!*&#$^@&*^$*@!!!

If anybody has a genuine, cat-friendly live/work loft for rent for $1500 or less in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area of Brooklyn, preferably shared with other cool, serious, friendly artist or healer-type people over the age of 30, I am officially desperate.

Oh God, what are these people THINKING?!!!!

First the guy didn't return my phone calls. Then he finally did, but turned down a free massage in an air-conditioned room. Bad signs. Went anyway, of course.

Yes, it is "the most beautiful loft in Williamsburg," uh-huh, absolutely. Gothic vaulted ceilings, heavy metal doors three times the normal width, floor-to-ceiling windows, polished and stained concrete floors. Claw-foot bathtub. Marble columns. Lots of marble, in fact. Including in the BED. And the kitchen table. And the statues of sylphs lit from within on either side of the blacklit stage with the disco ball on the floor. Wood panelling, too. Custom-built wood panelling with sixteen different antique cameras set into it. Gold and silver faux finishing. Stone caryatid faces. Eery green and blue liquid glass lamps glowing out of the blackness, underscored by a long blue neon tube. Long, low curlicued benches. Heavy hanging drapes. Glass bricks, malachite column, pink Formica cabinets in flourishing curves.

CREEPY CREEPY CREEPY CREEPY CREEPY.

Then, of course, the rent. Fifteen hundred a month for one room, three thousand for two. Not that this would be offered to me, at any rate, because nobody is living or working in this 'live/work' mausoleum, nobody who paints big glorious messy oil paintings and cooks sloppy vegetarian Indian food for normal wholesome people and grows gargantuan houseplants and has a few too many cats. Nobody healthy like me.

The guy SAYS he's moving to Los Angeles, says he's taking the furniture with him, but I don't believe him. I don't think he's ready to let go; I think he wants to charge an obscene amount of rent to some other anal-retentive queer boy who will maintain it as a museum to Gothic kinkiness. At any rate, the creepiness has soaked into the very bones of the space. I could not FATHOM myself moving into it.

I also do not know what this guy is thinking, interviewing people individually for a space that MUST be shared by at least three people.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. In one week I will be officially without a source of income, isolated from the community I've spent the last year and a half immersed in, devastatingly heartbroken. I am beyond depression.