Ready Player Everyone — Chapter: Operator Error

The Cadillac went for twelve fifty.

That's the sentence. It took about four seconds to say out loud and I've been turning it over every since, because twelve hundred and fifty dollars is either nothing or everything depending entirely on where you're standing when you hear it. Standing where I am, it's a transmission's worth of breathing room and about three weeks of not flinching at the gas pump. Standing somewhere else, it's a nice dinner.

Same number. Different world. That's most of what this whole thing has been about.

Salvation Army comes Thursday for the furniture. Not selling it — giving it. There was a version of this where I left it all behind for the landlord to deal with, and I thought about that version for maybe an hour before I noticed what it actually was: spite, wearing the costume of not-caring. No hard feelings, Doug. Genuinely. The couch is going to a family who needs a couch, which is a better ending than the couch sitting in an empty room being evidence of something.

We're keeping the bed frame. Probably not the mattress. There's a whole philosophy of leaving somewhere in that sentence and I'm too tired to excavate it. U-Haul on Friday reserved for $79.00.

The new room in Dunnellon is furnished, which is the kind of grace you don't recognize as grace until you're standing in a living room deciding what a lifetime of stuff is actually for. Dunnellon's a short drive up 19. Or up 41. Depends on your perspective — which is a thing I'd say about the whole map at this point.

The van has been teaching me a lesson I keep refusing to learn. Three times now it hasn't started. Three times I've done the thing where the panic arrives before the diagnosis — where I'm already six moves ahead into what this costs and what this means and how does a man in a van get anywhere without the van — and three times, once I stopped, it started.

There's a procedure for a flooded engine. Foot flat on the floor, hold it, let the thing clear itself. I have never once used it. Not because I don't know it — I know it — but because knowing a procedure and running it while your chest is tight are two entirely separate skills. The engine was never the problem. The engine was fine. Every single time the engine was fine.

Two stall-outs in intersections, which is its own particular flavor of humbling — sitting there in the middle of a green light being a problem for everybody behind you. And then today we ran Courtney Campbell out to the boat ramp and back and it was perfect. Flawless. No hesitation, no acceleration issues, nothing. Just a van and a causeway and my own last name on the road signs the whole way out and the whole way back. You take the omens you're given.

Between the packing and the not-packing, I've had the carburetor off the generator. Four hundred watts of Jenkins GK2300i, and the whole fault is a jet the width of a pencil lead with varnish in it. That's the entire failure. Not the engine, not the magneto, not anything with dignity — a passage the size of a hair, clogged.

I spend my days doing the exact same thing to software. Something enormous doesn't work, and the cause is a passage the size of a hair with varnish in it, and the work is being patient enough to find it instead of buying a new generator.

I've been coding day and night. There may be a client coming — a real one, their own name on their own platform, the whole thing running underneath where nobody has to see my fingerprints on it. That's the goal. Not a monument. Plumbing. The kind of work where if I do it right, nobody ever thinks about me at all.

So: the furniture goes Friday, the van runs when I don't panic, the generator will run when I clean the jet, and there's a number in the bank that's either nothing or everything.

Ready Player Everyone was always about this part. Not the arrival. The packing. The part where you find out what you were actually carrying.

Most of it, it turns out, was couch.