Record One: Peep Show

Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage. We think it's more like a peep show. Stuff happens, but a lot of it is too small, too quiet, or too odd to get on a playbill.Record One contains nine stories of nine people's lives in 2013. The writers didn't make headlines, climb mountains, or even pay their rent on time, but they were here, and that has to count for something.Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage. We think it's more like a peep show. Stuff happens, but a lot of it is too small, too quiet, or too odd to get on a playbill.Record One contains nine stories of nine people's lives in 2013. For these nine people, a lot has happened in the short time they’ve been alive. The Berlin Wall fell. Hip-hop became a thing. Twitter happened. Protestors in Tahrir Square threw down an autocrat. There was a civil war in Libya. The iPhone 5 came out.We saw a lot of big stories. If you want big stories, you don’t need to look here. You can turn on the news and see drone strikes in Pakistan, nuclear threats from North Korea, and a garbage island the size of Texas churning in the Pacific. Heck, I heard the guy with no legs who climbed Mount Killimanjaro has a book out. If big lives and big stories are your thing, you can go read that book; it’s probably great.Or maybe, you’d like to hear some little stories.Amid the big news, big things, and big people that happened in the past few years, there was a lot of other stuff going on. Some of it was bad. Parents got divorced. Relationships didn’t work out. Our beards never grew in. But there was good stuff too: we remembered our loved ones after they left. We got enough sleep. We quit smoking.That’s what this collection is for. Little stories, little people, and little things. We didn’t necessarily make headlines, climb mountains, or even pay our rent on time, but we were here, and I think that counts for something.