I slept with my trash inside the van last night. Heard a crash outside around 11pm and felt certain I'd see something on the game camera this morning. Not a single image. Nothing looks different outside either.
Tonight is our last night here. I wouldn't mind staying longer but I'm also looking forward to whatever's next. We'll probably stop briefly in Ouray on the way out, back to that meat shop, and there's a trading post Steven says is worth checking out. Then on to the hot springs in Ridgway.
Yesterday I worked on the video for a Hi-Fi Lonesome song called Driftin'. Used the drone footage from the Million Dollar Highway. When I stop and think about it, it was a day of shooting, about a day to make the song, and a day to edit the video. Three days of work for one piece. I enjoy the process and I'm learning a lot, particularly about video editing. Worked it from about 8am to 6:30pm. Took the night off from building a campfire.
Something unexpected happened. I was testing Substack to see if I could create posts visible only to logged-in subscribers. I turned on paid memberships to test the feature, thought I turned it back off, but apparently didn't. Two wonderful, generous people subscribed before I realized what was happening. J. and M., thank you if you're reading this. The support is meaningful. I have some runway, but this is the kind of support I'll likely need if this work is to be sustainable over the longer term. It's a labor of love and I just want to find a way to keep doing it.
I wasn't planning to turn on paid subscriptions for the foreseeable future, but now that it's happened I'm going to go with it. What this means today is that it's time to find the list of people who subscribed to my Ghost blog last year and let them know about the new platform. And to the people who paid for that blog: I'll always be grateful for those early supporters. They helped show me it's possible to do all of this. I'll be giving them lifetime subscriptions to the Substack for free.
I've been around the block enough times to know that the things that end up supporting me are usually not the things I'd expect. The typical pattern is that I'm pursuing my interests and creating things I love, and then something simple off to the side surprises me by generating some income. So I don't know if Substack will end up being the thing. It's more likely to be a thing. But the journal feels like the central pillar of this little world I'm building. Everything flows out from that.
I'm getting in the river today. The cold water is calling. It is a particular kind of mental training that builds exactly what I'll need to navigate this next season of my life. The mindset.