I didn’t come to Meshtastic with a plan.

I bought a cheap purple device off Etsy for about fifty-five dollars because I’d heard the word a few times and vaguely understood it meant LoRa mesh messaging. I wasn’t a prepper. I’m not a ham. I didn’t have a scenario in mind. The buy-in was low enough that curiosity won.

I live on the 8th floor in Arlington Heights, with windows facing southeast. From that height, there’s a clear line of sight over a golf course and across low-rise terrain toward the Gaylord MGM. That’s not a metaphor or a thought experiment. It’s just geography. If you’re going to put a radio somewhere, elevation and openness matter.

So I plugged it in and turned it on.

At first, it behaved like a gadget. I paired it with my phone. Sent a few test messages. Watched nodes appear and disappear. It worked, which was reassuring, but nothing about it felt consequential. Traffic was sparse. Most activity looked like people checking in, not routing through.

I left it on.

That turned out to matter more than anything I did deliberately.

Over time, it became clear that Meshtastic doesn’t reward interaction. It rewards presence. Nodes that come and go don’t contribute much beyond their own visibility. Nodes that stay up quietly start to matter in ways that aren’t obvious from the app.

Eventually, I changed the device role from node to router. Not out of altruism, but because the device was stationary, wall-powered, and well-placed. Letting it sleep made no sense. A sleeping radio with good placement is just wasted capacity.

That’s where the friction started.

Router mode changes how the device behaves. Power management becomes aggressive. Bluetooth access becomes opportunistic instead of persistent. From the phone’s perspective, it feels unreliable. From the network’s perspective, it’s doing exactly what it should.

There was a stretch where Bluetooth access felt broken. It wasn’t. The control plane was sleeping while the radio stayed active. Once I connected over USB and adjusted the settings with that in mind, the behavior made sense. Deep sleep off. Bluetooth given more patience. The display left on, because power wasn’t scarce.

Once that was done, the device became boring.

And boring is the goal.

Around the same time, the local Arlington / MeshDC area started showing more consistent LongFast traffic. More ACKs. More multi-hop messages. Nodes sticking around instead of flickering in and out. Not because of anything I personally changed, but because more devices were staying online, placed well, and allowed to just exist.

I chose the handle ABRA. Originally short for Abraham. That felt too personal. Now it’s Abracadabra, which fits better. I connected the node to MQTT so it appears on the global map, which is still quietly astonishing. A little purple radio in a window, visible via the modern web, routing messages it doesn’t need to read.

Most of the coordination, discussion, and culture happens elsewhere anyway. Discord. Reddit. The meta layer. The mesh itself just moves packets.

What I learned wasn’t radio theory or emergency planning. It was simpler.

Meshtastic works best when you stop treating nodes like personal devices and start treating them like infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn’t demand attention. It needs uptime, placement, and restraint.

I didn’t set out to build anything. I just left something on in a good place.

Everything else followed.

This episode of The Chris Abraham Show is an unscripted, exploratory monologue that circles a single question from multiple angles: what happens to large war-oriented systems when they no longer have an obvious external war to fight?

Rather than arguing for or against specific policies, this episode looks at structure, scale, and inertia. For much of modern American history, war has functioned not only as foreign policy but as an organizing principle for labor, industry, logistics, and federal spending. The Global War on Terror normalized enormous budgets, standing emergency authorities, and sprawling institutional ecosystems that extended far beyond the battlefield. Those systems trained people, built careers, created regional dependencies, and locked in expectations about what “normal” government capacity looks like.

As external wars become harder to sustain politically and strategically, the question is not whether those systems disappear, but where they go. In this episode, immigration enforcement is examined not primarily as a moral or partisan issue, but as a systems problem. At scale, mass deportation and detention require transportation networks, facilities, staffing, courts, legal processing, medical care, procurement, and coordination across multiple layers of government. Structurally, it begins to resemble other national mobilization efforts the United States has undertaken during periods of crisis.

The episode introduces the idea of a “deportation industrial complex” to describe the interlocking public and private systems that emerge around large-scale enforcement. This is not presented as a conspiracy or a claim of intent, but as an observation about how large bureaucratic systems behave once they are built. Any apparatus of that size creates economic, political, and institutional incentives for its own continuation, much like the prison system or defense contracting before it.

From there, the conversation turns to the concept of a Domestic War on Terror, or DWOT, as a descriptive framework rather than a declared policy. The logic that governed the Global War on Terror did not vanish when foreign interventions slowed. It internalized. Categories of risk, emergency elasticity, and extraordinary authorities begin to operate inside national borders, often framed as administrative rather than military. The machinery remains largely the same; the theater changes.

