I’m thinking about the best Chinese food I ever ate as I’m watching you die.

The nice woman who served me took a special pride in her hot oil. Some of the hottest stuff I ever put in my mouth. She smiled as she watched me sweat and chew. She knew it was perfect, she wanted to see me cave and beg for bread or noodles.

The egg roll was fresh and clean. The music was from a lute and a single flute. The cabbage and the crisp wheat crust was without flaw, and she brought me some more hot oil, and it burned my mouth and my throat. It was so hot it was pure. It was so hot it hurt, It was sharp, and it stung and it burned and I felt like I was swallowing fire and shards of glass. I was alive, and uncluttered, and unfettered, and singular.

I learned long ago nothing is sublime and comparison is dangerous, but now, pretty and kind woman you challenge me and all my beliefs with this perfect egg roll and your fire oil.

For a moment I forget I’m watching someone very, very old die and the egg roll and the oily sauce is only an ideal, perhaps an illusion. Thoughts and memories of perfection are, once again, replaced by the broken and confused and ugly and messy and stained and weak and sad.

As you stumble for words, any words, two connected words, a short sentence, I think of only egg rolls and hot oil.

Jane Fonda has been in the news lately for her staged ‘civil disobedience,’ in Washington. She gets arrested, and released every Friday. Some environmental protest.

I’m so far left, Karl Marx would think my ideas are little to radical, but Jane Fonda?

I’m still pissed off about the Vietnam War. Still pissed about the guys I knew who came home in a box.

Still pissed at LBJ and McNamara. Still pissed that after all those years and 50,000 dead Americans and, possibly two million civilians and maybe a million North Vietnamese dead, the US military abandoned South Vietnam, took its ball and bat and said, “Fuck it!”

I’m still pissed at the lies, ‘stopping the spread of communism…’ I’m still pissed off about a lot of things regarding that war, but right at the top of the list is Jane Fonda sitting for photos with the North Vietnamese while American boys were dying in the jungles.

Fuck you forever Jane, and when forever ends, Jane, fuck you some more.

“She’s had a rich life…”

I heard that, again, today. “Your mom has had a full, rich life.”

The richness, the wealth, has dwindled to loose change now, maybe a dime, and a few pennies.

Every time a virus hits, even a cold, the fluid in and around her chest compresses her heart and lungs, it leads to heart failure. Her lack of movement, any real movement, then leads to pneumonia. There ain’t much oxygen flowing, this makes it worse, it starves a already dying brain.

Any drug to drain her chest hurts her kidneys, resulting in kidney failure.

The richness of life is forgotten, dulled to moments of abject boredom and sadness. She must feel, daily, the sensation of drowning, slowly…

Each bout with a simple cold results in a measurable loss. My phone rings at 3am, or noon, or 6pm, again…

More pennies taken away…

They always begin the report with, “Mr Lobb, no emergency…”

There is truly no emergency—ever. Not now, not here.

There are no emergencies in this slow, endless march. There are no battles or heroics. Only the slow, deliberate progression of days.

The end, the last day, the last breath is a teasing whore, offering glimpses, maybe a peek—then gone again. The whore never stays.

The robust wealth of life, squandered and spent and leaving only a handful of loose change. After each incident another coin or two is taken away. She never returns to a hundred percent—and last weeks hundred percent is barely a fraction of the life that was.

She gets pissed at me, and I’m happy to see it. It tells me there is still a little of the fire in that mind. The mind that would wake me, as a boy, at two in the morning and say, “get dressed, I’ve packed a bag, we are going to Florida…”

Florida was the promised land. A twenty-some hour drive, accessible even on a long weekend. Ninety miles per hour, top down, whisky bottle under the seat.

I learned to obey the law, whenever practicable, and carefully hide the evidence, from her. From her came some of my piracy.

I wish I’d left her to die in a home Florida, it seemed cruel, but it’s all cruel. The existence is cruel. At least she’d be dying in beloved Florida.

But, Florida or New York, the walls are all beige and antiseptic, and the same. Florida, is only another crumbled construct of a lost mind. Another memory that may or may not be real.

I try to get her to remember a better place. I tell her close her eyes and go there, and be there. I tell her this life is all an illusion anyway, but she gets confused and angry again.

There ain’t many pennies left in the jar, Ma. I wish you’d throw those that remain out the fucking window and let go…

“An unbroken string of days is all that brought us here. Eat some, sleep some, drink some, fuck some and fight some and here we are. An army of scoundrels, like me, like you, pulling’ and pushin’ and sellin’ each other to the highest bidder. Ain’t no allegiance.

There ain’t no plan, never was. No tremendous and awesome high-up power a savin’ ya from Hell’s fury and fire! Just all of ya in it, pushin’ fer what helps you and fuck everyone who ain’t like ya.”

“I learn’t this early on and I know’d they’s money in it. Preachin’ come easy to me boy. Ever man got his ass saddled down with guilt. A man stole some, er fucked somebody he want ‘spose to, or he finds his ass caught in a lie. Ain’t no feelin’ worst than when you know’d ya been caught in a lie, and the waitin’. The waitin’ is the worst.”

“Every man what ever put on a pair of pants got some guilt eatin’ at him. Ya just got ta dig a might ta find it, then offer a way to save his broke-down ass and he’ll foller ya like damn pup—and throw his last dime in the collection plate. Good money in salvation, boy. Damn good money. “

“That’s all we is, boy, just scoundrels fuckin’ and fightin’ and one day rolls inta the next and ya end up right smack here where ya have been all along.”