The GoPro had been in his hands for less than a day, and it was already failing him. The first clip cut off at thirty seconds. The next one lasted seven. rswfire ran the search, found nothing that explained it, and started recording anyway — narrating the malfunction into the malfunction itself, the screen going dark mid-sentence while the red light stayed on. It's recording. He kept going. The device was new, the system was untested, and the only way to find out whether it worked was to run it.
What he had to show was a stack of notes. Not a plan, exactly — an accumulation. Pages written across weeks as the question of how to leave a house and live in a vehicle broke itself into smaller and smaller pieces. He read them out in order, one page at a time, addressing the people who would eventually watch. Some of you will find this very boring, he said, and read on anyway. The insurance page: Progressive, chosen over cheaper options because full-timers recommended them and he was willing to pay more for that. The towing page: everything required to pull the Jeep behind him, the whole figure named without hedging. Fifty-five hundred dollars. We're good there.
Then he reached the page that indicted him, and he read that one too. Require independent inspection. He hadn't done it. He said so immediately, and then said why — that insisting with a sales guy takes a kind of courage he doesn't have, that he wishes he did, that writing it down was the closest he got. Didn't do it. Just sad. The next line: require a senior tech to do a walkthrough. Also not done. He had no idea who would walk him through the RV. He had gotten the guarantee that problems would be fixed before possession, because that one mattered enough, and he was fairly sure the pre-delivery-inspection-before-payment item was simply not something a buyer gets. The unexecuted items stayed on the record beside the executed ones, named at the same volume.
The next page was the big things, and the big things were mostly about the body and the animals. Glasses, because he wears contacts and doesn't want to, because they're hard on his eyes, because he's very nearsighted from a life spent at computers and wants to see far away while driving. Then: alphabetize the DVD collection. He paused on that one — hundreds of discs, the idea that he'd haul them to Alaska and barter them, which he knew was a thing people did up there. Then the arithmetic landed on top of the idea. Way too much space. Cannot get away with it. The cats, next: vaccinations that were current but due for the annual anyway, microchip records updated for a life on the road, flea protection, and the water fountain at 1.5 watts — a smaller one already coming from Amazon, better for the power draw.
Then the house itself. Three columns — taking, selling, discarding — with discarding meaning Goodwill or something like it, not the trash. Under taking he had written books, movies, game consoles, and reading it back he laughed at himself, because he can't take any of them. There is no space for them. He said it twice, and the second time it wasn't funny. It's real hard to give up your stuff. Let me tell you.
The last pages were questions — the ones he'd been feeding to ChatGPT and Google, the loop he runs when he doesn't know something yet. How do you maintain tire pressure in an RV, meaning where do you actually go, where do you put air in them, where do you take it for an oil change. How do you get mail on the road. How do you find RV-accessible sites. Two of those he marked as kind of know the answer to that now. One he did not resolve: how to judge clearance for trees and obstacles, because he is bad at distances, genuinely bad, and he expects that to be a problem. The weight distribution hitch was already solved. The page from last night was still opening rather than closing — pet insurance, vet records, a new vet, because Bailey's vet won't see him anymore after the visit he went into alone under the COVID rules, and it didn't go well, and the sentence ran out before the story finished.