Dr. Marc Abrams, image: LAist Featured Photos flickr pool
Anyone who has joined one of our Big Parade practice walks in Silverlake – or who has done any walking in LA’s most on-foot friendly neighborhood at all – probably noticed Dr. Marc Abrams, the intent, sinewy, shirtless pedestrian pushing forward on what seemed to be endless loops around the reservoir and Sunset Boulevard, almost always alone, except for the newspapers he carried. Yesterday afternoon, the Los Angeles Fire Department Twitter feed posted an alert that a body was found in a hot tub at Abrams’ address on Moreno Drive. (I recognized the house number because I used to live next door.) This morning, the Los Angeles Times confirmed the news that the 58-year-old “Doc” had died. No cause has been announced.
I didn’t know Doc well, even though I was his neighbor for two years, and that’s part of the quintessence, I suppose: his walking – and life – was solitary, and not really about sharing (though for a while, in the late part of the last decade, I saw him actually running with a beautiful, tall African-American woman. The grimace he usually wore was gone; he was smiling, instead. But then, the girl was no longer there, and he returned to routine.) What Doc did sat somewhere in between the isolation purposely sought by solo wilderness adventurers, and the involuntary – but now organic – isolation of Southern California’s motorized way of life, as we travel, sealed behind windshields, isolated and stretched tight for hours on end, just as the Walking Man moved tautly and continuously, shielded by his Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
The Big Parade is organizing a memorial retracing of Doc’s 15-mile route; we’re setting a tentative date for late August. If you know Marc’s exact route, please let us know. (There were lots of articles written about Marc over the years. Here’s a good one from the LA Weekly, 2009.)
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
