Current mood:

hopeful

Someone Else's Ear
I got drunk again. Stumbled outside the Teen Center. Nearly got run over by some asshole.

Turned out that some asshole was Hank. He seems me fallen from grace, dirty, scruffy... He wants to have a man to man chat. And I figure, well, what have I got to lose?

So we sit down. And he tells me about where he came from. The carefree lifestyle. The wife. The kids. The cheating. The divorce. The amazing world adventures...

And as he's talking, as I'm watching his mouth move up and down on that puffy, middle-aged face, two things occur to me:

A - this guy's adolescence and young adulthood... Sounds a lot like mine.

B - He's a pathetic old windbag, clinging to girls half his age, with no real sense of direction or ...

I don't want to be that. I can't be that. If I just run after one skirt and another, leaving behind whatever family I might find, alone and hated by my children... I -

I made a decision. I got back to my place, I wrote a check to my landlord for the next month's rent with a note saying that I was vacating my apartment. I packed some books, some CDs, and a bunch of clothes.

In a few minutes, I'm going to take this all out to the car, throw it in the back, and say goodbye to Los Angeles, hello to the open road. I've had it too easy. Time to live life a little harder, meet some people, learn some trades.

Got 23 bucks in my pocket and a pre-paid cell with 120 minutes on it. I'll be in touch... someday when I've learned who Parker Abrams really is.


Damn, this is hard. I've been writing Parker Abrams, despicable lothario, for about... 7.5 months now. And it's been great. It really became an experience for me as a writer, living inside a single character's head, finding out what he wanted, why he wanted it...

He's an unsympathetic character in the extreme. He does awful things to good people, and it's not because he's evil (I've always referred to him as morally ambivalent), but because he's just that self-centered. I initially picked him because I felt there were no other characters, but I found, in him, a really satisfying experience as a writer. To take a character so unlikeable, and try to make him more human? That was great. I think I succeeded, but that's up to the reader to decide on their own, I think.

Not that I didn't like to get my licks in. Every time a comment said, "I hope Angel kills you," or "You're an asshole," part of me would go, "YES! Doing my job," and the other part would go, "HEY! That's not fair..." Still. I tripled the amount of broken noses, gave him some other, non-nasal severe beatings, had him turned into a watercooler and a rat, got him fired from his job, and had him slip into the abyss of booze and... well, booze.

I also gave him a girlfriend at one point, and showed the side of him that might come out again if finds even an ounce of maturity on his journey. Who knows? Maybe he'll change his name to Charlie and discover a UFO conspiracy or something.

It's been fantastic interacting with the Socks, being pummeled by the Socks, having sex with more Socks than, well, Parker probably would have if we hadn't brought him into the skewed Sockverse.

Maybe he'll pop up again someday. Keep your eye out. And remember, kids, having sex with the title character of a major cult television series and then dumping her? Has no statute of limitations for pain.