You may or may not have been wondering what’s up with me so hey, it’s an indoor day – sleet, which I loathe – and I bruised my shoulder – nothing serious – but being I’m less frolicsome than my wont, why not catch you up – as my lord and master can’t resist doing – to pass the time.

Maybe the nicest thing about being a dog is you don’t need to pass the time, it passes on its own, like food through my gut, not a thought required – involuntarily – I think that’s the adverb – unless my parts aren’t working. Same goes for what humans call Time. To “get” Time you’ve got to wrestle Before and After, Yesterday and Tomorrow, Cause and Result, which we canines sensibly don’t bother with. Time, face it, does not exist except as an idea. Can you see it? Taste it? Eat it? The wind is more real.

And this idea, based on my chief’s example, which he insists is typical, turns out toxic, worse than chocolate for dogs. It makes Carll sad, blue, listless sometimes, crabby, with no zest to play fetch, self-destructive even. (How come crabs got smeared with crabby? Crabs aren’t crabby!) Because Time creates Loss – here today, gone tomorrow – which ignites regret – and moaning about the meaning of this “veil of tears.” (That’s how the Psalmist describes existence, if you can believe it. And humans pride themselves on their smarts!)

Time does another bad thing less often noted, even by polymaths. (Sounds insectile doesn’t it – a POLYMATH!!!) Time slimes the pleasant present in a sort of smog, so everything that is is simultaneously all it’s not. Here is OK but it’s not there. Today is paltry compared to yesterday or tomorrow. That scurrying squirrel is not its delectable self but one of umpteen billion. Possibility and Memory kneecap Actuality, converting every is into a swarm of isn’ts. This, to my way of thinking, zaps existence of its zest.

The poet William Carlos Williams, whom Carll has been rereading, declared famously (and oracularly) “No ideas but in things.” He was urging poets to say what they saw and let their word-pictures speak for themselves. But this undercuts the primal purpose of poetry which is to assuage the damage done by Time. Humans sing not to pass the time but to make sense of it, which is a laugh-riot, because life never made sense and never will. Dogs, humans, the lot of us, just are. Dogs accept this obvious truth without a murmur. Humans wail, snivel and invent gods to persuade themselves it aint so. Of course life has meaning! Of course humans matter!

Carll writes, he tells me, to accommodate himself to the confusion of being. If he doesn’t write, even for a day, the mystery of his moment seems too much to bear. Any meaning he glimpses, he admits, is delusory, a trick of the light, still the patter of syllables soothes him somehow. Since I depend on Carll for feeding and fondling, I’m all for any therapy that keeps him fit and this one’s not expensive, but I mean really! What crazy make-work – to have to envision one’s significance to keep sane. “Oh what fools these mortals be,” observes one of Shakespeare’s non-human creations. (Puck’s sort of like a dog.)

Such pain, tsuris and verbiage come from Time. I keep telling Carll to forget yesterday and tomorrow and what might have been and yet might be and live wholly in the delightful present. He tries – but it seems he’s not wired that way. Time pleasantly passed without futile scribbling he accounts culpable profligacy. Go figure.