The Jeep came home on a Friday, and rswfire came home with it. He'd driven it back from the shop and parked it outside the house, and before he did anything else he pulled out his camera and started talking, because the thing that had happened at the shop was too good to keep to himself. A technician named Brian had installed the towing gear. Near the end of the job something had gone wrong — a blown fuse somewhere in the system, no obvious location, no quick diagnosis. Brian had stayed late and spent a couple of hours finding it. He hadn't charged for the time. He had also drilled a hole through the passenger side of the firewall so the dash cam could run to the battery, and hadn't charged for that either. rswfire named the Jeep after him. It was also, he mentioned, the name of his first love, which felt fitting, but the naming was for the mechanic.
He moved around the vehicle with the camera, narrating what he found. The dash cam wire ran exposed across the interior — he pointed this out and claimed it, saying he'd asked for it that way, that hiding the wire would have taken effort he didn't want spent. The supplemental braking system sat where it sat; he said he'd find a bag for it, something to make it easier to handle and carry. Then the base plate, and the extras Brian had added so the Jeep's battery could trickle charge while it was being towed behind the RV. Somewhere in the back was the tow bar, too far in to film. There were bags from Lowe's stacked in the cargo area — organization hardware he'd bought the day before with his mother.
Running through the walkthrough was a second voice, steady and unembarrassed: he did not know what several of the components were. He said so each time he encountered one. I don't know what that stuff is yet. I don't know anything, guys, but I'm going to learn. A cable he couldn't identify. A part he guessed at and then declined to guess further. He named the gap and named the intention in the same breath — that he would learn the terminology, that he didn't want to sound like an idiot all the time, that he wanted to learn things the right way. The same discipline applied to the tires. The Jeep's tire monitoring sensors he'd installed himself, all four, locked on, theft-resistant if not theft-proof; he'd run them on the trip to Phoenix and found them useful. The RV's were another matter — the valve stems were unreachable, his dad had said you could get at them from inside the tire, and rswfire had responded by buying a jack and jack blocks so he could get underneath and find out. I'm trying to be a safe dude and learn stuff the right way.
He said he loved the Jeep more times than the walkthrough required. A 2023, his fifth, his favorite by far — he intended to keep it ten years or longer, to keep doing things to it, because it was a part of him. His Jeep, his cats, his RV: he listed them as the components of his life, the reason they were in every thumbnail. The RV itself never entered the frame. It was back there somewhere, referenced and not shown, the adjacent thing being converted while the Jeep was being outfitted to be towed behind it.
Then the plan for the weekend. He would finish insulating the RV, starting with the room he had decided to call the social area — office, dining, whatever it turned out to be — insulating it better than he had the first time. Then under the bed. Then he would stop, because that was a good place to stop. The Lowe's hardware would go up on the walls, ideas taken from YouTube videos and from his own or his mother's shopping trips, all of it aimed at making more space out of the same space.
The last part came with a correction attached. He had already put things in the camper once and it hadn't worked; he had gone about it the wrong way, moved possessions in before there was anywhere for them to go. So he had taken everything back out. The rule going forward was simple and load-bearing: get the organizational systems installed first, and after that, if you take something out there it has to have a place. Everything that failed the rule stayed in the house, and everything left in the house was the thing he had to get rid of — that was the actual work of downsizing, the sorting that would let him live tiny, live on the road, live in the RV with his cats. He was standing in the driveway of a house he was in the process of emptying, in front of a vehicle now rigged to be pulled behind a home that wasn't a home yet, saying he couldn't wait. Then he wished everyone a good weekend and stopped recording.