The workday ended and rswfire started his music, and the moment he turned the camera on the music shut itself off — an automatic behavior he named as ridiculous and then walked past. He was on the Eel Lake Trail by then, already at roughly seven thousand steps, stating he would clear ten thousand before the day closed and that he was in the top eight percent, and that the number would be better still once the trail was behind him. He had the next two days off plus the night ahead of him, and he said out loud that he intended to make the most of that. There was hamburger meat in the fridge that needed cooking, so dinner was settled: burgers. He noted, in the same breath, that his dinner options needed expanding — but not today.
Walking, he moved into the ledger. He put the figure at seven hundred dollars, the amount he was thinking about how to come up with. The Jeep and RV payments were made and both current, and he stated plainly that they would start running late again in about a week — the working threshold being thirty days, under which he described it as pretty much a nonissue, with sixty days possibly survivable though not something he wanted to risk. Around that same window, he said, ranger jobs should be available, and if it came to it he could explain the situation and work it out. He had bought himself time. The insurance was the piece that had to move: normally a couple hundred a month, currently five hundred because the policy renewed and the months appeared to have doubled up, due — he thought — yesterday, confirmed by an email. He named the risk precisely, that lapsed coverage could put him in trouble with the finance company holding the RV. Then he turned the volume down, saying it was a bit loud for being on camera and talking.
He addressed the record directly. Nothing was implied by any of it, he said. He understands one person watches him, and that person actually helped him, and he thanked them and said they made a big difference. What he was doing was being consistent and sharing his life completely. For him, he stated, this is like a journal — a documentation. Months from now, years from now, he can look back and say he remembers that time, that it was a stressful time, and that he got through it. The recording, in that moment, held both functions at once: the log, and the reason for the log.
Then a boat, out on the water. He greeted it — hello boat — noted it was very cool, saw they were fishing. He tried to zoom and found the camera hard to control at distance, any tiny movement of his hand throwing the frame wide. He mentioned the nice digital camera he owns and has not learned, and that he would love to be able to take much better video and pictures, and hasn't yet been in the mood to sit down with it. Soon, he thought.
The evening plan assembled itself as he walked: clean up the camper, which was a little messy; mop the floor, if the energy was there, which he left genuinely open. The YT project had gotten very little of him until the very end of what had been a busy day. He had gotten the steam cleaner working, and it was awesome — pulling dirt out of furniture he had not known was in there. He told her he would use it on Sunday when he starts back and get that furniture cleaned for real, and he said he felt better about it. He named the mechanism as the integration process: once he starts doing a thing and sees the result, the resistance drops. Not fun, he said — but he can make that furniture look nice, and he will.
Tomorrow he would wake up and decide. Check in with his core muscles, make sure they were doing okay. Maybe the beach, finally — he stated that he misses the ocean, that he needs to see it, and that he knows exactly where he will go, a new place he hasn't been. First thing in the morning. And after that, not necessarily the same day, north to the lighthouse, where a ranger told him he would love it: the 101 comes back to the water up there and it is all cliffs, different from the south stretch. Here, he explained, it is all dunes, and the dunes are why the highway swerved inland — a long distance of them. He wanted to explore all of it while he was here, and he decided he could save the northern part for February, when the next campground puts him twenty miles closer to it. Use this time for the dunes. We'll figure it out, he said. We're definitely going to the beach, though. Have a good night.