The last morning at Cape Blanco arrived on the final day of the year, and rswfire greeted it the way he greeted most mornings — camera on, coffee-hour cadence, good morning fellow humans — noting the coincidence of the calendar without making much of it. There were things to get done inside the camper before he could leave. Cape Arago was a possibility, a maybe, floated and left open. What was certain was the hour and a half north, and a different park at the end of it, and the fact that this was the last time he would wake up in this particular spot on the southern Oregon coast.
He turned to the thing he actually wanted to say. The channel had been monetized, and monetization had opened a door he had been circling: memberships. Two tiers. The first at three dollars, basic material plus a monthly live stream — something he had considered for a long while and declined, because the prospect of going live to a room of strangers had never appealed. A membership changed the composition of the room. He couldn't promise a schedule. He would give notice when the month made sense. It might come from Cape Blanco's edge, or from the beach, or from inside the camper; it might be dawn or dusk. He is a nomad, internet is always a challenge, and flexibility is the price of the arrangement. Once a month, an hour of real time, questions answered as they came.
The second tier, at ten dollars, was where the architecture showed itself. That was where the more vulnerable material would go. He named the reason plainly: ten months on the platform, ten months of navigating it, had given him a reliable sense of when his content straddles abuse for the people receiving it — and he was done supplying that. He described the drift it had produced in him, the way you start sharing less because you know how people react. The paywall was his correction, and he framed it in the opposite direction from what a paywall usually means. Behind it he could be more vulnerable, not less. A member is someone who has crossed a threshold on purpose. That makes them a little bit safer to interact with.
There was a mechanical obstacle. YouTube does not surface the join button until eight people have subscribed. So he built a perk for the first eight — no gotcha, sign up for a month and leave if you want, and he would make each of them a friendship bracelet. Then he went to show them what that meant. Into the closet, one-handed, out came the threads, all the colors laid out for the camera. He had loved this since he was a teenager. Pick up to five colors, he said, because every color you add makes the bracelet harder to make. He pulled out the pattern books too and named them for what they were — clearly for children — and named himself in the same breath, a big Manchild, someone who does the basic designs. He found the one he tends to make, then the one that is his favorite.
He was honest about the timeline. He starts bracelets and doesn't finish them, because sitting still doing one repetitive thing is boring as hell to him — this is a chaos person, right. He couldn't promise how long it would take. For this, he would put the effort in. And alongside the bracelet, a postcard: something Oregon, something about the coast, bought from one of the little gift shops around. He had been sending them already. One went to his dentist and his hygienist, because they had done such an awesome job and he wanted them to know how much they changed his life.
He closed without closing it. A lot of the content would stay open to everyone. He was still working out how exactly he wanted to do this. The membrane was being drawn while he was standing inside it, on the last day of a year, in a camper with tasks still pending and ninety minutes of highway ahead — one relocation of the body, one of the transmission, both underway before noon. So that's where we're heading.