…

By the time I got myself, the executor and a notary together they had induced her and she has a breathing tube for a few days. So nothing can be signed, yet, if at all. But of course still had to pay the notary to show up…

Each day she goes to radiation therapy. On day one she walked in from the curb drop off point, on day eight she had to be lifted out of the car into a wheel chair and the doctor couldn’t find any breathing function in one of her lungs. She is getting oxygen in her bloodstream though, it’s something else that is wrong with her respiration. We have spent three days trying to talk her into going to the hospital and she refused every time she adamantly refused.

Then she called for us to get her an ambulance earlier. Finally! It’s not just the radiation causing all of this …she has been having a pretty steady decline since she got out of the hospital the first time. She isn’t loosing weight but it is definitely redistributing. Her arms and legs are wasting away and her abdomen is swollen/bloated. She doesn’t have enough muscle in her legs to support her right now. At this point she needs to be in a hospital environment.

She has had bad back pain today which makes me wonder about her kidney function and other tumors in that area. She hasn’t been eating anything with nutrition. They say she is dehydrated but she isn’t supposed to drink too much water because of her kidneys. She is abusing inhalers using them 5 or 6 times in a row which is not good at all and then smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, eating ice cream and drinking coffee after coffee. She is constantly holding her abdomen but always says nothing is wrong and that she feels fine. It’s just not good all around.

Sort of fuzzy.

It’s nice out today but I’m allergic to my surroundings.
I take a peek out my window at the parking lot, it’s not worth opening the shades for that view.
I let the blinds fall back into place.
Hank Williams Sr. plays in the background.

Yesterday we drove several hundred miles in a celebration of life and death.

(“the silence of a falling star
lights up a purple sky…)

It would have been my brothers birthday if he had been among the living. His ashes had been scattered in the pacific ocean on a cold, foggy March morning 15 years ago.
I turned to a nearby mirror to look at the dates and flowers tattooed on my shoulder blade. Was it really 15 years ago?
Yes.
I’m older now. I’m just about the same age he was when he died. Give or take a few months. He was too young.

(“…and as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry”)

The day also served as my fathers party. Call it a funeral party if you will.
A shrine was set for him on a table.
He was there of course. In his plastic box. Ashes waiting to be scattered. His picture beside him.
I gave him his hat, the same one from the picture. It fit his box nicely.
Other objects appeared on the table as the day went on.
I’ll confess they were all mine. I had hoped people would have noticed and caught on.
An hour later a corn cob pipe appeared, then a small replica of a Harley Davidson later in the day. A beer came from nowhere, sometime after that someone found it and drank it.
I’m sure he was able to enjoy himself. He would have liked the party.

(“this dog house here is mighty small
but it’s better than no house at all
so ease it on over
drag it on over
move over old dog
cause a new dog’s moving in”)

We expected more Harley’s to arrive. There were only two. All those people are old and there’s not many Noblemen around anymore. My father outlived a lot of them. Not to mention the other biker groups.
Of the bikers though, Dirty Larry was there.

I remember one time…
My father and Dirty Larry were partying. It was the night Larry fell off of  the top of a camp trailer watching the sunset or something. I believe he was getting down for another beer. Apparently there wasn’t any so him and my dad decided to walk to the convenience store to buy more alchohol.
In the dark it was a little difficult to know where the path was. The fence was down but the metal fence posts were still standing. Larry being drunk walked his face right into one of the metal fence posts. I believe that was the last night that fence post stood.

By the time they got to the store they were so drunk they were holding each other up. Larry was bleeding profusely from his mouth, all down the front of himself and onto the floor, creatively creating new explitives while my father was laughing so hard his eyes were tearing up.
They asked the poor sales clerk for some pliers and went into the men’s room for some shit-faced biker dentistry when Larry’s wife Ann came running in drunk and screaming for them to stop just as my dad was geting ready to pull.

Ahh good times.
Strange memories.

Dirty Larry was the guy who refered me to the tattoo artist for my first tattoo. A memorial to my brother. It had been 1995 when I was 15. I traded it for a box guitar.

Barbara also came on a Harley. That was great to see. She was there with my dad in the end almost every day. A great old gal.

(“why do you run and hide from life
to try it just aint smart.
why cant I free your doubtful mind
and melt your cold, cold heart”)

Some people were too old, too sick or too far away to attend. Like Fred, Jeff and Carl. Some just never made it there, like Isaac.

