Governor Rick Scott has announced his latest tactic to rescue Florida from dire financial straits. After declaring Eustis–a rural, tea-party infested central town–the new state capital, Scott called a press conference at his Lake County office to reveal that Jacksonville is no more. Scott overturned the city’s 1968 consolidation with Duval County, and the two were granted an annulment by the small but feisty pastor the Governor carries around in his breast pocket.

There is absolutely nothing funny about suicide.

At the funeral, few spoke in honor of my uncle. The shame! After all the man had done for everyone present! When all those tender spoken anecdotes added up to so little, such a mite in a man’s eye, I decided to liven up things in the dead man’s name. Having died almost childless, half-friendless, a loner in a small town far from the bustling metropolis he’d been born into, the thought of him going into oblivion without a proper sendoff, haunted me. So I stood up unsteadily.

Don’t you hate it when you have a dream, a really great dream, and it ends too soon? Your alarm goes off, your children jump on top of you, your cat starts licking your face… someone or something wakes you up, ruining everything.

Welcome to the August 2011 issue of Defenestration.

An interesting (and true!) story about editing this issue*. After I stitched all the stories, poems, photos, and biographies together into the standard layout, I printed out a copy. Apparently my wife had accidentally loaded up the printer with a bunch of discarded drafts of old Ben & Winslow strips**. So as I’m editing the issue, these light pencil sketches keep showing up behind the content, like the ghosts of cartoon characters. The first page of Lawrence Barker’s “A Stinking Rose by Any Other Name,” for example, contains a half-drawn Apsara Williams in a tank top, which I found fitting because the first paragraph uses the word “attention-whores.” Several other pages have faceless proto-Bens and proto-Winslows cavorting on them. One of the proto-Winslows was fondling his breasts.