The episode also explores how protest, resistance, and public opposition interact with enforcement systems. Rather than assuming resistance always slows expansion, it looks at how visibility and escalation can sometimes become part of the feedback loop that sustains additional capacity. This dynamic is discussed without assigning blame, focusing instead on how systems respond to pressure.

Throughout the episode, real-time statistical queries are used to contextualize fear, risk, and public perception, not to reach definitive conclusions but to illustrate how narratives form around numbers.

This is not a call to action or a warning. It is an attempt to describe a recurring pattern in American governance: large systems tend to persist, normalize, and adapt rather than shut down. Temporary measures become permanent. Emergency budgets become baselines.

Recorded as Season 10, Episode 2 of The Chris Abraham Show, this episode is intentionally exploratory and reflective, meant to be heard as a thinking-out-loud session rather than a polished argument.

After a long hiatus from live, human-voiced podcasting, Chris Abraham returns with the unofficial kickoff to a new season of The Chris Abraham Show. Call it Season 10, or just call it “one more than whatever came before.” This episode is less a formal broadcast and more a fireside check-in. No hot takes yet. No grand thesis. Just Uncle Chris catching up, taking inventory, and letting listeners back into the workshop.

Chris opens by reflecting on a year spent experimenting with AI-assisted writing and audio. Substacks fed into NotebookLM. Podcasts assembled more like orchestration than performance. He likens himself to a Renaissance painter running a studio: sketch the idea, let the assistants fill in the canvas, then obsessively revise until it feels true enough to sign. It sparked conversations, which felt like a win, even if the whole thing occasionally resembled “DJ Slop.”

From there, the episode turns personal. One week post-second ablation, Chris reports that his heart is finally humming along in sinus rhythm after a long struggle with atrial fibrillation. The first procedure failed and took the wind out of his sails, contributing to weight gain, lethargy, and a general retreat from movement. This time feels different. Better sleep. BiPAP nights. The cautious hope of eventually shedding some medications. The slow return to walking, cycling, kettlebells, and the familiar ritual of getting back in the saddle, literally and figuratively.

Fitness and body discipline weave through the episode, including a rueful confession: Chris once tattooed a kettlebell on his hand as a motivational Hail Mary… and then promptly stopped lifting. Future tattoo ideas may include a Concept2 logo and the muted horn from The Crying of Lot 49, because symbolism apparently works better than guilt.

Work life is steadier. SEO, Google Business Profile recoveries, and AI-adjacent consulting are keeping the lights on. But the real joy lately lives in the nerd margins. Chris dives deep into decentralized systems, inspired by Ghost in the Shell, particularly the sentient blue tanks that sync their “souls” to a server. That idea metastasized into a home-rolled infrastructure project: seven identical Lenovo ThinkPads running Linux Mint, all synchronized via a cloud droplet using Syncthing. Not a backup. A living sync mesh. Every laptop a node. Every document everywhere.

That fascination with nodes and meshes extends into the physical world via Meshtastic. Chris recently deployed a LoRa-based radio node, ABRA (short for Abracadabra), hanging from an eighth-floor Arlington window, quietly strengthening a local, license-free mesh network. No voices. No feeds. Just short messages hopping node to node, old-school and strangely comforting. It’s part prepper tech, part early-internet nostalgia, part philosophical itch scratched.

Elsewhere in the ecosystem: Mastodon survives for now at abraham.su, rescued at the last minute despite the .su clock ticking toward 2030. Micro.blog joins the stack under chrisa.micro.blog and ChrisA.org. Digital homesteading continues.

Chris also shares the unexpected joy of joining a long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign, Curse of Strahd, playing a stubborn Eldritch Knight named Radley, refusing to read the manual, and delighting in chaos alongside a group of grizzled old nerds on Discord. Dice are rolled. Plans go sideways. Everyone survives, mostly.

The episode closes with quieter notes: a growing devotion to the Gospels, nightly Episcopal Compline prayers, the simple rhythm of rereading rather than rushing ahead. A Powerball ticket purchased. Gym plans deferred. Kettlebells waiting. A rowing machine sulking upright in the corner.

This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a temperature check. A reintroduction. Uncle Chris is back, heart steadier, systems syncing, curiosity intact, and ready to spend the rest of the year talking through the small things before returning to the big ones.