A Letter to 2112

Dear Yumans of 2112,

Yes, I really am talking to you across the sea of time… get over it.

I wanted to drop you a line to give you some insight about all us dead people from your past (this assuming of course they don’t invent some miracle anti-aging drug and I’m still alive in 2112).

Anyway, residents of Yuma County came together on Feb. 10, 2012 to bury items inside of a time capsule in the Centennial Heritage Area behind the Yuma Main Library.

Inside are 15 aluminum cylinders which contain many items including photos and newspaper clippings that won’t be seen by human eyes again until about the time you futuristic super humans are reading this.

There are two items in the canister the Yuma Sun put together that have special meaning for me.

The first is a bottle of brandy that is a joking nod to a story I wrote back in 2010. That year, I was covering the opening of a time capsule in Somerton that had been buried since 1985. When they pulled out the contents, some had been destroyed by moisture, but one item was entirely missing – a bottle of brandy.

I spoke with a man who worked for the city of Somerton when they buried the time capsule, and he was certain there had been one full bottle of brandy inside. It was a head scratcher for sure.

A while later, Stephen Colbert did an entire comedy bit about the missing brandy on the “Colbert Report,” his television show on the Comedy Central network.

He blamed the incident on “Time Traveling Brandy Thieves.” Hopefully in 100 years you future types will read the original article I wrote about the bottle, unless you already know about it because you are the Time Traveling Brandy Thieves…

The second item is a photograph of Yuma Sun editor Roxanne Molenar and I. The photo captures a third person view over our shoulders. It was taken by Randy Hoeft, the head photographer for our newspaper currently. I am using a laptop to look up yumasun.com, while Roxanne uses a “smart phone.”

For all you future people who are reading this in ten decades, a laptop is a portable - at least by our standards - computer, and the smart phone is a nifty little gadget that allows us to speak on the phone or access the internet just about anywhere.

Okay so you have some new fangled AI phones or something, and you are cyborgs with built in computer systems attached to your brainstems… don’t rub it in. Compared to 1912, we are crazy advanced technologically. So, “eat my shorts.”

That last quotation has been uttered many times by a yellow guy in a cartoon on the Fox television network. If you want to learn who said it, search your version of  Google using your cyborg brains.

Anyway, I think it is incredibly cool that when you futuristic peeps pull out the contents of those canisters, there will be my pretty face, as if no time has gone by at all. This is assuming of course that the contents survive that long and that there hasn’t been a massive zombie uprising or global thermonuclear war.

Hopefully someone will look at that photo and be like, “who is this dude?” To me, being remembered after you are dead is immortality. Here’s to you 2112. Have a beer for me.

Word to your mother,

Chris McDaniel,

Yuma Sun reporter