It was nine in the morning in Kentucky and rswfire had slept well. No stress dreams — he said so plainly, the way a person notes a barometer reading. He was not a morning person and told the camera as much, though his voice moved easily enough that the claim sat beside the evidence rather than on top of it. The selfie stick would not hold the angle he wanted. He worked at it, gave up on it, mentioned that he would probably look for another one, and went on talking. The frame was wrong and the recording continued anyway.
The day had a shape already. It would be in the seventies, cloudy, the kind of weather he had been waiting on. Days earlier he had assembled the large structure for the cats and then left it standing indoors, unused, because the outdoors had not yet cooperated. Today it would go outside. He called it a cat kingdom and heard the drama in the word as he said it, allowing that it was probably too much and that he would likely need to scale it down. He also said he intended to take as much of it as he could, and that most of it was easy to assemble. The kingdom was not decoration. It was cargo being tested for the road.
Then he turned to the platform itself, and the assessment was unsentimental. YouTube felt impersonal — a camera, a room, a comment thread he could not track well. The Facebook groups felt the same, people asking questions into a space that answered without knowing them. What he wanted was to share the journey and receive something back, to build an acquaintance-friendship with the people on the other side of the lens, and he did not believe this surface could hold that. He asked for suggestions, now or later, and said the thing that framed the whole request: he was not trying to do what everyone else was doing. That was not who he was. The tool was found insufficient and named as such, and the field it was meant to carry was put up for relocation.
He lost track of the day — Saturday or Sunday, he thought Saturday — and then found the thread again on Monday, when the Jeep had to go in to be fitted for towing. He did not have the word for it. He said hitched, questioned himself, moved on. What followed was an inventory of his own ignorance, offered without apology: supplemental braking system, tow bar, safety cables, tow vehicle wiring kit, base plate kit, tire pressure monitoring system, breakaway system, probably sway bars. He could name the list. He could not yet say what most of it was. He did not know what a tow bar was and said it was probably stupid not to know, and then kept going, because the not-knowing was a task and not a verdict.
The story arrived here the way it does in speech, sideways. He apologized for going off topic and then said the truer thing — this is how you are going to get to know me. He has one brother. rswfire is the computer person, programming, all of that, and knows nothing of the other domain. His brother knows mechanics, knows building, built his own house a couple of years ago. Neither has the other's skills. rswfire said he wished he had learned some of it when he was younger, that it would help now, and left it there. Two complete competencies, mirrored and non-overlapping, and one of them was about to walk into a shop on Monday.
That was the actual concern: walking in without knowing, being sold what he did not need. He wanted to arrive somewhat knowledgeable. So he had gone to ChatGPT and learned there were two kinds of supplemental braking systems, and he brought the open question to the audience — the portable ones, the ones that are not permanent, are they easy, are they reliable, are they safe, would you use them if you lived on the road. He had watched enough video on tire pressure monitoring to know he would buy one for the RV and one for the Jeep and watch them both, always. He had already looked at the Jeep and knew the front did not have the right thing on it, and could not say whether the rest of the list was already bolted to his vehicle or entirely absent. He expected the whole assembly to cost thousands. He said he was willing to spend it to be safe. He would get quotes from a couple of places. He did not have to be fast about it.
He did not have the RV yet. Friday, he thought — Friday he would pick it up. Between now and then the house had to come apart. It was time to start packing, to set aside what would be sold, to make the listings on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. He said he was at that stage now. Time to get rid of my stuff and prepare for that RV to come. Then he closed the way he opened, with the ordinary business of the day: he would be back later, when the sun was out, and in the meantime he was going to play with the cats outside. He said he was very excited. The camera went off, the angle still wrong, the morning still early, the kingdom still indoors and waiting to be carried out.