The morning found rswfire at the house, which was no longer quite a house — more a container being emptied, a fixed point he was moving through rather than living in. He turned the camera on and opened with a line that functioned as both apology and refusal: an artist doesn't like to explain his work, but let me just try anyways. What followed was a correction. Not to anything anyone had said aloud, but to a frame he could feel forming around the record he was making — the assumption that this was a series about RV living. He named it directly. This is about following your dreams. This is about overcoming fears and self-doubt and doing it anyways and seeing where you end up. The category others might file it under was too small, and he said so before it could set.
The cats were with him. They had made the drive the day before, and he described them without softening: terrorists in the car, and the listening had been hard. Now they were here, in the house, and he was about to leave them and drive back. The logistics were plain and stated plainly — the house had to be dealt with, so it was being dealt with. More of his things would go out on the return trip. The shuttle between the two dwellings had its own rhythm by now, a corridor worn between the residence being vacated and the vessel being outfitted, and this morning's transmission was recorded somewhere inside that corridor.
He mentioned the ceilings. On the drive or in the handling of boxes, ideas had arrived about how to use that overhead volume in the RV — the vertical space above a life, reconsidered as storage. It was a small note, delivered in passing, and it sat beside the larger reorientation without competing with it. I'm still doing my thing, you know. The build continued. The thinking continued. The two were not separate activities.
Then the thread he had been holding underneath the logistics surfaced. He said he was trying not to have so much technology in his life, and named it as one of the changes he wanted to make. He had been using computers since he was a small child. It had been wonderful and had helped him in a lot of ways. It had hurt him in many too. He said the next part twice, the repetition doing the work that emphasis does: I lived on the internet. I really lived on the internet. Not a confession, not a complaint. A statement of where a life had been conducted, offered as the measurement against which the current move could be understood.
And then he stepped outside himself to look at the record he was building. He described the person in his own videos in the third person — a person who has a lot to learn about life out here, because he was afraid to embrace it, and now he's choosing to do so. He was watching the figure in the frame and naming what the frame showed: fear, and then choice, and the distance between them being crossed on camera. The videos were not documentation of a lifestyle. They were the argument itself, the evidence that the crossing was happening.
He closed on what he had hoped for from the beginning. I was hoping that would inspire you guys. Really was. Then the drive back, with the cats left behind at the house and more of his belongings going the other direction, toward the ceilings he had ideas for and the outdoor life he had said he was going to learn.