If I Ever Lose My Faith

I've been looking for a new roommate for the past two months. The search has been a real challenge, with very few responses from craigslist and even fewer leads from friends and family. I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps my place, once an oasis of thrift nestled between three gentrified areas, has suddenly become expensive with the current economic downturn. If that's true, then the recession has hit me hard as well, to the turn of over a thousand dollars as I have to pay twice my portion of rent each month.

Every week a few people come by to look at the place. I greet them with a smile and give them the best sense of my personality I can. I'd've thought the place, its location and the roommate speak for themselves, but it's been difficult to find any real takers. I had one fellow genuinely interested, a 28-year-old medical imaging specialist named Darren, but I foolishly strung him along while looking for someone I thought would be a "better fit." No one with a spine waits forever.

Whenever I have a showing I clean up the place as best I can and then turn on Sting's "Ten Summoner's Tales" in my room. I turn the sound on my laptop low and keep the CD playing on random song order and I want potential roommates to get a sense of my musical taste and the vibe I consider ideal for being at home.

Potential roommates have never commented on it either way, but I'm convinced it helps my case. The real problem is when someone I have an appointment with flakes, or calls to say they've just placed a deposit on someplace else and won't be coming by after all. Suddenly the sad songs take on a poignant new meaning (Fields of Gold, Shape of My Heart), the uptempo pieces wax ironic (She's Too Good For Me, Saint Augustine in Hell) and the album's Epilogue ("They still know nothing 'bout me/still know nothing 'bout me...") acquires a strangely defiant tone.