At five-thirty in the morning, an hour already spent awake in the dark, rswfire sat up on the camper bed and started talking. The bed was more comfortable than the last one — firm, which he had chosen deliberately. He explained the reasoning outward, to whoever was watching: that softness reads as comfort intuitively but doesn't serve the body, that a person who moved to a firm surface or to the floor would struggle at first and then find the back pain gone. He allowed that someone less sensitive might simply not register the difference. He noticed it. That was the point he kept returning to.
Because the mattress was not the problem. He said so plainly, and then he reached for the leveler to prove it. He set the tool against the camper itself — absolutely level. He set it on the bed in one position — fairly level. Another position — still holding. Then further, and the bubble slid off true. It's real bad there. I mean, explain that. I don't get it. He moved the leveler across the frame and narrated what it showed him, arriving finally at the section that sits over the cavity where the slide retracts, the gap he had shown the audience the day before. That part he expected. The rest of it he didn't. The surface was uneven all over, and beneath the mattress, out of reach. His body knew it. It woke him every time he shifted position. He could see a temporary fix for the top section — plywood, something laid down while the slide was out — but the rest of it he named as unsolved and left it there, unsolved.
Bailey came in then, fifteen pounds of him, and settled onto rswfire's chest and stayed for the rest of the recording. rswfire said he had meant to talk about the cat this morning but hadn't worked his thoughts out yet, and then talked about him anyway. He described the fur, the constant need to be in his face, the weight. He described raising Bailey from six weeks old and the bond that formed. He described the night six months prior when Bailey attacked his brother Oliver — woke rswfire from a dead sleep, the two of them fighting like wild animals in the kitchen — and the pattern that followed, Bailey turning on Oliver whenever he saw another cat through the window. Something switched off in rswfire's brain that night. He states he has not been able to switch it back on, that he has never figured out why, that Bailey did nothing he had control over and doesn't deserve it. He is responsible for him. He loves him. The bond got altered, and rswfire said he wished it hadn't.
He turned to the audience next, and to what the previous video had shown him. Most people, he said, were there for entertainment — he couldn't guess in what capacity or why, only that it was so. He'd had trouble with that. I'm not here to entertain you. Really not. Then he separated out the ones who weren't, the ones who had written to say he was helping, and he thanked them. One in particular he addressed directly, a commenter from some time back: you've got this, you know what you want, you know it in your heart, it takes courage and you have it. He noted that the person was taking steps toward their dream, and that most people don't do that anymore.
The shelves overhead held his Minecraft books, and seeing them pulled him sideways into the game. He described rerolling the world seed over and over until he got the one he wanted — the spot he landed on, mountains, waterfalls, a village nearby. Perfect. He said he could see building something beautiful up high in it, that he needed to reconnect to that, that it was creative, digital Legos. He mentioned his own server, empty, and offered it: there's nobody on it, so there's plenty of space for us. He'd ignored Minecraft for the first ten years of its existence. Every so often the interest comes back.
Then he circled back deliberately, to finish something he'd left open the day before. He'd said the shelves might have contributed to the dream, and he wanted to elaborate so there was no confusion — noting, as an aside, that he starts thoughts and doesn't finish them and assumes people can follow, that he has been that way his whole life and doesn't know how to change it. The shelves were his own installation. He'd mounted them into a hollow wall because that was what the RV gave him to work with, and he had been worried about them coming down on Bailey. That worry was the link. Everything is a challenge in an RV, he said — they're built really badly, the manufacturers should be ashamed, the quality is ridiculous for what these things cost. The stress he carried about the build had surfaced in the dream, the height of it, the two-part strangeness of it. The shelves weren't the dream's content. They were where the load sat.
Coffee soon, he said. Then more organizing — he hoped to have the interior done that day. Then, trying to figure my life out here. He said he'd let them know how it goes. Bailey stayed where he was.