Something I'd Prefer To Be None Of My Business.

Recently, I had my condo in Malibu, which overlooks the ocean, on the market for sale or lease.
Selling is much simpler.
Your only real concern is getting your price, and making sure that your prospective buyers pass their credit check.
After that, there's really no vested interest on your part about who these people are.
Leasing is a completely different matter.
You find yourself having to concern yourself with who these people are.
Would they be good tenants?
Would they wreck the place?
Would they skip out on you after only a few months of a year's lease?
(That last one actually happened to me.)
So all things being equal, you'd probably rather be in the world of selling rather than leasing.
The problem with selling is that you invariably are confronted with a bunch of insulting lowball offers.
Insulting to your wallet, anyway.
But with leasing you find yourself confronted with having to make moral judgments about people.
One such example occurred recently.
My condo has two bedrooms.
We were attempting to lease it furnished.
It would have been much easier that way.
We had a prospective tenant who wanted to lease it furnished.
A fairly young divorced single mother of two.
That's where it got a little complicated.
Her two kids were an eleven year old daughter, and a nine year old son.
Now, this second bedroom that we had contained one Queen-sized bed.
The master bedroom had one King-Sized bed.
And there was a long, comfortable couch in the living room.
The prospective tenant had no problem expressing the prospective sleeping arrangements.
She would have  the master bedroom with the King-Sized bed for herself, and the two kids, 9 and 11, of different genders, would share the Queen-Sized bed in the second bedroom.
No mention of anyone sleeping on the living room couch.
Certainly not the mother.
No mention of any potential psychological damage to the kids.
And it was as if she was dictating the terms.
It all seemed rather grotesque to me.
This created stability issues in my mind that wouldn't have concerned me if a sale was involved.
I got all of this from a phone call from our realtor, who felt the red flag going up.
The mother-of-two was in a position to fork over a significant deposit for the year's lease.
But still, I felt that I had been thrust into a position of dealing with, and making a moral judgment about something that was none of my beeswax.
Why do I have to be thrust into the role of King Solomon?
For a fairly large box of money.  That's why.
But I suppose that Judges are well-paid in general.
And I guess they wouldn't do it for free.
So it's just another thing I needn't bellyache about. But bellyache about it I eventually did.
And I bypassed the fairly large box of money.
If I had sold the place to her, she could have sold her kids into slavery for all I'd care.
Fortunately, we were bailed out by another set of prospective tenants.
A somewhat elderly German couple.
All they had was a dog.
And just as big a box of money.
And they signed a year's lease, and are currently living happily ever after.
At least for a year.\
And nobody really cares where the hell  the dog sleeps.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My books ,"Show Runner" and it's sequel, "Show Runner Two", can be found at the Amazon Kindle Store.
Along with the newer ones, "The Man Is Dead", and "Report Cards".
You can search by typing in my name, Cindy Williams, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd Couple, or Happy Days.
Check them out.
You don't need a Kindle machine to download them.
Just get the free app from Kindle, and they can be downloaded to an IPhone, IPad, or Blackberry.
The paperbacks, "Mark Rothman's Essays" and my new novel, "I'm Not Garbo" are not
e-books. But they are available for people without Kindle.
I have many readings and signings lined up for those, and the thing about Kindle is you can't sign one. If you'd like one of the paperbacks, personally autographed, contact me at macchus999@aol.com.
And now, we've got my reading of my "Laverne and Shirley Movie" screenplay on YouTube, and my 4-hour interview at the Television Academy's Emmy TV Legends Website.
Here's the link:  www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/mark-rothman
Add to this, my new Kickstarter project, "Another Network".  Please check it out at Kickstarter.com

*****