So it appears that Lloyd’s Rocket may not be dead after all. While passing the former gas station the other night, a blood-red neon light read that the place was open, and inside I saw a cook cooking for nobody and a bartender tending a bar without people. Lloyd’s refusal to die, its commitment to a long and slow death that has no end in sight, reminded me of the last part of Baudelaire’s poem “The Cracked Bell.”

And when in sorrows, it wishes to people the cold air of the night with its songs/ Often it happens that its feeble voice seems like the thick death rattle of one wounded /Forgotten by the side of a lake of blood, under a great weight of dead /Who dies without moving amongst enormous efforts.