca was my soul cat, and would spend all day and night with me. I can’t even pick up Zuzu right now, and Diego is not a cuddler. Maybe that will change as they get older, but thinking about the years with Loca and the reality that she’s gone is still painful.

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Speaking of pain, I had to renew that SSL certificate, and a two-second job turned into like five hours of hurt. There’s this big schism between bncert and certbot and I think I started with bncert last year, then tried to get certbot going, and it completely screwed my site. Lots of panic, tons of floundering, and I could not get it to work. I eventually got the HTTPS stuff going and the permalinks were screwed up. Any configuration of the .htaccess made it worse. I don’t know what I did, but I eventually beat it enough to get it back to operational. But I will forget all of this, and in six months when the cert expires and the auto-renew script fails, I will screw it up again. (Note to self if you find this in August: don’t start chasing certbot; you used bncert.)

Anyway, if you find broken anything here, let me know.

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Nothing else. Giant release at work, which I won’t talk about here, but that was 100% of my bandwidth for a while. Trip booked for first week and a half of April, but I still need to flesh out what I’m doing. It’s not to any current war zone, but who knows how much that will change in the next month.

I’m currently heads down with Atmospheres 2. Every month since like a year ago, I said I would wrap it up in a month. I think I’m close to that, or at least I want to get a feature-complete draft by the time I leave on April 2. It’s getting there, but it’s over 500 pages now, so it’s a slow process. I think I started this book in 2014, so I really need to end it. Also, I have published 19 books, and I don’t want the 20th to be some dumb compilation zine thing, so I really need to keep on this until it’s done.

Nothing else. Everything else. I’ll try to remember I have a blog before the summer is over or whatever.

For my birthday this year, Sarah and I headed down to Mexico. This was a bit of an unusual vacation that didn’t really feel like a vacation, but in the opposite of the usual “we went to somewhere because we had to, and now need a week of vacation.” It was also noticeably different than my usual solo trips to oddball places that are more of an experience than actual rest.

So the deal: we flew in to Cancun, but actually stayed at a medical wellness spa about ten miles north, at Costa Mujeres. Flight in was delayed by three hours due to a broken plane, but it was a straight shot from SFO, maybe five hours. Got there and had a driver waiting, so we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of transportation people on the way out. We got loaded into an SUV and drove through Cancun at night, looking at the surrounding stuff on 307, but going straight to the facility.

I think the first question I kept getting was if I was worried about immigration or about the general safety, which is a bit silly. Immigration in and out was absolutely minimal. Coming back to the US, I’m pre-vetted with Global Entry and don’t even talk to a person. The immigration into Mexico was only a “how many days/where are you staying” and a stamp in the passport. As far as safety, we stayed at the facility the entire time, and it was roughly five times safer than an upscale Disney vacation. We were talking about this and I was trying to think of the most unsafe place I’ve ever been, and it would definitely be the United States. I mean, I caught RSV in Dubai, and I went to a statistically unsafe beach in Iceland because of the cold and brutal sneaker waves. But every time I’ve ever felt imminent danger, it’s been in the US. Anyway, Mexico was entirely safe.

The resort was insanely beautiful. It was a single curved row of suites, made to look like a strand of DNA from the top. Every unit had a view of the water and a private balcony, and the door opened up to a long balcony walkway that looked out over a mangrove forest. They built the place maybe two years ago, and it all looked ultra-modern and high-tech. There were infinity pools and fountains facing the water, with a white sand beach below. The entire facility was impeccable. Our room was giant, a suite with a living area, a balcony, and a bathroom roughly as big as our living room back home. It was all truly five-star.

On the first day, we started the program. We weren’t on a particular plan, but they offer different plans like for weight loss, smoking cessation, women’s health, longevity, performance training, and so on. I began with a battery of tests and evaluations, scans and measurements and blood draws, meetings with doctors, a dentist, various specialists, and a nutritionist. I got set up with a specific nutritional plan for the trip, and met with a coordinator to register for the various activities and treatments I wanted for the week. Everything’s done in an app, which keeps your schedule, shows activities available, and keeps your test results and meal menus for the week.

So there’s one dining facility you go to three times a day, and your meal times are scheduled. It’s a pretty swanky restaurant, with inside and outside seating. The food was all insanely good. I wasn’t programmed in for weight loss or for sugar detox, and was given extra protein for each meal, usually either additional tofu or tempeh, or sometimes a protein shake. The food was vaguely a Mediterranean diet, with no red meat or chicken, occasional fish, and mostly vegetable protein, but not strictly vegetarian or vegan. Portions were controlled, but no more so than any fancy restaurant that isn’t shoveling out buffet food. Everything looked and tasted incredible, and the staff were also great to work with at each meal. (Also, not on the menu, but Sarah somehow bribed someone in the kitchen, and on the night of my birthday, I got a slice of flourless chocolate cake. I don’t know if it was my general sugar depravation or not, but it was insanely good. Definitely not nutritionist-approved.)

I won’t get too into the medical stuff in a public post, but I did some physiotherapy and osteopathy on my back, and worked with a trainer to stretch more. There was a world-class gym on the top floor, and I went there every day. The bottom floor had a hydrotherapy circuit, which was fun: a walk-through pool of freezing cold water, then a Jacuzzi of boiling hot water. The main pool was warm, and had these water jet things that ranged from a pleasing massage to enough pressure to remove paint from a car. We also took a healthy cooking class, where we learned how to make various vegetable protein snacks and foods.

It’s hard to write much more about the week because it wasn’t about what did happen, but what didn’t happen. It was probably the lowest amount of stress I’ve had in my life since I was a teenager. There was no itinerary of museums and shops and landmarks I had to see. I didn’t do the usual ritual of filling dead space in the day by shoveling calories into my head. The TV never got turned on. I didn’t think of work at all. I just walked, exercised, ate long meals and talked with Sarah, and did nothing. It was incredible.

Another odd thing was that there weren’t many people there, and you seldom saw anyone. I think they scheduled meals in such a way that there were never crowds, and there were maybe a dozen or a dozen and a half guests there at any time. The people I saw - this was a real White Lotus situation, absurdly beautiful women and rich guys who if you asked them what they do, they would scoff and say, “Well, a little investing, and I’m on a few boards” and it turns out they’re like the COO of GE Healthcare or something. No kids, either. Overall, it was an extremely quiet situation, and everyone treated everyone else like how you act as a New Yorker when you run into someone famous. The brief head nod, ignore them otherwise.

Unfortunately, it all ended on Saturday. I had one more treatment that morning, and we had breakfast and lunch, then we said our goodbyes, paid up the tab, and a driver brought us back to the airport. It was an abrupt culture shock, as the Cancun airport is always cramped and crowded. I immediately fell off the wagon and got a Coke Zero. Flight back was pretty uneventful. I had Global Entry and got back in the country without even talking to anyone.

I immediately was back into the fray with work and house stuff. (We got the place painted while we were gone, and had to move everything back into place, which took a few days.) I am still trying to figure out exactly how this could work, how I could capture a few practices from the trip and make the other 51 weeks of the year match the pattern a bit more. Looking at my numbers, and my sleep and HRV were way better there. I didn’t gain or lose weight on the trip, but there was some non-tangible improvement in my general digestive health. Not looking for answers here, and I know some of them. It’s just a matter of building routines to support things better.

Anyway. Good stuff. I’d love to go back, or do a similar thing in another country. Maybe in the fall. First, I think there will be another dumb trip in late spring. I’ll start thinking about that in a month or two.