Glenn Weldon

Some people watched Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse and saw a shattering chronicle of the descent into madness.

I saw a vocational training video.

Every so often an abandoned lighthouse comes up on Zillow and I'm the guy who posts it to the group chat and tries to convince my friends that we could all pitch in and make this happen.

It will never happen for me because my friends are no fun at all.

But who did make it happen are the folks at Project Lighthouse on YouTube and on Instagram.

They are the underscore lighthouse underscore centers.

This is a father and son who are restoring a decommissioned wolf trap lighthouse in the middle of the southern Chesapeake Bay.

They're also doing one farther north.

Both of those lighthouses are ones that I sent around to my friends.

I still have their listings in my phone.

And I envy these guys so much.

Less so now that I see how much work is involved, which is a tremendous lot.

But, you know, whenever a post of theirs turns up in my feed, my black desiccated husk of a heart skips a beat.

I become a romantic for like a brief two minute window.

The content isn't particularly romantic.

Of course, it's just, you know, property renovation content.

I have consumed so much more paint stripping content than I thought I ever would in my life.

And my algorithm doesn't know what to make of that because my algorithm is just a steady stream of like

Fitness Gays and Drag Queens and Tolkien Deep Dives.

And then there's these two guys celebrating because they've just installed a door.