I ain't Dead Yet

Sometimes I think my favorite part of writing something is in thinking of what to call it exactly, but of course I put the title at the beginning and then hope that the words some of which I've thought out in my head already will make sense to fit them. At least that's what I'm doing now.

I guess everyone was sort of alarmed by my last blog. Shame on me for putting something so stillborn into the world without explaining how that sort of thing has happened before and I'm used to it.

Those rages of my roomates really remind of the ones my father used to have, except without the hint of violence in his voice, of the feeling that he was being split apart at the inside.

So. Maybe its my fault for not writing more. Everyone always says what a great writer I am. I don't know. Maybe I would be if I wrote more. But there's the rub. Great writers write. Other people just doodle and dawdle.

There's actually been a lot of terrible things that have happened to me in the just over 2 years time since I moved to New York. I've had roommates steal thousands of dollars from me. I had my car broken into in Harlem. I had a skitzo roommate almost kill himself when I lived in the East Village for a month. 2 weeks later the cops dragged him away as he was singing loudly to the whole neighborhood. 2 days after that, the leaseholder, a crack addict, rented the apartment out from under us (there was another roommate as well who was caught in this crazy scheme) and gave control of it to a cross dresser who promptly came in with an equally discomforting "other" in black leather, sat on the couch and asked when we were leaving. In an hour the locks had been changed.

I fell madly in love with a girl from church for about a week in a mostly email relationship, culminating the next Sunday when I went to church with her, her sister and her roommate followed by an afternoon at the Moma where during lunch at the Moma cafe my Southern eating habits were dismissed with a remark about meat and potatoes. 2 days later she told me couldn't date artists anymore because she wanted someone who could pay her way in life and provide her with a child and a stable enough income to move somewhere with a nice view of Central Park.

I walked the streets of Manhattan for nearly 8 hours a day for most of my first 2 months looking for restaurant work, and when I found it. I was fired in 3 weeks. Not to mention the time I was fired before I was actually hired due to being late for the training which was a week after I was offered employment. And the third restaurant was Mediterranean and didn't have enough business to keep me on for more than a week before letting me go. I admit that pacing around in an empty restaurant for 6 hours a day is enough to drive anyone bonkers.

In the meantime my credit cards were being put through the wringer. I was too scared to make a balance sheet or look at how much I owed. All I kept thinking for months on end was how I needed to find stability.

I've just got to get a job I told myself. Then I can start auditioning and taking classes and meeting people and getting in the movies.

Then there was the time a whole suitcase of my pants was stolen right next to my car at 7 in the morning in Brooklyn.

The only friend I knew here, a hipster who used to live in Virginia, abandoned me after a week or so. I suspect because I didn't do any drugs with him, which I freely admit was because I was convinced I would have a job at any moment which might require a drug test, and I couldn't possibly sabotage my chances over something so trivial.

And I'm just not as good at making friends here. I mean real friends. I have a lot of friends that I've eaten chips with, that I've sang praise and worship songs, but not a lot of friends that I can just call up and hang out with. You know, nothing normal like "Hey Tom it's Josh. Do you wanna go out and get a sandwich or something?"

Maybe no one has time for that sort of thing here, although I suspect there is a secret underground cult which may engage in this bizarre type of behavior although I have yet to witness it personally.

And to think that my own father was worried that I would fall into homosexual behavior by moving here and hanging out with the theater crowd which he quite rightly as it turns out viewed as being full of men that like men. When he said this to me, I made a joke to him which either he didn't fully appreciate or it caught him off guard. "Dad" I told him. "I haven't really engaged in any heterosexual activity"

Wow were my parents scared. They still are. They would call every day if I let them. Now it's only five times a week. Everyone prays for me back home. I'm glad. I probably couldn't sustain myself without it. Jesus loves me. I heart him back.

And now I'm living with a crazy delusional, paranoid, preachy, depressed, loudmouth old man of a roommate who won't ever shut up for anyone. I have to address him whenever he comes in and even get up from the computer lest he get into some twitter about something I didn't do like the dishes or how there's a faint odor in the house which couldn't possibly come from his ornery cat that drags its cat litter everywhere including the bathroom which still has pieces of glass in it somehow when I scrub the floors.

I still call my old roommate Mario sometimes and remind him that he owes me 1300 dollars. I'm sure I'll never see that money but it sure would be nice if I did. Mario never answers the phone or calls back in the last ohhhh year or so, but just the fact that his answering machine still has his voice on it gives me comfort that he might turn his life around get an actual job being that he's 44 years old, not an artist and must at one point have had some job training or some skill which would enable him to do something more besides cry about his life and yell at his mother on the telephone about how she was never there for him because she used to not pick him up from school on time.

I could go on and on and on. Maybe I'll start to write more about the mundane existence of every day life here and how you have to grab the bull by the horns or get run over by it. That's a euphamism for life by the way.

I'm livin it. And for under 600 a month to live in the city that never sleeps fifteen minutes from Times Square as opposed to 45 minutes or so I can put up with a lot. I hope this impresses all the Josh fans out there because it sure impressed the heck out of me. Maybe I'll finally put some action behind my words.

God I hope so.

Look for me as George Bush next month in a play.