He woke at 5:45 and did not want to get up. That was the honest starting point, and he said so on camera at six, already outside, already walking, the fog so thick it had erased the far side of everything. It had rained overnight — it had rained many nights — and he admitted he did not know what caused fog, offering the not-knowing as a plain fact rather than a gap to be closed. The bed was the reason he was tired, and the bed had produced something new: back pain, which he had never had in his life. He said it twice, the way a man says a reading he does not trust the first time. He said he would sleep better on the floor and that he had genuinely considered it. Walmart was on the schedule for that morning — not for the right mattress, but for a temporary one, because the right one required measuring the frame, locating the hinge point, accounting for the space, working through specifications he stated he was not good at. Between the impulse and the correct solution sat a set of numbers he had not yet taken. So he would buy the stopgap and keep the real problem open.
Then he told the story he had been carrying since the message arrived. He had signed up for BetterHelp, told the channel he would, and cancelled the next day — no, I don't want to do this actually — and then that morning the platform matched him with a therapist anyway. Her first message, he said, was rude. He had mentioned the YouTube channel, the thing he started when he embarked on this new chapter, and she had answered with a statement about herself: that she could not and would not be on YouTube. He could understand setting a boundary. It was the wording. It was that the first move in the relationship had been about her position rather than his process. Therapy is supposed to be about me. He said he would talk about what he learned in therapy — of course he would, that is what he does here — and he would never use her name, and the idea that he might struck him as crazy. He read the whole exchange as her insecurity meeting his transparency.
He turned it over economically as well as ethically. The month was paid; there was nothing to be done about that. He weighed giving it a try against the cost, said it felt expensive for what it offered, and admitted he did not know enough to render a real verdict. But the feel of it was the finding: it didn't feel like BetterHelp to me. It felt like any online tool. He did not throw out the practice. He kept it and dropped the platform — if he was going to find a therapist, it needed to be more traditional. Then he said the line he uses to close these assessments, the one that keeps them from hardening into pronouncements: that's my honest opinion, that's what I share here.
The walk continued and the inventory continued with it. He had decided the day before to quit smoking, and he was doing it by substitution — vaping first, the whole three-and-a-half-hour drive home on it, the way it had worked for him once before, before the hospital stories about kids scared him off and before he learned, a year later, what those stories had actually been about. He mapped the staircase out loud: vape only, then a patch, then vape less, then quit completely. And on the same lines, he said — the phrase itself the tell that this was one architecture and not two — Pepsi instead of Mountain Dew. His parents drank Pepsi; it had been in the house his whole life. He didn't hate it. It wasn't his favorite. It was, he judged, less toxic than Mountain Dew, which had something about it that was worse. And he named the terminus past the substitution: he wanted to give up pop completely.
Then the fog opened onto water and a figure standing in it, and he said good morning to a stranger he could not fully see and named as a fisherman or fisherwoman without resolving which. That's just a cool image. From there the frame widened. This is an adjustment, guys. This is a different way of living. Change is slow. He was doing a lot, he said, but they were impulses — he hadn't turned them into habits yet. He did not know why he couldn't have done this at home. He knew only that he couldn't: he had literally had to get out of his house, change wouldn't come there, and this — this fog, this water, this hour — was different.
Even inside the fog the sun was bright, and he stayed on that a while. Everything is powered by it. The planets. Everything on Earth needs it. A giant ball of energy, just solid fire. He said the sun is awesome and meant it as a physical description. Another new beginning, another day, his mind still on getting better, which he stated was exactly where it needed to be. And then the disclaimer that was not a disclaimer: I don't have to have all the answers yet. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I truly have no idea. But it's okay.
The last thing that troubled him was the trees. They were beautiful, and the camera would not carry them. He had discovered this the day before — looking at the thing, then looking at the screen, and finding the two not even close, not even close. He wanted the viewer to see it the way he saw it, and he did not know what to do about the gap. He offered the failure without much defense, joked that this was probably why he was not a professional photographer, and then let it stand as unresolved as the mattress and the therapist and the life. He hoped they had a very good Tuesday. He thanked them for listening. Then he went to start his day.