Eight in the morning on a Sunday, and rswfire was already looking for his coffee before he was looking for the camera. He found it, held it up, said something about what he'd do without it. Twelve hours of sleep behind him — the first real reservoir after a week of four and six-hour nights, the deficit he'd already told his subscribers about. The RV sat around him unlevel, electronics still uninstalled, the couch still occupying its factory position, the cat somewhere in the frame's periphery. He had not slept in the rig. He'd slept in his bed. The rig was still being brought to the condition where sleeping in it would mean something.
The first thing he corrected was a word. He had planned to write in his title that he'd crashed — meaning the sleep, the twelve hours — and then heard how it would land on a page next to a picture of an RV. He caught it before it went out and said so on camera, and then said the thing underneath it: that some YouTubers become victims of the algorithm, that he wanted his subscribers to have an authentic experience with him, and that if this thing ever started changing him he would stop doing it. He repeated the oath. Then he circled back to the word itself and noted that crashed was simply how he would have said it, and that he was glad he'd caught himself. The audit ran and closed in under a minute, and the channel kept going.
The channel was growing. He said he was surprised by it, that it seemed to grow every day, that it gave him some hope in humanity. He said he hadn't expected anyone to watch an older guy with no teeth without constant ridicule, and that he'd known the ridicule was possible when he started, and that he'd started anyway. He described it as having taken some courage. Then he set the policy, plainly, for anyone arriving new: comments about his mouth would not be deleted. He wasn't going to respond to most of them; the first troll comment he'd answered with a thank-you and a heart emoji, and he offered that as the template. He said twice that he wasn't bothered. He gave two reasons — that people showing the world who they are is their own business, and that it counted as engagement either way.
He drew one line through it. Someone had written, while he slept, that he was a fool for financing anything he couldn't afford. Not ridicule — no point at all, in his reading. He deleted it, said so, and said he had no problem having done it. The distinction sat there without further defense: mockery of his body stays, pointless negativity goes, and he was the one deciding which was which.
Then the levelers. He'd bought the sloped ramps first because every video he'd watched called them the easy ones, and he'd found them terribly difficult — no way to know how far up to drive before driving too far. They scuffed on the first use, which meant he probably couldn't send them back, and they had been eighty dollars. The Lego bricks were forty for a pack of ten and he would need more than one pack. Two more were arriving tomorrow, and he needed them, because he was not level yet. He explained why he preferred them anyway: you can stack uneven counts on either side and still arrive at level, and they sit on a nice square spot. He said he didn't know why everyone recommended the other ones.
The layout resolved last. The bed stays — he'd decided, and the reason was the afternoon in the back with the cat that his subscribers had seen the day before. The couch goes. He hoped his friend Brandon could help him move it, because his parents are on the older side and Brandon is the only friend he ever made here. The couch would go into storage rather than out, held against a future trade-in. What he planned for the space once it was empty, he said, would be perfect.
Bailey's was staring at him, so he wrapped it. The day's work was the electronics he hadn't gotten to the day before — the day had just gone, he said, gone fast. More time in the rig with the cat. More levelers tomorrow. He caught himself once more on the way out, clarifying that no, he hadn't slept in it, he'd slept in his bed, but he'd be camping in it very soon. Then he wished them a good weekend, noted it was Sunday for a lot of them, and left them with the closing he uses: just live today.