What are you supossed to do when you're stranded, forgotten, just another brick in the wall? I wish someone would tell me because it's not very fun drownding in a sea of dispair. My name is Joshua Parker and I'm 24 years old. Let me explain myself, I am a starving musician just looking for some inspiration.
Nothing ever came easy for me, I grew up in a little cabin in the middle of nowhere Kansas with my cold-hearted father and a beat up 6 string guitar. My mother passed away when I was only 2 years old due to lung cancer. I don't remember much about her, my memory is quite faint. But one thing I'll never forget is that she was like an angel living in a country girl's body.
She came about my father at a bar. They were both fairly drunk and made some bad mistakes, I was one of those mistakes. after my mother got pregnant, my father forbid her from leaving him. He didn't want to raise me alone. To make sure she didn't go running off in the middle of the night, he locked her away in the basement and severly beat her. All I remember about that is laying in bed all night long, eyes wide open, listening to her agonizing pain.
I felt like the only way to let out my pain and anger was through writing music. So I would sit outside all day with my guitar (which my father won gambling and was decent enough to give it to me) and listen to the winds whistle and the gophers dig in the ground. I didn't know how to play, but I just began plucking strings and making sound.
As I grew older, I began to get very good at guitar. I started playing at the local bar when I was 13. There were only a total of 20 people in our town and most of which were spitting images of my father. Although I can say one thing, they were suckers for some good music. They would sit at the bar and listen to me play for hours and hours at a time. My father on the other hand though it was all just a bunch of worthless noise.
One day, my father walked down to the bar (not knowing I was playing at the time) to get a drink, or two, or five. Well when he saw me out in the spotlight with everyone applauding endlessly, he snapped. He always thought I wouldn't amount to anything in life, so when he realized that I was actually good at something he couldn't handle it. He walked out towards me, took my guitar and smashed it all over the wooden floor. Nobody could believe it, even I didn't know my father could be that cruel.
He thought he had had the last laugh, well he'd be wrong. Turns out, out of all the people watching me play, one of them was the owner of a record company visiting on buisness. He thought I was truely spectacular. I told him my painfull story and as the tears rolled down his cheek, he insisted that I come back with him to Los Angeles. Well that kicked off my career as a musician.
As I grew older, I began to wonder what ever became of my dead beat father. When I went back to visit ten years later, I asked a man working at the bar what happened to Collin Parker. He told me, "boy where have you been the last six years? He died, went out and hung himself. After his boy left he didn't know what to do with his life. I said, "thank you very much sir."
Well that's the story of how I barely grew up, made it big, and lost the little bit of family I actually had. I guess nothing really matters in the end, we only live to be faded away in the end.
