January 30
This morning I found a handheld recording device left behind at the counter of the Mandarin King where I take my coffee most mornings. Instead of returning it, my voyeuristic prying nature overcame me and I was forced to secretly put it into my fanny pack. I casually paid, ate my fortune donut and eased out the door unnoticed. I rollerbladed as fast as I could to the boardwalk where I could sit in private amongst the philosophically hostile homeless disputing the beauty of the vast ocean and listen to whatever might be recorded. I rewound the tape to the beginning as I plugged in my headphones and pushed play. After a few minutes of what sounded like a granddaughter teaching her grandfather how to use the handheld device a clearing of an old smokers throat blasted my ears and his voice began. He took me on a grand tour of his life, beginning with his parents, his schooling during war time, exact sizes and shapes of girls he had kissed, and detailed accounts of various acts of male bravado. As he entered his twenties, it was becoming clear that he was interested in the fringe life as an artist, he explained how he had buried 100 plastic skeletons in the Mojave Desert so as to confuse future archaeologists. How museums should be taken over by terrorists, and forcefully turned into Food Banks one month and safe places for youthful drug exploration the next. As he hit age Eighty he gave exact details of how he was to be buried when he passed, the wood of his casket, “no nails! An escape hatch, and a playlist playing in headphones linked to a solar battery on the tombstone, just in case It somehow takes time to fully commit to dying, I am going to need music to ease the transition”.                                                                                                                                         Jeff Peters              

This morning I found a handheld recording device left behind at the counter of the Mandarin King where I take my coffee most mornings. Instead of returning it, my voyeuristic prying nature overcame me and I was forced to secretly put it into my fanny pack. I casually paid, ate my fortune donut and eased out the door unnoticed. I rollerbladed as fast as I could to the boardwalk where I could sit in private amongst the philosophically hostile homeless disputing the beauty of the vast ocean and listen to whatever might be recorded. I rewound the tape to the beginning as I plugged in my headphones and pushed play. After a few minutes of what sounded like a granddaughter teaching her grandfather how to use the handheld device a clearing of an old smokers throat blasted my ears and his voice began. He took me on a grand tour of his life, beginning with his parents, his schooling during war time, exact sizes and shapes of girls he had kissed, and detailed accounts of various acts of male bravado. As he entered his twenties, it was becoming clear that he was interested in the fringe life as an artist, he explained how he had buried 100 plastic skeletons in the Mojave Desert so as to confuse future archaeologists. How museums should be taken over by terrorists, and forcefully turned into Food Banks one month and safe places for youthful drug exploration the next. As he hit age Eighty he gave exact details of how he was to be buried when he passed, the wood of his casket, “no nails! An escape hatch, and a playlist playing in headphones linked to a solar battery on the tombstone, just in case It somehow takes time to fully commit to dying, I am going to need music to ease the transition”.

                                                                                                                                        Jeff Peters