He began by naming the constraint. Before the hobby, before the wood, before anything he actually wanted to show — rswfire told the camera that the internet where he is is bad enough that short videos are the only thing that will post, and that this is simply how it has to be done. The format of the transmission was decided by the infrastructure available to it, and he said so out loud, at the top, without complaint. Then he moved on to what he had picked up to show.
The RV at Siltcoos is compact, and the recording was close-range, handheld, the pieces brought up near the lens because there was nowhere else for them to be. He held up a flat sheet of wooden model parts and admitted he had forgotten what the thing turns into. He found the part he could name — that's a wall — and then, in the same breath, that's as far as I got. The build was unfinished and he presented it that way, without apology, the way a person shows a friend the actual state of something rather than a staged version of it.
Then he found the reference image and turned it toward the camera: that's what it looks like when it's done. The finished object existed as a picture, the started object existed in his hand, and the rest of the kits — a bunch of them, he said — existed a considerable distance away, at his parents' house, where they had been left behind. He had bought them for a specific purpose. They were going to go on his bookshelves.
The bookshelves came into the video as an aside and then held the center of it. That's the thing I miss most in life, he said, of books and shelves, and let the statement sit without elaborating on it. Around it, the enthusiasm kept surfacing unforced — look how cool that is, it's so cool — and then the register shifted from sight to smell. He brought the wood close and said it smells nice, that whatever kind of wood this is, it smells so nice, that he loves it. The wood was doing something in the small interior of the RV that had nothing to do with the camera and could not be transmitted through it.
He circled back to the limit without letting it end there. There'd be nowhere for me to display them in here — the plain spatial fact of the dwelling he lives in, stated as fact. And then, immediately, the location where the practice resumes: one day I'll have a cabin somewhere, and I will get books again, and I will display all these. He said he still wants to do this. He said it seems like a nice hobby to have.
Then he closed the way he opened, unhurried, the transmission the length the bandwidth would carry: so I'd share that with you.