Boulevard of nightmares

The 2005 Seattle Street of Dreams is within walking distance of my parents' house. We went there yesterday.

It is hard to articulate the garishness and gradiosity of those homes. My parents have a large 4bed/2.5bath home. There are rooms in it that are rarely used. It is more space than we ever needed. All of the street of dreams houses were at least 3 times as large as my parents and contained no more bedrooms. Who needs a massage room or three ovens or two kitchens or a flat screen TV built into the wall of every room?

There were some things that I did like, though. There was a bathtub with jacuzzi jets, a fireplace, and a flat screen TV with surround sound. I would no longer need to set up my laptop near the bathtub so I can watch movies in the tub. There was a home theater filled with rows of armchairs and couches, like a smaller, classy version of the Kennedy School. There were some great distressed wood desks. I wouldn't mind such things.

Probably the most frightening aspect of the tour was the other people wandering through the homes. Many had their digital cameras out, taking pictures of the things they wanted in the houses they were planning to build.

I can handle the Boulevard of Nightmares when it is a statistical outlier, but when there is the possibility of its garishness infecting all of the McMansions under construction, I am horrified.