Red's CD Project Story

Note: The Snakester and I have been working on a side project to create CDs for each other from music that we've picked up over the last couple of years. We decided to reveal the songs in a post. I've actually had the CDs made for about a week, but I've struggled finding a creative way to post them. The following sort of came to me when I sat down just to do a free writing. Sort of like Smoking Guns, I just started this without really knowing where it's going to end. But I thought it was interesting. For your information, I made two CDs with a total of 35 tracks, so this will obviously be and ongoing project for me. I'll probably try to do one once a week or so. I hope you enjoy.


“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.” – Stephen King from On Writing.


Disc 1
Track 1
When I Paint My Masterpiece
The Band
Greatest Hits

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble. Ancient footprints are everywhere...

Hal dropped the old wooden chest to the floor of his kitchen and left it sit. He walked over to the sink, grabbed a used cup from the counter and filled it half full with water. He drank it all down in three gulps. A window over the sink peaked out on the backyard, masked in dark except for for a few feet halfway back where the yard light reached over the garage. He didn't have to see to know that the early spring ground grass was still a burnt, dry yellow from the previous late summer, but that the soil under was saturated and soft.

Spinning away from the window, Hal watched the wooden chest. It was naturally a gray tone, but years of dust and dirt had stained it an even more dreary gray. Inlaid on the rounded top was an intricate design of a family crest. It featured a wolf rushing into a bush and hundreds of small birds fleeing in fear. Blood appeared to drip from the wolf's fangs.

Hal refilled the cup, the shake in his hand returning.

His father had told him the chest would be in the attic. That it was Hal's responsibility now. It was his turn. He didn't know what his babbling father, weary and demented from his long bout with Alzeihmer's disease, was talking about. But after his father's funeral, he climbed the stairs of his parents old farm house and found the trunk right where his near-crazed father had told him it would be.

Hal had not the guts to open the chest. The first time he touched it, he swore he heard a thousand voices filling the attic. They came in a symphony of sound so complex that he couldn't make it out. He only felt a sinister evil stir in his heart.

Now the trunk was sitting on his kitchen floor. After several minutes, he mustered the courage to open it.

Bending in front of it, he was overcome with a sense of dread, a sense that this was rite taken by hundreds before him. One that led to impending doom. The trunk was ancient – a relic of not one world's past, but many.

He pulled back the brass snap on the front and lifted. A million voices screamed in the stale air sealed inside releasing into the open atmosphere. Even the air can't stand being near this, he thought.

On top, an envelope sat with his name scribbled in his father's hand. He grabbed it quickly and shut the trunk without seeing anything else. He dragged out a chair from the table a few feet away and dropped down.


Disc 1
Track 2
Flirting with Time
Tom Petty
High Companion

I've done all that I can do, now it's up to you

Hal,

I write this because I have to. It's a letter we're all doomed to write before we're done. You are six months and a day old as I scribble this out. You're lying only a few feet away in you're crib napping when you probably should be awake. Your mother has ran to the store. I don't have much time to explain. But I don't need to. The chest speaks for itself. Inside, you'll get your answers. You'll find what you've been searching for your entire life.

Son, all men are destined for something. Each destiny balances out the great equation. This inevitably means that some men are destined for evil, for acts that ravage humanity. Our family has been fated for this from the beginning of time. The chest will show you that. Now, quickly put away this letter. Put the chest away for tonight and go to bed. Tomorrow, my son, tomorrow you find out more about destiny.

Yours,

Herman Glock, Jr.
October 31, 1981


Disc 1
Track 3
Wisemen
James Blunt
Back to Bedlam

Look who's alone now. It's not me. It's not me.

He replaced the glass of water with a bottle of beer. Actually, he replaced it with two beers – one for each hand. He handled each bottled by its cool, thin neck like he was trying to strangle the nectar inside out. The house was empty and cold. His wife, Mary, had moved out two months ago. They had only been married for two years.

He loved her. Loved her more than anything else, but his life was unsettled. He was restless and unbearable. He hated his job as a detective for the county police.

Three months into the marriage was the first time it happened. He was leaving for another long, boring day on the job. In Jacobs County nothing ever happened. Even when it did, there wasn't much detective work involved in finding out who done it. Criminals around here weren't smart. All he did was file papers and play solitaire on his computer. It frustrated him way beyond being able to stand it.

Mary hadn't woke up in time to pack his lunch. It didn't bother him that much, he rather liked picking up fast food. But when she staggered out from the bedroom into the kitchen, he backhanded her across the cheek. She fell into a ball on the floor, him standing over her too shocked to yell at her or apologize. He left and he pounded his fists into steering wheel when he got in his car.

That night he brought her flowers and begged forgiveness.

What he didn't want to admit was that he had felt better than he had in years the rest of the day. What he did became a habit. He pushed the acts like a user pushes an addiction until she had enough. She left him alone, moving back with her parents. He missed her terribly.


(To be continued)