Walking with Mr. Fish. Ostensibly it is all about getting exercise for the dog, but I think if the dog and I were being honest with ourselves, we would admit that it was only a ruse.

Mr. Fish is really interested in smelling stuff, finding the occasional ball, and spooking the random cat. She has also developed a strong interest in marking which I never noticed before, and it must be new, because I don’t think I could have missed her stopping to leave little inch-wide puddles of pee every dozen feet before.

Rather, I think she just figured out after all these years that she could not only smell the conversations on the posts, but even participate. She’s the Mary Wollstonecraft of dogs, and she’s thrilled to death to be peeing all over creation.

For my side, I am all about spending some quality time with my dog in her declining years, working off some guilt about her early years when she had to spend a lot of time in smallish spaces, and looking in people’s windows.

You know you do it, too. You’re out walking, and it is impossible not to check out people’s windows. Me, I just look to see how they’re decorating and what kind of lifestyle or hobbies you can infer from the sliver of their world that you can peek into. Others (and here I’m meaning “all the guys”) are also wishing that a slender yet chesty naked girl, aged 18-25, would walk across the window at that exact moment. Perhaps with her girlfriend.

There’s not much else to do but hope for naked people when you walk. You can’t read, you can’t surf the internet, you can’t nap. The only thing to keep your eyes engaged after you’ve exhausted the wonders of nature (four and a half seconds) is to hope to catch naked people being naked.

Tragically, it never happens.

What you do see is an astounding number of televisions casting their bluish hue through the room. It seems that almost everyone has a TV in their living room. And that almost everyone watches their TV in their living room in the evening.

It is a pretty unattractive scene, walking past house after house of people slumped in chairs and on couches while this vivid splotch of color dances on the other side of the room.

I came home, and the first thing I wanted to do was move my TV out of my living room. Even though my blinds are always closed (because I am always walking around naked, and you know that no one is taking their dog for a walk hoping to see some nude guy), I thought it would be much better if I could hide my television shame in a bedroom or in the basement somewhere.

But I can’t do that, because the living room is also where my stereo is all wired up. And when I plug in a movie, it would be unacceptable to not have the TV play through the stereo.

So, should I put it on a cart and hide it in another room, only to roll it into the living room when I am going to watch? Should I build a fake front of books to disguise the fact that there is a TV in the entertainment center? And how do I reconcile my desire to hide my TV with my desire to have a new, huge TV (or ideally a projector!)?

It’s a real problem. Do drug addicts have similar conversations with themselves? “Where do I hide my needles so that no one knows, but at the same time keep them within arm’s reach, just in case?”

OH! Better idea! Why didn’t I think of this earlier?

What is needed is to create a “stage” living room in front of the window. I could have a chair or two, a reading lamp, and several books and newspapers piled studiously about. Someone who has done set design can help me create the illusion of a fifteen-foot deep room while only giving up three or four feet of space. A frosted window behind my fake-living room will let light into the real living room, where I could now be safe lounging naked on the couch watching Tron for the thousandth time.

Apropos of nothing, I’ve been finishing a lot of ChapSticks lately, which is throwing me for quite a loop. Certain things in life are bottomless. You never finish a ChapStick. You almost never finish a box of tissues. You never empty a box of staples. You never finish off a ream of paper at home. Nail clippers never get dull or break, they just disappear. There is a whole class of items that simply go missing before you ever have a chance to finish them.

So it is a deeply amazing thing to me that I have finished three ChapSticks in the last three months; that I have kept track of not one, not two, but THREE tubes of ChapStick for the year or two it takes to exhaust those buggers. This is no mean accomplishment. There should be a medal.

I couldn’t be more astounded by this new skill of tracking small long-term things than if I had suddenly developed x-ray vision.

X-ray vision, however, would be a much better superpower.