mini-cassettes

I’ve always loved a little serendipity in my life. Recently I purchased a mini-cassette recorder on eBay. It shipped with an old cassette tape from the early 1980s, and it’s less a found recording than a time capsule. Between syrup shipments and invoices, someone breaks into song, then drifts into football commentary, then back to business notes. Later, the voice recounts California walnut groves and farmland swallowed by freeways. It’s messy, mundane, and hauntingly human—an accidental archive of a few years, preserved in analog fragments and hiss.