laid back days and sonny crockett nights

I don't know what that means, so don't ask.

Shelley Jackson's cover illustration for Christopher's chapbook Bittersweet Creek is lovely, beautiful, perfect and amazing. Yes, all of those things. And why yes, you can pre-order from that link.

There's a giant bird that's been swooping through the perfect autumn skies outside my building at work for the past few days. Some people say it's a buzzard. But I don't think they're looking close enough. I was in a meeting adjacent to the big windows it particularly likes to swoop outside and couldn't stop trying to figure it out. No one else notied. I'm going to try and get a digital picture tomorrow. I will ID this bird!

I've taken to calling it the Godzilla bird, for it is huge and fierce looking.

The poems and stories (and comic) in the new Say... are really, really great. I love them all. And they feel very good together, thematically. I can't wait to see the issue all of a piece.

Greg van Eekhout's journal post about hair cuts got me thinking about my Grandpa Summers. Or Papaw Summers, which is what I mostly called him. There's a tendency, sometimes, to become more formal in death than we were in life. He was a barber, at a classic barbershop with the pole out front, and two other men with big green chairs that rose or sank according to the height of the person who sat in them. He had a little room off their bedroom at the house, with a chair in it and a sink and crackly yellow linoleum. It was where people came from around home, who didn't go into town to get their hair cut. I have great memories of sitting in that room and eavesdropping on the conversations he had with these men (always men; he used to claim he could cut my hair, but I never let him near it). I can't remember the details now, not many anyway, but they were great conversations. I remember the rhythm of them more than anything, like weather or seasons, rising and falling, like the chair maybe. And the crisp whip of the cape at the end, coming off and dumping their hair all over the floor. He never made my Granny Summers sweep up.