I was listening to that Vertical Horizon song on the way from work today. God, I love that song! There's something about "Everything You Want" that is so haunting to me. That was my Ellis song in 1999. Everytime I hear that song I think of him and I wonder why I didn't find him perfect, because he was pretty darn perfect, even more perfect than Brian. Brian had a hell of a temper and would have really hard to live with, him and his nasty tongue lashings, that Virgo shit coming out. But Ellis, he was easygoing and a Gemini, which meant like me he's an air sign.

I told a friend of mine on a plane coming back from Vegas that Ellis was just too perfect and I never had perfect before and it was so scary to think I could have it with him. Not that I don't think we wouldn't have had problems, he was kind of boring but boring in a good way, but with Ellis life would have been nice and easygoing and stress free. I'm sure he's married now. He was so cute and so nice and pretty well off too; any girl's dream come true. Guess not mine.

Anyway, I was listening to this song on the way home from work and I was thinking about my baseball story and it occured to me that my baseball dude guy has to fall in love with his father again. I mean, falling in love and falling out of love, is the same for men and women and I think a child and his or her parents.

Just think about it. You start out totally loving let's say your dad when you're young and then something happens along the way and all of a sudden, your dad becomes this total asshole. And you kind of go on from there thinking he's this total jerk until you get older and then something else happens and you find you want to make up with the guy. I think in order to do that, you're going to have to learn to love him again, not as his son or his daughter, or as a child loving their parent, but as an adult liking another adult. You're going to have to see him for all his faults and assholeness and you're going to have to like him despite all of it. But it's hard because you've still got years of hate and resentment. How do you get over that? How do you cross the huge gigundous gap that's not crept up between you and your dad? And then there's that little child inside of you that's still angry at dad.

How do you resolve all of that? Maybe that's what this screenplay is about for me. Resolving that gap. How do I get my baseball guy to rediscover and refall in love with his dad? I think the way he's going to have to do this is to grow up, to stop being a kid that was hurt all those years ago and become a man, trying to befriend another man.

I think about the words to this song by Vertical Horizon. "He is everything you want, he is everything you need, he is everything inside of you that you wish you could be. He says all the right things, at exactly the right time, but he means nothing to you and you don't know why." My baseball guy has to fall in love with his own dad. What a concept! It's weird, I think my baseball dude has to grow up in order to recover his love for his dad, but in doing so, he becomes a child again, maybe not an innocent child, but an older more wiser child. I'm not sure if this all makes sense, but I think this is what my baseball dude guy wants to do in my story and this was his way of telling me.

It's weird how you when you get older you can become friends with people who you know have qualities you don't necessarily like, but your friends with them anyway and you kind of just learn to live with their bad qualities. You take the bad with the good because you know the person is really nice underneath. But somehow, it's really hard to do the same thing with your mom and dad. It's really hard to take their bad qualities and their good qualities and then decide that they're good people anyway, never mind that they made your childhood and probably are continuing to make your life hell. Maybe it's hard to do with your parents because you have years and years of bad memories. Or maybe because they're your parents and you're like shocked that they were so mean to you because you think parents aren't suppose to behave that way.

If my baseball dude guy wants to fall in love with his dad, he's going to have to grow up pretty fast. I've only got 80 more pages till the end of the story.