The journey videos

I started them on April 12, 2024. I told myself they were for my future kids.

I do not have kids.

Sit with how alone a man has to be before an imaginary audience is the warmest room available.

Around ninety of those videos exist and I have kept every one. They are not content. Nobody was watching, nobody was meant to be watching, and there is no version of me from that year that would have survived somebody watching.

The 420 credit score is in there, read out on camera like a weather report.

So is the morning my bank balance was eleven cents. Not a figure of speech. Eleven cents, while the software subscriptions that ran my business tried to charge me all day and failed, one after another, like a slow alarm going off in a house nobody was living in.

The Ferrari deal is in there too. Closed on a handshake on June 12, no contract, because that is how the man wanted to do it and I was flattered enough to agree. About 300 hours of work later, on July 29, it was cancelled by text message.

I am not naming him and he is not the lesson. The lesson is that I let being believed in stand in for being paid, and I did it because being believed in was rarer.

The Click money printer is in there. It worked. I want to say that clearly, because the failures in this stretch were not all incompetence. It genuinely printed money for exactly nine days around my thirty-first birthday, and then it stopped, and nine good days is its own particular kind of cruelty.

The phone getting cut off is in there.

And I kept recording through all of it, which I have never been able to fully explain. The closest I have come is this. That camera was the only thing left in my life that could take the entire story without needing me to be smaller for it.

I still want to reach back through the screen and put a hand on that guy's shoulder. I did something better than that. I kept his tapes.