August 25, 2026

Where: Villa Lee Park

When: 5:20 pm

Bird Species: ---

Things I Thought About:

• I tried. I really did. I made the fatal mistake of saying “I have a little more time than usual before pub quiz. I’ll stop somewhere a little off the beaten track.” So I just looked at the maps app and pulled over to the first neighborhood park I saw on the way, but nothing doing. I mean, zero. I really treasured the extra time for the walk, but there were no birds around.
• See yesterday re; “summer doldrums.”
• Obviously, I spent the whole time thinking about Dolly.
• I wish we had never invented the word "parasocial" because it makes me feel ridiculous to be taking this so hard. But the honest fact is the only people I have loved longer than Dolly are my parents and Chipper Jones, and look how that one is turning out.
• Dolly was a public good, and there are only like six left that can be taken from us.
• I'm glad I have a niche blog, largely followed by people who have known me long enough to know I was both braced for this and also crushed by this, so I can talk about Dolly Parton.
• In a dozen viral twitter prompts, "Who would you most want to tell you the meteor was coming?," "Who would you be most starstruck to meet?," "What celebrity would you want to see at your wedding/funeral?" the answer for me was always Dolly.
• The old "it takes a lot of money to look this cheap" was such a good line and such a good bit for her, but the thing is, she didn't look cheap. She never looked cheap. She looked loud and extravagant and succulent and sometimes tacky, but that's not the same thing, at all.
• She looked like a woman who was born in a one-room cabin, whose mother who had 12 pregnancies by 35, who cut her first record at 13, and fell into touring and television and wild success and a 58 year marriage, and she found glitter and sequins and satin and bangles and lip liner and wigs, and every bright shiny beautiful thing, and said This is me, I'm gonna grab every bit of this, I'm going to stack this bounty on top of itself, I'm gonna drink every drop, which is exactly what she was.
• When I saw her instagram story in May, cancelling her Las Vegas shows, I started mentally preparing for today, and can I tell you something? It didn't help at all. Fucking sucks, man.
• One summer I was in a show called Della's Diner: Blue Plate Special, one of a series of little plays that were soap opera spoof comedies, a jukebox musical of country classics and gospel standards. There was a character I craved to play, who was an in-fiction country star, who looked like Dolly and sang Patsy Cline, but even at all of 26 I was destined to play the tired middle-aged lonesome waitress type.
• Technically the lead, though. And in that summer, I got to sing "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," and the mama sang tenor, and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." And I got to sing the harmony on "Jolene," and I got a verse and a chorus of "My Tennessee Mountain Home."
• This is the verse I got to sing: and honeysuckle vines cling to the fence along the lane/Their fragrance makes the summer wind so sweet/
  And on a distant hilltop an eagle spreads its wings/And a songbird on a fence post sings a melody
• So I guess this is a post about birds, after all.

BOTD: Green heron. Nothing signifies here; I wasn't looking for a photo of a bird that looked like an angel, or a bird with gorgeous eyelashes, something to tie it to Dolly. Dolly did not remind me of any bird; if anything, she reminded me of one of those frilled lizards, if they came bedazzled [complimentary.]

Just I didn't get a photo today, and I saw this guy not too long ago and never shared him with you.

This is an immature adult. You can tell because his color is so uniform and dark and rich, and because, respectfully, he isn't fucked up yet. Herons look busted. They have muppet hair and tangles and dangles hanging off of them. Their plumage gets washed out and decidedly mussed. It's part of growing up.