When do we live? That's what I want to know.

There were presents - some silly, some not. Israel Edel gave me a rubber ice-cream cone with a squeaker in it - a plaything for my little dog, who is a female Lhasa apso, a golden dust-mop without a handle. I could never have a dog when I was young, because Alexander Hamilton McCone hated dogs. So this is the only dog I have ever known at all well - and she sleeps with me. She snores. So did my wife.  I have never bred her, but now, according to the veterinarian, Dr. Howard Padwee, she is experiencing a false pregnancy and believes the rubber ice-cream cone to be a puppy. She hides it in closets. She carries it up and down the stairs of my duplex. She is even secreting milk for it. She is getting shots to make her stop doing that. I observe how profoundly serious Nature has made her about a rubber ice-cream cone - brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.