He woke at three and lay in the dark for a while before sleep came back. Around five he surfaced again and stayed in bed anyway, and by the time he was standing at the counter it was almost six. The rig was still dark-quiet. He set the little drip machine going and waited on it, and while he waited he counted forward to his days off, then counted the yurts between here and there. One yurt cleaned would be actual progress, he said — and then there would be other yurts. He named the job plainly: he does not like it, and he is going to do it, and he is going to do it as well as he can. Both halves stated without strain, as though they had never been in competition.
What he wanted, standing there, was to be out in it. He said so. The reason he isn't is the core injury, and he made himself say that plainly too. He reached for the numbers first the way he reaches for numbers — Samsung Health putting him in the top twenty percent for his age group and for all age groups, sometimes the top ten, once as high as four — and then set the numbers down, because the numbers were not the point. The point was that he had to sit down and acknowledge an actual injury requiring actual healing time. It felt better than yesterday. Yesterday there were sharp pains when he moved a certain way; this morning he hadn't noticed them in a while. Surely they're getting better. It's such a slow process. It's fine, though. Then the truer word arrived underneath the assessment, and he gave it: bored. Very bored.
He paused the recording. When it came back, a decision had already been made on the other side of the pause. He does not want to share his life with an anonymous audience anymore. The morning reflections would move to the members-only channel. He named the cost of that in the same breath — if the videos aren't out there, nobody discovers him, nobody even has the opportunity of knowing he exists — and kept the decision anyway, sorting what stays public as he went: exploration videos, cooking misadventures. What he wants instead is an intentional community that supports each other. I'm here for you too. The audience was being made smaller on purpose and made mutual on purpose, and those were the same move.
The coffee went in the cup and some of it went everywhere else, and he narrated that too, mid-thought, without losing the thought. The thought was about how the world defines a person by their job. He hadn't thought this way before, he said. He didn't know he was a programmer and that that was respect enough. He has been programming since the sixth grade — used to write code on paper and run it in his head — and he prided himself on his intellect, and then he turned the pride over and looked at the underside of it: he didn't really do anything, he was born with this brain. Park ranger is a respected job too. He said the whole framework was bullshit and moved on. There is going to be friction with this organization, he said, no way around it, all the rules and regulations, and he is already butting up against some of them. They don't help people. How are you a park ranger and you don't help people. Then the community dynamics, and all of that. It's a lot. Most humans navigate this their whole lives; he did a very good job of avoiding it for most of his. And now here he is engaging with it on purpose, which he finds interesting rather than alarming. He doesn't always understand his decisions right away, he said, because he operates on intuition. He does not have a full understanding of why he is pursuing this. He is trusting it will work out. He is hopeful.
Then the domestic layer, handled with the same attention as the philosophical one. Coffee and water onto the list. He could fill the jugs from his own supply, but he doesn't trust the tanks — nothing that flows through those is going in him — though maybe the potable spout through the filter would be all right. Maybe he's a weird person about it. He'd much rather have Fiji. First sip: hazelnut creamer and sugar, exactly how it needs to be. Good coffee. And then the small mourning underneath it, for the mocha machine he threw away back in Kentucky because there was no room in this thing. For a while he thought he'd replace it, set it on top of the power station — but the monitor lives up there now. It's a small space. You really have to be careful what you bring into it. Drip coffee is good enough. He put the hat in the wrong spot and he keeps bumping into it.
He came back to the audience thought and spoke directly to one of them. To Irishman: I appreciate you. He said the man puts care into his comments, that he is trying to understand rswfire's boundaries and respect them, and that this matters a lot. And the reason it matters arrived immediately after, because all his life people have been trying to fix him and he is not broken, and that pisses him off. His cousin's text — what are you going to do — landed in the same category. He has thought about it. He was asking for help, and what came back was an attempt to dictate how he lives. He said he doesn't understand why you can't just support the people you care about. He said his family has always held a warped view of him, treated him as though something were wrong with him, called him a loner when he states he is the most relational person he knows. He would choose homelessness over being around them. He would go live in the woods. He would live on the streets. That, he said, is not a loner — that is someone getting away from toxicity, from people who won't witness or honor him and try to fold him into their world view. He never could conform. He cannot dishonor himself or his truth; his whole being pushes back on it. It is much easier to go with the flow of who he is.
The morning reassembled itself around tasks. Laundry, in the little room inside the shower house whose name he could not retrieve — something to do with plumbing, a weird name, new vocabulary he's still acquiring. He'd check the calendar and make sure nobody else had claimed it. He wants his good clothes. The yurt, obviously. Maybe a walk. And the insurance payment that didn't go through, emailed to him that morning, a lot of money, on the financed Jeep and the financed RV, and the open question of what a finance company can do about vehicles that are just sitting here — the kind of question he never had to navigate across two decades of stable employment. Then his family surfaced again unbidden and he marked it: he can't believe this is even bothering him, he thought he was over it, he is completely disconnected, there's no reason to be thinking about it. There were other things he meant to do and they weren't coming to him in the moment. He'd figure that out. He signed off wishing everyone a good morning — and by y'all I mean one person for now.