Category Archives: Writings

Anything written that is not directly related to the blog. (E.g. Fiction, Essays, ect.)

Review: Colin Frangicetto’s “My Brother’s Ears / My Sister’s Eyes”

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From guitarist Colin Frangicetto comes “My Brother’s Ears / My Sister’s Eyes,” a ten song album released under the moniker “Psychic Babble”.


The music combines one part melancholy with two parts eerie, and the haunting, echoing vocals leave the listener reaching for something by which to balance themselves, yet enjoying the confusion all the while.

Multi-part harmonies and fluid guitar work come through on all the tracks, and are particularly impressive on track five, “You Said It”. The driving drum beat, sliding bass guitar, and backup vocals move the album along quite nicely and remind the audience that, while the immanently singable softer songs make up the majority of the record, there is a strong backbone to Frangicetto’s compositions. Right in the middle of the album, “You Said It” spurs the album along firmly, while retaining many stylistic similarities to the other pieces, and thus creating a very coherent whole. This ability to write music in a variety of flavors while using repeat ingredients is what we come to know as character, and is rare indeed, as many musicians are ultimately singular in their sound.

Mournful as Frangicetto’s music seems, there are undertones of hopefulness and lightheartedness, or perhaps awe and adventure. With an almost child-like sense of wonder, songs like “Nothing Familiar” and “Let Me Change” remind one of the fantastic and bizarre – a trait common in the music of Frangicetto’s most well known group, Circa Survive.

Drawing from moods of the alternative, experimental, and folk variety, “My Brother’s Ears / My Sister’s Eyes” is quite a creation to behold. As track one (“Five Fold Kiss (Don’t Sleep)”) suggests, many listeners may be left conscious through the late hours of their days, dazed in the wake of Frangicetto’s new album, a work reminiscent of the best kinds of modern music.

Find Psychic Babble on facebook HERE.

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Ficly: Erica and the Bear

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Ficly about a woman and a moment of existentialism that might have cost her.


Erica and the Bear

Erica turned from the window to look at the bear through the fog.

The house was caught in a perpetual gloom, every corner darker than the last, and the only light seemed to be the ultra-pale blue that slid through the think murky windows to spill across the floor and walls. She was in the kitchen, the sink on, splashing about the dirtied dishes from her solitary dinner the night before.

Candlesticks on the table, two places set, but she ate alone.

And now, her back to the sink and the rain outside, she looked across the wood floors that moaned under each step, and out to the back door. The mahogany paneling on the walls showed a silvery hue in the daylight, which felt more like moonlight in the weather.

A cool, misty chill crept across the back of her neck. The animal meandered about the yard for a while, its unkempt fur matted with mud and water. Small eyes recessed in its thick skull watched her occasionally.

She might have closed the screen door, for that was all that remained in the doorway of the old house, but something seemed so docile about the creature. She hesitated to obstruct her view of its magnificence. Even in the damp air, out in the wet grass of the field-like lawn that lay beyond the porch, this bear commanded her awe.

It snorted and growled, and eventually found the courage to enter the house, lumbering as was its way.

Some of those who knew her say they can still hear her screams when they close their eyes, but Erica lives in the south-land now. When people stop and point at what is left of her, others tell them to hush, and that it was a landmine or an accident of some sort. She is treated as a hero.

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Poem: Might Have Been a Friend in the End

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I wrote this today. Surprising uninspired by anything in my life. Enjoy!

Might Have Been a Friend in the End

Kid got lucky,
in those first few years,
played some songs,
we bought him a few beers.

One night around Jimmy the keep,
we listened and thought,
about where the Kid was,
and the life he had bought.

Cause one night he packed up and left,
down a one way street,
somewhere in Harlem,
Jimmy, Fekman, and I, still tapping our feet.

Found something better,
on the other side,
he must have thought,
stick on the metal of ride.

The band spend some time on the road,
and we watched him get a little lost,
he’d never call, not his thing, or ours for that matter.
We were the old shoe that he tossed.

We were proud,
like three men watching someone
we never knew but cared about,
out in the world having some fun.

After a while,
got wind of the next big thing.
Skipped one of his albums,
and gave my girl a ring.

There were other things on my mind
for a while, and the lights on the Kid’s stage had to dim.
And if he had forgotten from where he came,
then where he came from was just eventually going to forget him.

No one blamed him,
he had things he wanted to do,
and when he left home,
it was a few days before any one knew.

With friends like us,
it’s no wonder he left.
I just hope he never thought,
that to his music, I was deaf.

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Ficly: Shell of a Man

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There’s… there’s just no excuse for this one. I kid. I actually like it. Let me know what you think.

