So, I’ve lived in California for a week now; though, I’m not sure I should count the last couple days, as I’ve been in the hot, wet towel that is Miami.  My little roadtrip from Bethesda, MD to Reading, PA to State College, PA to West Orange, NJ to Boston, MA to Hoboken, NJ to New York, NY to Los Angeles, CA – with brief pitstops in Honesdale, PA and Long Island, NY – has been rather unstable since I finally left NY, and the northeast.  Upon finding a buyer for my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I left NYC and went to Phoenix.  There, I hung out with my buddy Jack and his friends before teaching training classes to a client of my not-quite-former-employer and finally getting to my cousin’s place in Santa Monica.

Besides the whole “packing up my life and moving it – and my debt – three thousand miles away from anywhere I’ve ever lived” thing, I’ve been having some psychological troubles for a few months.  I hate to boil these issues down to friggin politics, but this year is like none of my other 30.  Everything else this year seems to fail in distracting me from the Presidential election coming up in a month and a half.  And while I have never been very political – mostly due to my belief that a system that has devolved into a two-man game of Monopoly is far from “democracy”, when Mobil and Exxon donate billions of dollars to the Republican and Democratic candidate (for example) – I have a chilling feeling that this election will do more to alter this country forever than any other in my lifetime.  The man (of course) who wins (or “wins”) this year will most likely choose 4 (four!) Supreme Court Justices to replace departing Justices (I don’t want to overuse the quotation marks as a symbol of sarcasm/irony, but it was all I could do not to put these little “s around the word Justice).  I’m not sure enough light is being shed on that monumental possibility.

Between my references and my tone, I imagine it is not difficult to correctly guess who I am supporting… er, who I am not supporting.  To be honest, I’ve grown tired of the subject.  I know I am the author here, but the topic depresses me way too much to continue.  The fact is a man who cannot count to six if you spot him the even numbers has hired the folks responsible for counting the votes.  This is also a man who apparently ignored my cousin’s friend’s memos regarding the threat posed by North Korea for so long that this friend decided to quit trying and leave his job in the Administration.  For a few months, there has been no doubt in my mind that he would “win”.  Acceptance is something I must strive for.

Okay… the other thing that has been weighing on my mind – when I’m not desperately looking for a house or apartment for my new home – is how I should pilot my acting career… the main reason I decided to move away from the greatest city I’ve ever seen.  I came here with a heavy portion of reality, and I have been sobered even more by the sheer futility of full-time pursuit of a career in entertainment at the age of 31 even before my first audition (third overall in LA, but first since moving here).  So yesterday, while I was sitting in a ghetto little office space, helping some helpless suits price a Municipal Bond Deal for the county in Florida blamed for the atrocities in the last “election” (sorry), it hit me… I should write a script!  If nothing else, it will help me feel proactive, even during long lapses between auditions.  For some reason, “Garden State” is motivating me even more than the obvious standard, “Good Will Hunting”.

I think I have a story.  It’s about me.  I know me.  And I can nail the lead role

But more importantly, I think an interesting story can be told about the process by which a kid: born in Maryland of Indian parents, who studies math and earns his MBA while living (and more often, the last few years, dying) by Penn State and Pittsburgh Steeler Football and North Carolina Basketball, and then moves – inevitably, but finally – to NYC to work in a Financial Software company called DBC <breath> … decides to try his luck in Hollywood.  Rather than charting the progression over my 4.5 years in NYC, or my almost 10 years since college, or <gasp> my lifetime, a good storyteller could make a month, or a week, or a day (an hour?) pretty damn fascinating.  Unfortunately, as anyone who knows me, or even anyone who has read this far, can attest, I am not a good storyteller.

But “lord” knows… I’ll certainly try.

That’s all for now. 

Oh, if anyone reading this has an idea for a story, I promise to credit my sources.  Unless it’s really good.

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