Nearly three in the morning, and rswfire was outside instead of asleep. His sinuses were acting up — congestion, the occasional sneeze breaking the quiet. He had lit a fire earlier in the evening, then fallen asleep, an hour maybe, he wasn't sure. When he woke the fire had gone out and the night had moved on without him. He didn't relight it. He sat near the pit anyway, in the dark, with the RGB lights he'd installed running color around the stone.
The pit was finished now, or finished enough to sit in. He had laid gravel in a wide circle around the whole thing and run a gravel path from it up to the deck. The boulders came out of the forest itself — harvested, hauled, and set as a border ring, one after another, all the way around. Logs placed for seating. Lights along the sides. Standing in it at three in the morning, describing it into the camera, he called it beautiful. Perfect, man. It's really cool. The material had come from the ground he lives on. Nothing about it was rented.
Earlier, before the nap, he had spent a minute at the computer. Two servers staged on Hetzner — a German company, but with resources in Oregon, so he took the Oregon ones. One for a PostgreSQL database, one for web services. Fifteen dollars a month. He named the number twice, the way you name a thing you've been waiting to be able to say. The migration off AWS would be entirely manual, every piece by hand, and he was clear-eyed about why the price was what it was: there's always a tradeoff, and that's the tradeoff. But I've been doing this all my life, so it's nothing for me to do. He would work on it tomorrow, after his rounds. The weekend was over. First day back.
From there the accounting continued outward, unhurried. Fifteen dollars for infrastructure — not bad. A hundred fifty for Starlink, an excellent option where he lives and also an expensive one; he turned it over, considered a travel hotspot he already owns, acknowledged it isn't great, filed it as worth thinking about. Then the Jeep, which he has held onto this long and will not risk. I love it way too much. Three lines, three different verdicts. Each bill examined as something he had selected rather than something that had happened to him.
The day before, he had restarted his Upwork membership. He hadn't looked at anything on it yet. The plan was already formed: take the sections he'd built on his homepage and treat them as what they actually are — projects — and load them into a portfolio there. Think through what services to offer. Just got to make some money, and that's what I've done all my life. No reason it shouldn't keep working.
He named the surrounding conditions plainly. No money. Most people, he said, would panic over that, or judge themselves, or run all the distortion. He stated he had always known what he was capable of and was never worried about it. He had tried everything and couldn't get people to pay attention; the paths he wanted to pursue were blocked, for whatever reason. Freelancing was where he kept getting pushed back to — so this time he would approach it differently. Aligned work. And it wouldn't need to be much. He doesn't need much anymore to have actual forward motion.
He was almost tempted to build another fire. He knew he shouldn't — the day started in a few hours. He noted that he had always been nocturnal, all his life, so none of this was unusual. He said he'd figure it out. Then: guess I'll leave it there. The lights stayed on around the stone circle, and the forest held the rest of it.