He almost slipped on the shampoo that spilled to the suctioned rubber mat on the shower floor. When he caught himself before chipping a tooth, he clutched the handle on the wall and sighed deep relief, looking down at the drain as the spout battered the back of his head and the water dripped off his eyelids and nose and lips. Eventually he convinced himself to shut off the water and step out. In the steamy bathroom, he looked at his face. This was sixty-five. This was what he had become. He looked at his stomach. Loose skin grinning through his shreds of youth. He looked at the back of his hands.

He ought to cut his nails.

He knew he was getting older. His house looked like the house his parents used to own in Miami, because the nail clipper, like everything else, was exactly where he expected it to be. Next to the bottle of light-green toothpaste in the medicine cabinet with the sliding mirror doors that took a good shove to open.

Even his toilet had a furry pink slip-cover which greeted his rear when he sat down. ‘Christ,’ he thought. ‘This bathroom could be blue. It could be anything but this pepto-bismal pink.’ The wall paper was coming off at every corner.

He clipped one nail.

Then another.

His right hand first. Started on his second. When he got to his left ring finger he slipped and cut his finger tip. The clipper was dropped and he gripped his finger prematurely before the pain set in.

And he waited. Waited for the shock, the sting, a spot of blood. But none came.

Eventually he let go of his hand and looked. It was strange. A bit of skin was certainly missing, but it didn’t seem like there was anything on the other side. Just a kind of… hollowness.

He pressed and prodded, and eventually the edges of the hole chipped and the opening widened and he was able to slide one finger, into the other. His fingertip, the one was wasn’t bleeding- well, it was almost all gone. Little shards in the wastebasket.

Of course it was odd but there was something all too fascinating about it and he picked up the clipper and snipped away until the finger was entirely missing. Then he moved onto the others. He clipped a pinky-finger at the base and it dropped to the floor and shattered. Soon he had taken off the entire arm, clawing away at the facade-like flesh until naught but his shoulder remained. He had to find out what was inside him. Next he removed a leg, which toppled away from his hip, off the toilet, and disintegrated to dust across the expanse of tile. With one leg gone the other simply had to go, and soon after, his penis.

He beat his chest in to see if he had a heart, and he reached through the hole and felt around. There was nothing for a long while, but he knew there had to be… something. Anything.

And then someone from within grabbed his wrinkled hand. Their hand was soft and young, and out climbed a young boy. And the old man knew that the boy was him, and through parched lips he said, “Oh…”

“I knew you were in there somewhere.”

And the boy stood before him and hugged him, and the legless old man smiled, and broke into ten million pieces.

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Ficly: The Limitless Rise

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Kind of a weird situation to think about. Little kid doing drugs. Sorta out of the ordinary. The title is from a song by RUSH.

Zack Ritter shuffled some of the bottles of shampoo around and moved the bath toys onto the counter top, placing them strategically so that it wouldn’t appear as if they had been dumped up there haphazardly. He crawled in, under the sink, into the cabinet, watching not to strike his head on the piping as he had last time. He closed the door and smiled his boyish smile in the dark where no one could see him. His sister told him he was too fat to fit in that space and, while it was cramped, she was wrong. She made a point of refusing to check for him during their games of hide a seek as a matter of principle and, knowing this, it was the only place he would hide. Eventually she convinced herself that he really couldn’t possibly be under there at all and would give up and get angry before even stepping into the bathroom.

He could spend an hour or two in there even if he knew his sister had long since stopped looking for him, and he would play with the bottles on his lap in lieu of the friends he didn’t have. The depth of the black never scared him because the space was small and the door was immediately in front of him. Occasionally he would grope for one of the aerosol bottles and spray it for a moment or two and inhale. Dizzy, he felt. It was a sensation of weightlessness, or no, of being in a limitless expanse of darkness. The sensation was heightened when he would use more than one can at a time, and it wasn’t long before he was begging his sister for any excuse to play hide and seek so he could breathe in the fumes again.

Every time he went under he would hold down the nozzle for just a moment longer than the previous time until he really felt as if he were falling, spinning, deeper and deeper into a hole from which he could never escape, but he loved it. It was sanctuary from the nasty lunch ladies and the other children at school. He was far away from everything else, and he fell asleep in that hole. Slowly, as if falling through an increasingly thick fog until he was completely underwater, a dark, cool water. And in the moment when he stopped breathing, nothing made any sense, and it didn’t have too.

His sister gave up looking for him, and when his mother panicked and called the police, the last place in the house that anyone checked was the cabinet under the sink.

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