unasked raze it was the last phase of a wild house party. i guess it was what you'd call winding down. what was wild had been tamed and most of the people who'd been there had gone home to sleep off whatever needed shedding, only the hardcore faithful few still awake and opening and closing their mouths so words could fall out. some of us were drunk. some of us were high. some were both. i was one but not the other. the mood turned reflective. one friend who isn't a friend anymore said to a friend who's still a friend he didn't think he was ever going to see him cut his hair. the friend who's still a friend said he would. he said he'd cut his hair the next time someone he loved died. and in my half-stupid teenage brain, i thought maybe that would be me. maybe i'd be the person to get him to cut his hair. but i didn't die, and after a while the sharpest edges of the impulse to make it happen got sanded down until there was nothing much left to poke an eye out or inflict unfathomable pain on a person falling into it. his hair is short now. i don't know if it's because he kept the promise he made that night to a living room full of quiet teenage trouble, or because he decided when he started a family it was something he needed to do to look the way he thought a father should. i don't think it's something that needs to be asked. but sometimes i wonder. 140821 ... leif what if that part of him died? 140821 ... raze could be. he seems more or less unchanged, aside from being more grownup now, but you never really know. it brings to mind the time i was accosted by a drunk woman on my twentieth birthday. she asked me if i had a light and told me never to cut my hair. "you cut your hair, you're cutting your spirit," she said. told me she used to have hair longer than mine and then her daughter died and she cut it all off. i'd remember her face if i ever saw her again, and i'd let her know i heeded her words whether they were true or not. 140821 what's it to you? who go blather from