Beats by Dre [prose] by Ruth Boon

Listening to ‘In Da Club’ on my Beats by Dre. Would Dre be proud of himself? They’re selling Beats by Dre in the Apple Store now. I think in a capitalist society, that’s probably seen as a good thing. Something to make Dre think ‘I might have made it.’ He probably doesn’t think he’s made it though. Even the ones who’ve made it don’t seem to think that they’ve made ‘it’.

How many leaves does a mature Oak Tree have? Quora says two hundred thousand leaves. Jane Simon (teacher) says mature oak trees can shed three thousand six hundred pounds of leaves in their sixty-year lifetime. I wonder, what constitutes an oak tree’s maturity? I wonder if Dre is ever thinking about the way an oak tree sheds itself every year, how it reconstructs itself over and over again, anew once more. I wonder if Dre minds that I’m not referring to him with his correct title, Dr. Dre. I suppose he must have considered oak trees at some point, and if not the oak tree, some other tree. Perhaps in his childhood garden, or yard (as they call it in America) he had a tree of his own, perhaps he used to go there and write rap music, or poetry, or whatever you want to call it.

Now he’s probably lying about in a pink flamingo pool float in his super yard. He’s got to have a super yard at least, a man with headphones that aren’t Apple headphones being sold in the Apple store has got to have some kind of pool, or at least a pool float. Perhaps Dre takes his pool float to a quiet beach at seven pm when nearly everyone has packed up and decided to go home because it’s not cold but it’s not as hot as it was in the sun. Perhaps he puts his feet into the sea, feels the cold saltiness around his toes, pool float tucked under his arm. And then he wades out. Sort of slow because he’s looking at the sky and the way that the blue turns into something else, kind of orange but maybe something more important than that. He gets all the way, nearly up to the tops of his thighs. As the water touches his balls he leans onto his tiptoes a bit but then he slowly accepts the cold. It is at this point that he decides to climb onto the float. He’s not too far out. He doesn’t want to go too far out either because he wants to lie in the quiet bit of the sea and maybe there are some kids playing in a faraway part of the beach and maybe someone is swimming somewhere in the ocean nearby but Dre is in the silver-blue orange and it is calm and he closes his eyes and feels his chest move up and feels his chest move down and it’s almost enough to make Dre let go of three thousand six hundred pounds of leaves, almost.