Back in 2007, I had an unusual encounter at the Geary Club, a San Francisco bar near Union Square. A guy on the barstool beside me laid out his big idea—it was an era of Big Ideas—called dublit.com, a web site for people to freely upload and listen to spoken word recordings. It was to be a repository of audio essays, non-fiction, short stories, chapters from books, and so on.

I told him I was a writer, and I was interested in supporting it, if I could.

Fast forward one year: dublit.com’s launch party was a smashing success, and I vowed to make good on my pledge. Using nothing more than my iBook’s microphone and built-in audio software, I recorded two of my short stories, “Of Potential” and “Some of the Things He Thought That Year” (both available in my collection, A Concordance of One’s Life).

Later, San Francisco lit mag Instant City published my ode to The Owl Tree (another Union Square bar) and its recently-deceased proprietor, a lifelong city bartender and colorful character named C. Bobby. I read the remembrance at the magazine’s release party, which was recorded and made its way onto dublit.com as well.

I recently discovered these old spoken word recordings on a backup. (I thought they’d been lost.) I uploaded them to the Internet Archive, where they should remain available for years to come.

You’re free to listen or download them. I’ve included a PDF of each short story alongside the audio, if you prefer to read or read along:

• “The Owl Tree”
• “Some of the Things He Thought That Year”
• “Of Potential”

Sadly, many of the beautiful and sublime things I’ve mentioned are now gone: Geary Club, C. Bobby and The Owl Tree, the original dublit.com, even Instant City. So much loss against the wages of time, which ruthlessly spends down our youth with no regard for our future.