The Doll House

Someone abandoned this house several years ago leaving behind nothing but bags of garbage, some broken furniture (there's a dresser that is literally broken down to a pile of boards!), and the 15 dolls that I found (not all are shown online yet, they will be added as I get the photos scanned). I'm always curious why a house is totally abandoned instead of being sold to someone who will live in it, rent it out, or tear it down and build something else. This one and its land were for sale, but it had been empty a long time before it went on the market. The dolls, to me, are evidence of a sad story in some family's life. What little girl would leave all her dolls, her childhood friends, behind to rot away? Something terrible must have happened. I'm not trying to find out or reconstruct what caused the dolls to be there, that would be impossible.

I'm looking at how the dolls have coped with their abandonment and being forgotten by the child(ren) who once played with them. Loneliness is a part of my life. I have been alone all of my life, with no friends at all until I was in college and no love, ever. I have never been able to form relationships with women. In my adult years I have asked out more than 200 girls, every one of which turned me down, many with quite shocking cruelty. The few women I have dated, like my son's mentally ill mother, asked me out. None of them, except my son's mother, dated me longer than a month. My son's mother admitted to me that she used me to have a kid because she figured I was a "Nice guy" who would support the kid financially. She didn't want me at all. So, I no longer date anymore....I see couples together when my son and I go shopping or to restaurants, and I cannot help but think how foreign a concept it is to me that someone would be seen with me in public, or would hold my hand. I do have a small number of friends now, most badly messed up for similar reasons.

The dolls have found, in my story for them, friendship and family..love...even in bad times when things are bleak...what I have never known, and never can.

Update: I found the house in October of 2009, and the house was demolished at the beginning of May, 2010. I have more than 20 rolls of film that I have exposed at the Doll House in the last few months before it was demolished that I need to edit and scan to complete my telling of the Dolls' story. Keep checking back throughout the summer and check my Blog or my Facebook page for updates as new images are added, and the story's telling moves toward the conclusion.