#72 👓 FAILURE, plus the opening and closing of a home 🚪
In brief 🩲
- Journal: The interstitial, life-and-death dramas of an open home
- Practical: Failure is an option
- Read: Framed, even more thoroughly than before
- Art: Snails, mutations, immaculate poise
From the journal 📖
We’re selling our house, which is a stressful form of theatre. It’s not just the pressure of maintaining this mirage: our home as sanctum of tranquility, nexus of utility. It’s the organisation and cleaning required to sustain such artifice.
Each Sunday we stage our home, accentuating the qualities we assume viewers might desire for themselves. If these viewers were to buy our house, we suggest to them: You, too, may fan out your magazines on a minimalist side table free of clutter, with a bronze bull paper weight rested on top at a jaunty angle. You, too, may live an erudite existence packed tightly with books perfectly classified, spines all aligned, with pages magically immune to dust. You, too, may walk the hallways and rooms unimpeded by shoes, or clothes lying around – in various stages of dirty, clean or some kind of undefined in-between – for all clothing in this home is clean and put away all the time. You, too, may walk the grounds where the grass is forever clipped and edged at a sharp right angle. This is the life you may inherit. Just buy this house, and this is the life that comes with it.
Each open home is a mere thirty minutes of theatre. This belies hours of tidying, cleaning and organising backstage. This thirty minutes dares not reveal boxes hustled into the garage, paraphernalia stuffed under beds and into wardrobes, dirty or wet laundry shoved into baskets and driven off with us in the car. Each open home equals an entire morning of my wife and I power-cleaning like it’s a competitive sport.