Yes it’s been a while. One of you told Carll you missed me. Can’t say it’s mutual. I’m not into missing. You’re either here or not and if you’re not, that’s how things are, no “ou sont les neiges d’antan,” if you get my drift.

(Didn’t know I spoke French? I don’t. It’s AI. Lazier than he looks, Carll asked AI to translate dog into hoity-toity English, which I guess means spiced with French bunny-mutts. It’s like there’s nothing natural anymore, not even speech patterns. Did you know AI can bark? Happens in the movies all the time. Jane and Carll will be watching their after-dinner cop-glop and suddenly there’s this dog barking, so I start barking too, only it’s not a dog it’s something coming out of that screen, I sniff to make sure. I mean, really!)

So what have I been up to? Same thing you’ve been: being: what else is there? Ask a human what they’re up to and they’ll talk your ear off, even big floppy ears like mine – “I’ve been doing this, that, and the other…” Carll keeps a journal where – get this – he memorializes the mundane details of dailiness as if anybody gave a hoot. Almost as bad as that Andy Warhol movie of his boyfriend sleeping, lasted five hours and twenty-one minutes Google tells me. The things humans do and call it art, then buy and sell it like there’s no tomorrow.

I’m thirty-one pounds now. What was I last time? Jane and Carll thought I’d be smaller so they’re – not put out, I’d say, but puzzled – what if I don’t stop? Jane thinks I’d be cuter smaller but that’s ridiculous, how could I be cuter? Suspicions arose that my breeder pulled a fast one, but I clearly remember her saying with these breed mixes – cocker spaniel and poodle in my case – there are no guarantees. Same with human babies – you get what you get. In my case Jane and Carll hit the genetic jackpot but hey, I might have turned out a dachshund, then what?

I’d been meaning to tell you about a dachshund, those hotdogs on wheels – an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson got me dreaming in this direction – but now Carll tells me his word-counter foresees only two hundred words left for this outing, insufficient to explain the less-than-obvious dachshund-Stevenson connection, so either I cut what I’ve dictated thus far, which I’m loath to, or bend this edition in a less convolute direction. Jane, if she’d had the chance to read this before filing (which Carll forbids), might have chided Carll for “throat-clearing” – “yet again”. Not to intervene in this connubial controversy (a.k.a., “airing dirty laundry”), Carll would have grumbled in response there’s no such thing as throat-clearing because the “throat” – a.k.a., the voice – is what writing’s all about. It doesn’t so much matter what you say as how – think of nursery rhymes: the stories they relate are often grim – “ring around the rosy” concerns plague deaths, for example – yet murmured by a loving mom it wafts the kid to sleep. Same goes for literate prose: its sound is its sense: there’s nothing new to say, only new ways of saying.

This debate’s over my pay grade frankly and unless I’m missing something a waste of zest. Humans do this all the time, wrangle about definitions. I pay no never-mind to the right or wrong way to do things, I just do them, let the chips fall where they may. Whoever said they missed Henry, kisses, now you have him, in the radiance of his actuality. Satisfied?