The day began with errands. rswfire went into town with John — a tire shop first, air for the tires, then the grocery store. At the tire shop there was a man who, as rswfire tells it, was flirting openly with John and gave rswfire nothing at all. That alone would have been unremarkable. But then, in the grocery store, there was the tallest man he says he has ever seen, earrings in both ears, and that man also passed without registering him. Two in one day. rswfire opens the recording by calling it dramatic, framing it as something horrible, and the framing is the joke and the data at once: two non-encounters do not make an event, but they make a pattern, and rswfire treats patterns seriously even when he is laughing at them.
He also bought headphones. Over-ear, thirteen dollars at the dollar store, and he says plainly that they are very ugly. They exist because he lost another pair of earbuds — the fourth pair now — and he needed something to listen to music with. He is wearing them on the trail while he records, which means the people he can hear near the lake arrive to him muffled, present but not close, and he mentions this as a fact of the audio environment rather than as anything else.
The hike was a decision, and he names its purpose directly: to work off the energy. From there the recording becomes a hypothesis loop conducted out loud while walking. He proposes that he is emitting a new field, something repelling. He immediately declines the metaphysical reading of his own phrase — he says he does not really believe in that — and rebuilds it as social mechanics. Humans are social animals. We pick up on cues. He reaches for the term micro-expressions, cannot retrieve the word, works around the gap, and keeps going: maybe the cues shift with mood, or with how a person is regarding himself at that moment, an output loop rather than an aura. Then he tests the pattern against counter-evidence. Just yesterday, on this same trail, a man wanted him. So it cannot be in his head. Then a simpler candidate: he did not say hi. He did not even say hi. He states he is not spiraling, that he is playing, and files the whole thing under recalibration.
Alongside the hypotheses runs an accounting of context. He states that he almost feels like an outcast right now, that visibility feels strange, and that he is out here recording anyway. He says he wants to get back to his old self, that he has been through a lot, that he does not feel like talking about it and truly wants to put that chapter behind him — and then, in the same breath, that it has changed him and therefore has to be acknowledged. That is the rule he names: no compartmentalizing, no burying parts of himself because they are uncomfortable, and the reason for the discomfort does not matter. He says he has never done it, his whole life, and that this is how he was able to integrate every part of himself.
The train of thought carries him to boundaries. He says he has always wondered why he protects his so fiercely, at any cost, when most people do not. He describes an analogy he worked out with the help of artificial intelligence — that when someone paints your picture inaccurately, the anger is not at the person but at the picture. He says he thinks that is true, and then says there is more to it. He describes himself as a joyous person with a childlike spirit, still carrying wonder into nature and into how he meets the world, and states that what people try to take is exactly that — that making someone smaller, boxing things up, is the mechanism. He says he never let them do it and never will.
Then he arrives at the bench above the lake and stops moving. Boats are out on the water; he keeps them out of the frame and turns the camera to show the lake instead. It is a nice day. He says he would rather be on the ocean, but he just got back, and it is four in the afternoon, and he is getting ready to have dinner with John, who he calls a very good friend. Tomorrow, probably the beach — his last day here — and then north. He says he does not know if this is worth posting, that he has no problem sharing his life but knows how it lands on a platform like YouTube, and then names the actual purpose: he likes witnessing his own life. He does it for himself, not for other people. He states that he is a fully self-contained human being, that he does not know many people like himself, and that he would like to meet some. Then he says he is going to sit there for a while, and does.