Today will mark 100,000 visitors to this Naked Man Project Blog since it began the beginning of January earlier this year.  I had turned off the counter to exclude myself and had set up spam filtration not to inflate the numbers.  This total is the two blogs combined since I have still continued the original blog on Blogger because there seems to be a lot of foreign visitors who are using translators on that site.  Recently there have been about 500 followers per day.  I am a bit awestruck to reach such a number and I am honored that so many people have followed this project.  Many of you have become friends on my Facebook page and I am amazed by the diversity of people who have connected to me over the year.

I feel a lot of emotions beginning to overwhelm me now that I am in the final week of the project.  I now have models that are becoming reluctant to be shown in the project because it has grown so much and suddenly when their names are Googled it leads to this project and some of them are reluctant to have this much exposure, so to speak.  We are a very small community that typically is not open about such things.  And I doubt greater Missoula has much knowledge the project even exits.  I know at UPS, nobody is aware of its creation and what I have been doing, so in an odd sense it still remains a secret.  Most of my family is not on Facebook and none of them are followers either, in fact most every one that surrounds my immediate world is completely oblivious to my undertaking, or has not mentioned anything.  I feel like I should have a celebration to have accomplished this project, but there is no one around me to share that celebration.  It now exists in a strange vacuum on the Internet and I am honored to have shared it with those of you who follow it.  You see in my world the naked man is still taboo, physically and emotionally.  We are still a civilization here that becomes uncomfortable with the expose of nudity, and equally so about not expressing our feelings, personal thoughts, emotions, and especially anything to do with homosexuality.  To Montana this project is foreign and in a sense so far ahead of it’s time.  Yet we exist on the Internet, sharing our daily activities and images through all the social networking in many ways trivializing our lives for all to see.  Does everyone need to know the daily details of our existence?  I have tired to approach this project on a broader scope and tried to create a vision of my time.  Writing about issues we are all dealing with, well not all, people more like me, stuck in a places more like mine, struggling with identity, fear of creation in an absence of beauty.  We live in a turbulent time of great uncertainty where day-to-day life is still a struggle.  Where dreams begin to fade into a dreary escapism as we grow further and further from our true nature or sense of self.  Has the world always been this way or am I just now paying attention?

This year has been a tremendous amount of work and I feel weary and tired.  I have literally taken a year off with great sacrifice for its completion.  It will be good to put my focus on others aspects of my life that have been neglected through out the course of the year.  My focus now begins to turn outward toward those what surround me, but now with a greater awareness and appreciation for what I have become through the process of this evolution.