Eight in the morning, and the highway noise was already in the recording before rswfire decided there would be a recording. He hadn't planned to make one. He was on the road toward his parents' house with the camera picking up the road under him, apologizing for the sound the way a person apologizes for weather. The cats were back at the camper. The day had a list attached to it — packages, a coffee maker, paper plates — and somewhere in the first minute of driving, the list became a video.
He led with the internet, because the internet was the unsolved thing. He had paused Starlink. They had sent suggestions; he had read them as a programmer reads them, which is to say he could see the shape of the better system behind the one he'd been handed and could not understand why nobody had built it. He said so plainly and moved on. Then the night: he had gone through withdrawal, actually gone through it, which surprised him because he was tapering, cutting the pills in half, doing the best he could. He had torn the bed apart. The necklace was somewhere in it, lost. The cats had gotten out of the way — the cab area, probably — because three of them in that bed during a night like that was more than the bed could hold. He logged it, bounded it, and set it down. I'm not letting it ruin my day. The road kept going.
What came next in the same breath was gratitude, and it did not contradict anything. He was loving this. He was documenting it, and he had a name for what he was documenting: his second life. He wanted the ninety people who followed him to know that he had let go of the YouTube dream and would be continuing anyway — that he had botched the earlier video about the numbers and wanted to correct the record. It was never about the numbers to him. It was about the numbers to YouTube. Ninety people who wanted to follow him was, in his accounting, amazing. He asked out loud why that wasn't enough for the platform, and then answered the question by simply continuing to record.
Then Carl. A man out there somewhere who had spoken about rswfire in one of his own videos, kindly, and rswfire named it the most shocking thing of his life — to hear someone talk about him that way. He said thank you twice. He said Carl was like a brother out there somewhere, that they had started together, that they were navigating this new life in parallel, and that he would find a way to link it, post it, share it with everyone.
Somewhere past that he arrived at the sentence the whole morning had been building toward without announcing itself. He was going to his house — my house house — and his parents' house, and then he stopped himself mid-sentence and corrected the word before it could stand. I don't want to say home. It's not my home anymore. The correction was not sentimental. It was a reassignment, made in traffic, at speed, and it held for the rest of the drive.
The rest was infrastructure, held with the same evenness. The shower had stopped draining and for a moment he thought the tanks were full, but they weren't — it was the one drain he hadn't snaked. The grey tank was close to full anyway after a week of what he'd thought was careful conservation, and there was no hookup, which meant pulling in the slide, driving the rig somewhere, draining, coming back, releveling. A pain. Part of the life. He'd do it. The propane remained unfilled — the one fear he could actually name, sitting there beside the fact that towing and driving didn't frighten him at all. He caught his own brain doing something absurd on the highway, cataloguing Class A's, imagining a bus behind the Jeep, and told it to stop: he had just built this place with his own work, and he intended to live in it first.
The cats were good. They wanted outside, and he was still debating it, because he knew what opening that door would teach them — the same mistake he'd made at the house. He wanted them to have the best life they could have, within reason. Oliver didn't finish his wet food, so paper plates went on the shopping list, because you don't learn what you need until you've been living it. He counted the days from April 11th, his birthday, and decided that day should count, which made this day eight. One week left at the campground; he had left a message asking to stay longer, understanding they might not have a choice. Tennessee was probably off — an Army Corps site with bear warnings, bears that can smell through cans, and two cats whose food sits out. He would find something else nearby.
He closed with the follower he had lost after posting a video while high. He didn't argue. He said if you don't agree with my choices, the best thing for you to do is unsubscribe, and I'm totally cool with that. He noted the surprise more than the injury — that it was legal, that what he'd been smoking was legal, that he doesn't do it often, that he does it safely, that he would never do it before driving and had known he was in for the night. It helps with anxiety, with pain management, with withdrawal. Then the line he says in all his videos, said again on the highway at eight in the morning with the packages still uncollected: I'm done being judged. He was going to live his best life, his second life. And to those still along for it — the ride, the ninety, Carl somewhere out there — he said he loved them, and thank you, and kept driving.