The wind arrived late. It had been forecast earlier in the day and hadn't come, and then on Friday night it came, moving against the outside of the RV loud enough that one of the cats noticed it first. rswfire spoke to him before he spoke to the camera — it's okay buddy, it's okay, it's just wind — the reassurance arriving as reflex, before any thought had been organized. Inside it was seventy-two degrees. A pot of chili was on the stove, drawing about a hundred and fifty watts off the solar. He had been sitting with the Steam Deck, then the laptop, then back again, playing Horizon, going nowhere in particular.
The space around him had changed shape that day. A basket that had hung above the camera position was gone. In its place, curtains — thin ones, from Walmart, and he said so plainly, that they weren't perfect and hadn't been expected to be. They didn't block the sun. He'd discovered the fixture above couldn't control his camera, and that one had come down easily; the one in the office had been glued, and would have to be torn out later. Another curtain had gone up at the door. He mentioned he'd show that one another time. Small adjustments to a threshold, made without ceremony, the way a person adjusts a place they actually live in.
Then he opened the thing he had actually turned the camera on for, and opened it honestly: I don't have my thoughts worked out on this. He was thinking about turning comments back on. He thinks about it every now and then. And the first move he made was toward the people who had been there a long time — the ones he had talked with, whose exchanges he described as genuine, not performed. He said he understood that turning comments off might have registered as rejection. He said he understood they might feel that. He didn't soften what came next on account of it.
What came next was cost. Too many comments are superficial, he said, and some are very judgmental, and because he does not compartmentalize, there is no partitioned surface for them to land on. An attack doesn't reach a role he's playing on camera; there is no role. It reaches him whole, and it has to be processed whole. He allowed the counterweight — that he can view it through a different lens, that most people are fragmented, that some of what he says probably does apply to the person hearing it, that he isn't out here trying to offend anyone but is critiquing what he sees in society, in systems, in how people interact with themselves. He named integration versus fragmentation as the large part of his worldview, the thing he cannot see and then pretend not to see. He noted the register difference too: one on one, in a room, he'd probably talk differently — not less authentically, since that's his default mode, but differently, because a camera is not an individual.
The argument turned on what a comment could actually do. Nothing another person says will change his mind unless it resonates. Offense, criticism, upset — none of it moves the position. What it does is generate processing load. He said he had truly enjoyed not having to deal with that. And then the other side arrived anyway: the mountain, that day, driving up it and meeting fear not by fight or flight but by what he called the third way, integration, something he was proud of and felt had worked out material he hadn't known needed working. The first ascent had been an accident and he had laughed hard rewatching his own footage and imagined others had too. I would love to hear that from you. AI had suggested treating reopening as an experiment. He said he already knows what happens. This is not new to him. Somewhere in the weighing he heard himself land, and said it out loud: I think I'm talking myself out of it.
Then, without transition, chili. Friday night, simple: hamburger meat, diced tomatoes, red beans and black beans — the black ones a departure — V8, not spicy. He said twice that his process is getting better, and showed why: bean juice going into a Ziploc bag to throw away, a jar kept for grease. Anyone who had watched the older cooking videos would recognize the improvement. Somewhere in the middle of all this Bailey sneezed on him, and he had to go wash his hand, and the other cat bit him and clawed him and he told it to relax, that he wasn't even touching it, that it hurt. The wind kept up outside. He closed on the batteries: four and a half hours to charge, fully, and the reading was 12.68 volts, which he didn't think was ideal. There was a chance they were no good. He'd know tomorrow. A little concerning. It is what it is, though.