The morning began with a failure of hardware. rswfire woke inside the RV at Siltcoos, the dunes still holding whatever light October gives them at that hour, and somewhere in the motion of getting up the blanket caught the stud in his right ear and took it with it. Ripped right through, he says — not a slow working-loose but a clean mechanical event, fabric against metal, the blanket winning. Part of the stud went with it into the bedding and did not come back. He looked. It was gone. The piercing was open and the piece that held it was no longer whole.
What followed was not repair. He did not hunt for a replacement of the same kind or leave the position empty until one arrived. He opened the array. The bottom hole took a hoop. The little diamond stud moved over to fill the gap left by the loss, though he states plainly that he wants that position to be a hoop too — he started with a hoop there, and the stud is a placeholder standing in a position it was not chosen for. Each piece he moved was a decision made against a picture he already carries of how the array should sit, and he narrates the gap between the current configuration and that picture without complaint, as an engineer notes a temporary patch.
Then the smallest hoop he owns came out of the sequence and he looked at it and saw somewhere else it could go. Oh man, that could go on my eyebrow. And it does. He puts it in and turns to the camera and shows it — there it is — and the register of the whole recording shifts. He tries a second one beside it and finds the channel has already closed. He says he might try again, that the little ones are nice, that he likes them. The closure is registered and set down; it does not become the subject. What becomes the subject is the hoop that went in, the one he keeps returning to across the rest of the recording, the one he says outright he loves.
Along the way he takes inventory, and the inventory has a pattern in it. The left ear has never given him trouble. Never. No problems. The right ear is where things happen — a stud lost to a helmet, a piece that feels too big or too long, and now the blanket taking half of another. He names the asymmetry directly, one side stable baseline and one side the recurring site, and states it as observed fact about his own body rather than as grievance. He also knows there is other jewelry somewhere in the RV, in a little bag he has been keeping it in and cannot currently find. Finding the bag is the day's open task; if it turns up, he says, he could probably update his jewelry today.
He ends where the hoop is. This hoop up here, my eyebrow, I love it. He thinks it should be slightly bigger, and notes that this one went through easiest, and that if the sizing had gone differently it would be sitting in his ear instead. But man, I love that. Holy — . The stud that started the morning is still lost, half of it somewhere in the bedding, and the position it left is filled by a piece he intends to swap. Nothing has been resolved. The array has simply been redistributed around what failed, and one component landed somewhere better than where it began. A new day, I guess.