The camera came up at the ocean, handheld, on the ninth of November, and rswfire started talking the way a man talks when he has been walking for hours and the thought has finally arrived fully formed. A week ago, he says, he quit vaping. Cold turkey. Before that it was cigarettes since sixteen, and before the vape there was a year and a half of transition, and behind all of it a number he returns to twice because the number is the point: thirty-two years. His entire adult life, moderating and modulating through a chemical, and then he just stopped.
He is careful about how he describes the week. It has gone easier than he expected — he says that plainly, then immediately qualifies it, not with doubt but with caution, the way you handle something that is working before you understand why it is working. He cannot name the factors. He does not try to name them. He has been trying for all those years, and this time it took, and the reason for that is a variable he is content to leave open while he watches the system run.
What he did instead of explaining was walk. Over ten miles yesterday, probably fifteen. The same the day before. A lot of time on the ocean, he says, gesturing at the shoreline behind him — like I am now. The first couple of days he did not GPS track any of it. He thought about it and simply did not do it, and he does not know why, and he says so without correcting himself. The days he did track will end up on Atlas when he builds Atlas. He has been taking photographs, too, at intervals, whenever a stretch of it struck him as worth documenting. Those will go in the gallery when he builds the gallery.
It was the word gallery that brought the camera out. Thinking about gallery in his life, he says, and the sentence turns from feature roadmap toward the thing underneath it. His domain is due in less than a week. He has owned rswfire.com for twenty-three years. If he cannot pay it, he loses it. Hosting is seventy dollars and he does not have seventy dollars, so the site may go down for a while. If it does, it does. He states each of these as a fact with a date attached and no plan attached, and then: I'll figure it out. It's too important for me not to.
He is explicit about what he will not do. He will not beg. He has provided ways for people to help, and those channels sit where he left them, unappealed to — and he notes, almost as an aside, how shockingly uncommon it has become for anyone to use them. He does not follow the observation anywhere. He lets it stand next to the unpaid hosting bill and moves on.
Then back to the build, in the same breath and the same register. He thinks the gallery might be next, because he wants his photos online. But the open-source repository is a new project, and he is migrating code from the older ones into a single common codebase, and he switched the front end to React, so all of that has to be rewritten. He is considering using this new base for his homepage, even though the existing homepage already has substantial work built into it. Consolidation over preservation. He says it without visible reluctance.
The last stretch is a list, delivered fast, the way a man inventories what is actually in front of him. He quit vaping — that's important. It saves him money. It saves him the stress of having to worry about it. Still has to feed himself. Still has a few bills. Still has the Jeep payment. Doesn't know how he's going to do it. Won't beg. And the recording ends mid-sentence, on the offer left standing rather than extended, the ocean still moving behind him, the walk not finished.