Fiction: Preternatural

It’s not as if Frederick wasn’t proud of himself or what he’d accomplished, but accolades never suited him. You could call him A Great Lover or World’s Best Dad or Tri-State Wrestling Champ of the Years 1995, 1996, and 1997, and, looking in his eyes, tell him that the one record that his high school band released only on Maxell 60-minute cassette tapes, recorded on his Sony jambox, and duplicated on the drummer’s dad’s Very Expensive Please Be Very Careful No Wait Let Me Load That For You Pioneer Dual-Head cassette deck, during the winter of 1994-95, this record, now with the wow and flutter and wandering pitch of a decade-and-a-half of car stereo stopping, flipping, and brutal auto-reversing, this record, with it’s brittle, semi-translucent plastic shell and hand-written but xeroxed nonetheless album cover insert, is a Pristine Document Of Mid-90s High School Culture Without Par.

photo credit: ondressingup/Flickr.

You could say all of those things, and you’d think he’d blush or smile or play it off, or say Yeah I know, but there, in the living room of his home, surrounded by chipped Dura-Stay faux-wood-paneled wainscoting applied floor-to-ceiling, sitting on a tattered Lay-Z-Boy love seat that leaves only three feet for endtable and passage, Frederick barely blinks. He says, very slowly, with what seems like more deliberation than a human being of his accomplishments should, strictly speaking, require, something about how the idea of Capitalized Superlatives seem so juvenile as to cause acne upon thinking them.

Frederick’s skin is flawless.

As Frederick sits there, unblinking, you’ll notice how well his eyes pair with the rich oranges and deep browns — chocolate, you’ll think, everybody always thinks of chocolate, though it’s closer to espresso — of the Dura-Stay wood panels of his walls, and you’ll notice that they don’t quite share a fascination with your eyes, whether talking or listening, though for 15 seconds, before you notice this habit, Frederick will deliberately sustain contact, but with just your right eye. Sitting face to face, like this, across his coffee table, you crosslegs on the floor, that right eye contact is just enough shy of normal to make you feel uneasy, or would be, if he didn’t speak in such warmly hushed tones, as if every last phoneme was a potential bumper-sticker honor student, sent bittersweetly off to that first day of kindergarten.

And it’s these sounds, sent off with carefully packed peanut butter and jelly sandwich lunches, that tell you that while he is grateful for the committee’s recognition, no, he will not be accepting any grants for his ornithological research, which, once, the British newspaper, The Guardian, hailed as Revolutionary, that he is perfectly content to make due with what he can when he can, and to keep that as it is, though a new set of binoculars would be nice, seeing as he lost his in the divorce.

Of note: GettingDiscovered.net

When we were in college, my friend Matt and I would plot almost every day over coffee how to make money through ridiculous means. There were plans for ethanol plants, buying stocks on margins, and – most ridiculous of all – starting a small press.

Just look at him, scheming.

Our dreams of hand-stitched bindings and home-screenprinted covers have been left behind as I’ve moved 555 miles (almost exactly) away from his home in Muncie, Ind., but we haven’t left behind impractical get-rich-very-slowly schemes.

You see, Matt works retail, and I wait tables. But that’s not, exactly, what we do. I mean, it’s how we pay the bills, which, in turn, is how we keep our wives from strangling us in our sleep. Read the rest of this entry »

Nine Songs on BandCamp

I’ll be the first to admit it – I suck at teaser posts.

I was going to post the previous announcement, then the album cover the next day, and all that.

My problem is a simple one: I get so freaking excited about this thing, I can’t hold back.

What you’ll be listening to is the product of the last nine years. I’ve written a ton, and recorded a large handful of it. I used to think that this stuff was unusably flawed. The songs that I still like are the ones with mistakes in my face.

The same is true of music I listen to. The perfectly produced and performed stuff, like the Postal Service, always fades out over time in favor of things like Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted or Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand, that revel in error and the musicianship of actual humans.

In short, this record is a document testifying to the fact that I write what I’m interested in hearing. I hope you’ll be interested in it, too.

Nine Songs will be released tomorrow, but the whole thing’s up and ready for streaming at BandCamp right now. Tomorrow, you can download or buy.

Check it out; tell me what you think: