Ask any writer with an ounce of respect for the craft what the hardest part of being a writer is, and they’ll probably tell you, “Sitting down to actually write.” Some of them will even follow up with, “I know, how cliche, right?” before getting back to Facebook or looking at Internet pornography. Writers are told at all cost to avoid cliches while becoming living, breathing cliches themselves because someone once said, “The hardest part about writing is sitting down to write,” and we believed them.

I might tell you the hardest part about being a writer is being a writer. If history proves anything, the life of a writer is a constant struggle. A struggle to get published. A struggle to find work. A struggle to get our prose read by someone other than our wives and mothers. We go from clinically depressed and self-loathing to invincible and high-as-an-addict twelve times a day. We face constant rejection and feelings of inadequacy.

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Last week on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, I encountered a man who looked like one might expect Santa Claus to present himself if he’d been kicked out of the North Pole, mugged in a back alley, and ate nothing but donuts and diet coke since learning how to chew. I sat idling in my car at a stoplight. He sat idling in a broken-down electric wheelchair, his stomach and beard spilling forth over his lap. In his hands, a half-chewed cup he held out to every pedestrian on the sidewalk within poking distance of his cane. He kept yelling, “Quarters! Quarters! Do you have any quarters! Any extra quarters?”

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I no longer know what it means to be a Christian.

While everyone, everywhere else was going to church this past Easter Sunday, I intended to stay in bed eating marshmallow Peeps, and perhaps starting work on my new screenplay idea starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Franco, and Ryan Gosling. I could have finished it that afternoon too. My pitch is the three of them standing around, dressed well, smoking cigarettes, and squinting. People will tell you to write what you yourself would read or watch. I’d watch that.

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Note: The following is my submission to Trifecta’s weekly one-word prompt where the writer is asked to use the word in its third definition, in a 33 to 333 word response. This week’s word is brain.

brain (noun) 3: something that performs the functions of a brain; especially an automatic device (as a computer) for control or computation

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“This isn’t going to hurt a bit,” he lied.

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I have recently and rather unintentionally fallen into a sabbatical regarding writing about my life and my faith in intelligent design, immaculate conception, Bigfoot, and his Arctic cousin Sasquatch. Please don’t be alarmed. This is not a cry for help. I am not depressed. My faith is not in crisis. However, my ability to write about it currently is. I am unable to produce the voice you are looking for without sounding tired and worn out. Even writing fiction, which I hold dearest to my heart, makes me queasy and sea sick upon this unsinkable Titanic that is the Internet. So I wouldn’t read this if I were you.

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A few weeks ago I crossed paths with an older homeless man wearing headphones and a skull cap. He looked like Morgan Freeman without the questionable earring and black glove, or the dignified gray in his beard. This caused me to stumble before him as I surreptitiously tried to decide if Mr. Freeman was so bored with fame and fortune, he spends his Saturday afternoons as a homeless man counting change. (In which case, I had my phone out prepared to snap a photo and contact TMZ. Hello rent check.) Or if this was, in fact, just another homeless man counting the last of his change to buy lunch.

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This is the story of how I tend to be the most ungrateful human being on the planet, and a young guy named Josh.

I wake up every morning, my head protected from the rain and my body protected from the cold outside because of the roof I sleep under. When I wake up, I wake up warm and rested because of the 350 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets burying me into a deep sleep each and every night. Soon after being awakened by my cellphone that conveniently doubles as an alarm, which also functions as a camera and a computer and a GPS, I walk to the bathroom on my well-functioning feet to relieve my healthy bladder.

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A lesson in grace: A homeless man charges up to you while you’re on the phone, asks if you’re mocking him, informs you how “fucking good it’s going to feel to kill you right here on the sidewalk,” (that happened sooner than you expected, huh?) then spits in your face for being on the aforementioned phone while in his presence. Tell him you love him, or go Jason Bourne on his face and kick his teeth in?

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As a writer, it’s my job to tell stories. Make It MAD is about storytelling. It was the story of my life as a single man without a job and without a home living in LA trying to find his faith. I set out across the country to search for it, and for yours. I never started this blog because I had the answers. I started this blog because I was looking for them. And I didn’t want to do it alone.

I told stories of my adventures, and stories inspired by my adventures.

Today, however, is a different story.

This is the story of Randle. A failed actor who can’t hold down a steady job, is in a relationship he can’t keep track of, and at the age of 28, has just met his dead father for the very first time.

I’ve considered this the adventure of a lifetime, a road sign along the way to the truth, the art of losing myself.

I never meant it to be the answer, just a great place to start looking.

Because I don’t know what you have been through.

And I don’t know where you’re going.

But I know sometimes faith can be a rope that hurts to hold. And I want to tell you, “Don’t let go.”

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