Saturday evening at Siltcoos, and the day had gone to maintenance. rswfire had run laundry, cleaned the interior of the RV, serviced the tanks. He had meant to shower and hadn't — the tanks took the window. He names this at the top of the recording, unhurried, the way a person accounts for the shape of a day off before moving on from it. The camera comes up in the RV's interior. Shift starts again tomorrow. In the interval between the work behind him and the work ahead, he opens the transmission the way he will also close it: with his body.
The eyebrow is pierced a second time. He had considered the other side and chose against it — he describes wanting it where he would always see it, placing the mark deliberately inside his own visual field rather than outside it. Eleven or twelve days since the first, and the second is still bruised; he notes he has never had a black eye in his life and has no reference for how long one lasts. The ear went up a notch higher because the small studs read as elegant to him, and he says he can imagine another one after that. The hoops are in, though hard to see on camera — he'll check the footage later. Then the discovery he calls the funniest thing: the navel piercing he had planned to redo, done thirty years ago and worn perhaps a month, turned out never to have closed. What he had taken for a scar was an open channel. The piercer simply put an earring through it. He circles the fact twice, still turning it over — that a mark he assumed had sealed had been there the entire time, and that the piercer confirmed the eyebrows could do the same after about a year. He says he is never getting rid of them.
Then the pivot, announced as one: he doesn't have a lot to talk about, he just wants to say hi. The last update was the end of February, when he was still on the Welcome Center desk. On the twenty-eighth he worked a double and then stayed an hour past it for a woman from Canada who needed a campsite and had run into problems. He stayed with her until he had one for her. He states it made him feel good, and that seeing her the next day, being thanked, felt good too. Now he is cleaning yurts and campsites instead. He reaches for the word for what that is, tries and discards fun, and lands on rewarding — the searching itself left in the recording rather than edited out.
He holds the word up against the other thing in the frame. A whole life as a programmer. A very good career, a lot of money, given up a year ago for the RV. Now volunteering, unpaid, cleaning yurts, and calling it rewarding. He acknowledges that this is hard for a lot of people to understand and does not soften it or resolve it. He says he still sees the value in the work. Both accounts stay on the table.
The economic thread comes next and he loses his place inside it — where was I going with this, give me a second — and then recovers it out loud. Eight months of living on savings, spent while trying to think the problem through. The expenses are lower now but not zero: the RV, the Jeep, insurance on both, food. And the structural constraint of the nomad, which he has turned over repeatedly and keeps arriving at the same place — he can't take a job at a grocery store or a gas station, because in a month or two he is somewhere else. It keeps coming back to freelancing. He says he has no choice. He has just recovered access to his Guru account, locked out for so long he'd forgotten the credentials until they restored it for him; a few more steps and he can start looking for work. So, he says, more programming.
The working relationship with his ex boss is on pause as of the start of the month. He calls it recent and unexpected, says he had hoped to keep working with them, says there is a reason and that he hopes the pause is temporary, and says he is glad they worked things out. Ten years with the man. He managed an entire development team — dozens of programmers, hundreds across the span of it — and describes the job as stressful largely because he did everything, a one-man show carrying all of it for a very long time. That, he says, is where the RV started: he needed a break from all of that. And it has been long enough now. Time to reposition. He apologizes for seeming scattered, names that there is a lot in his head, and keeps going.
What he says he was never worried about is himself. He describes knowing himself his whole life, knowing there is no situation he cannot navigate, and having complete and total trust in that. He pauses to find precise language for how far he has stretched things — far enough, he says, that most people would be nervous right now, and he is not. He states that something this month reaffirmed that for him, and steps carefully around the details, saying only that he has been trying hard to de-escalate some situations and hopes he finally has, that de-escalation was all he was ever trying to do. He is doing good. He goes back to work tomorrow.
And then he names the position outright: a liminal space, one they have talked about before on the channel, one he says he thrives in. Between what is and what will be. He does not treat it as a gap to be closed. From there he goes straight back to the eyebrow — isn't my eyebrow piercing awesome, let's just end with that — and then keeps going anyway, because there is a year of viewers on the other side of the lens and 650 videos behind him. He says he sees what's happening in the world, that he told them, and that all anyone can do is navigate it. Resilience, facing reality, being clear-eyed, positioning yourself to navigate — he states this is the core of what he teaches here. The thread slips a third time and he says so. He states that there is no way to know, that they are in a liminal state, that they should be honest about that. Then the last thing: you can always choose joy, it is always a choice available to you, and it is the choice he is making. He calls himself rambling, wishes them a good weekend, and stops the recording in the RV, with the bruise still fresh above his eye and a shift waiting in the morning.