Reflections

today i submitted my 100th entry for the HGTV Dream Home 2019. what a journey it has been. it's wild to think about how i've entered this sweepstakes more times than i've brushed my teeth in 2019. i also can't believe it was 50 days ago when i threw my hat into the ring for the first time. it seems like these months have come and gone with the blink of an eye, but such is the way life goes as we get older.

doing anything for fifty days straight is not easy. after a certain amount of time it transforms from a mere task that needs to be completed each day, to something more concrete. it becomes a part of your life. it defines you. but that's not to say it gets easy. it drains me sometimes to sit in front of this screen, day after day, and post about the rustic retreat in whitefish montana. but i have an obligation to my readers to create content. this is the life i've chosen for myself for the time being.

during these days i have become become intimately familiar the Home, as one would with any subject they devote daily, unceasing attention to. i've imagined myself basking in the cedar hot tub, watching movies in the great room once i replace the moose head with a television, reading a book in the lodge room, sleeping off a hangover in the master bedroom. i've thought about what items would go in each drawer in the bathroom vanity. i've considered how i'll arrange my clothes in the walk-in closet. come march, i know i'll be announced as the winner because the house is already mine.

i will leave you with a passage from the novel a naked singularity by sergio de la plava.

"What happens when two people become friends Casi? I say that at least a part of what happens is that the two people become more real to each other. In a sense each feels that the other has become more of a human being. Anyone would agree with that but how does this happen? How does someone go from being a collection of flesh and bone who generally occupies the same space as us to being a real person who has an inner life that we, on some level, care about. Well I think the principal way this happens is through speech and language. After all, we can see the same person every day for years but if we've never heard them speak I maintain that if properly confronted we'd be hard-pressed to even think of them as human and we certainly wouldn't consider them friends. That sounds odd I know, but have you ever been in a room full of complete strangers who weren't talking? Did you ever then have a fleeting thought or feeling that maybe they didn't really exist at all the way you exist? On the other hand, people actualize through speaking. Actors know this. How many lines? they ask when considering a part, not how much face time. Hostages talk to their tormenters in the hopes of becoming more human and therefore harder to kill. These people seem to realize that the more we hear someone talk in a variety of situations the closer we become to them, the more real they become to us. Their speaking makes is harder to ignore their status as actual people with inner lives like ours. So why is that? The answer is probably obvious but I don't know what it is. Nevertheless, and more importantly, I'm going to make this happen in the context of The Honeymooners. Sure I've seen all these episodes before but half-hours at a time and diffused among all this other stimuli. This time, however, I'm going to be running these episodes in a constant loop. I won't move a muscle while they play. There will be no commercials. The result is that over time Ralph Kramden and to a lesser extent the others will begin to seem, no, will in fact become, more and more real."

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total entries: 100