Drew BBQ’d for everyone as he had been my fathers personal cook for most of the last year of his life.  My father had bought a grill for $600 but had never used it once so Drew used the hell out of it yesterday. He went through about 25 burgers, 20 giant hotdogs, about 30 pieces of chicken and some ribs. magically appeared as well. I got to show Sherri the work we did on my mom’s house. We had collected Stephen on the way and he brought good beer. Me and drew were going on little sleep and passed on the drinking. I had two beers overall I think. We sort of stayed in our own little group while the older generation got drunk and took group pictures of people mooning the cameraman(clothed luckly).
Typical party for them.

I fell asleep on the drive home. I have never been one to party like my parents.

I think I need some tea. I’ll go do that… now…

First off I NEVER listened to anything that wasn’t told to me by my parents. Probably a result of strange biker parties, I was also stealthy like a little ninja, I did what I could to sneak around the edges of things as undetected as possible or to move quickly so not to be stopped by anyone. This is where I began my habit of sleeping in strange places, under pool tables, behind couches, in trees. Watching the party from the darkness just out of the range of the light cast by bonfires when I wasn’t scammed into child labor by running the illegal bar.  This is a bad thing also because my parents had a habit of running off and leaving me with strange people, they would leave the strangers to tell me that my parents had gone somewhere. On this occasion I wanted to figure out where the hell they were, I knew they probably went to party with the Castro’s in the old school house so I started walking that direction. It was only a few miles away down a dirt road on the far side of an abandoned and rusting mercury mining town. To me that was nothing. On many occasion my parents would be too drunk and high to remember I had been with them and if they didn’t get the bright idea to have me drive them they would often entirely forget and leave me behind to walk to where they had gone. Sometimes I didn’t know and had to wait, occasionally I guessed wrong but I was a professional survivalist at age 5.

So here I was with this drugged out biker family and my parents ran off and the woman tells me that she is watching me and I have to do what she says. She put’s me in charge of watching over her youngest son who was at least a half year younger than I was and commanded us to stay in sight. This was too alien for me and I was getting the hell out of there.

I told him that my parents didn’t tell me I was being watched by his mother so I wasn’t obligated to be. I started walking down the road and he said he wanted to go with me because his mother told him to stay with me and because his father was with my parents, this was good enough reason to my 5 year old mind so I agreed to take him with. The little liar started crying about a mile away when he looked back and realized we were not in sight of his mother and he just kept sobbing pathetically about it. I told him to go back alone then and he really started bawling. I was disgusted by his behavior and lack of common sense and that I would have to go back to the woman that was his mother and then come back again by myself because he was too scared. I was quite upset, why did he wait until now to recall this important bit of information. I had not really been around other children so I somehow expected them to think and act like the adults I knew. As we got back to the driveway his mother came rushing out of the yard yelling at me. She then made all of her three children go inside of the house and she beat the hell out of me, right there in the road and left me in the dirt. A few days later Fast Fred overdosed on crank and that was the end of their stay in our town. I didn’t like other children anyhow.

1.Nonsmall cell lung cancer stage IV.

2.Hyponatremia, secondary to syndrome if inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion.

3. Leukocytosis secondary to steroids and malignancy.

4.Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

5. A history of tobacco abuse.

6.Anemia, stable.

7.Hypertension

8.Adrenal insuficiency

Theres pages of depressing things but the ones that catch my attention are these…

Results of radiology:

CT of chest shows 5.1cm right upper lobe mass abutting the posterior pleura, highly suspicious for lung cancer.  There are very large loculated hypovascular masses in both adrenal glands. The left adrenal mass measured at 7.8 x 8.8 cm, with lass effect on the left kidney and the left renal vein. The right adrenal mass measures 6.8 x 7.5 cm abutting the liver. Three pancreatic masses. Two right adrenal masses, several soft tissue masses in the pelvis and left hemidiaphragm.

CT of the brain shows multiple bilateral enhancing masses with surrounding edema compatible with metastatic disease and hemorrhage currently. CT of the neck shows multiple enlarged nodes in the right neck compatible with metatstatic disease. Right internal jugular vein may be thrombosed just below skull base, but does reconstitute.

Results of pathology report shows malignant cells present, nonsmall cell carcinoma, favor adenocarcinoma.

I want to sit next to a creek under some trees and drink beer, then play a game and BBQ. Damn you desert. Anyways its spring time for sandals and shorts.