WEBVTT

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"Spot in Space and Time"--

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Spot for me was always sort of
like the Holy Ghost, you know.

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Given the Trinity of
Dick and Jane and Spot,

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the Holy Ghost is the
interesting one, right,

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in a way.

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I mean, Dick and Jane are more,
more [INAUDIBLE] de mon frère,

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you know what I mean, but Spot
is a third, an other thing,

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a tertium quid, a
rare, rarer bird.

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I mean, it's one of
the father and son,

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you know, as relatives
go, that's fairly common,

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but the Holy Ghost,
that's somebody

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to have in the back bedroom.

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That's a strange cookie to have.

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So Spot sort of
obsessed me and I,

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I'm old enough to have
had Spot in my readers,

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and that's a-- so he's stayed
with me all these years.

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"Spot in Space and Time"--

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"Despite his name, the
dog's an imposition.

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Lying in the kitchen,
begging in the bedroom

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with his lousy posture
and unseemly salivation,

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even Pavlov's dog exposes us,
as men are known by companies

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they keep.

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At least, he's not
exposed himself.

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Thank God, it takes some
clothing to do that.

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The chicken in its coop, the
chicken in its roasting pan,

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the chicken in its place, I
mean with ruffles of parsley

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at its ankles,
doesn't seem indecent.

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Then you sit it up on the edge
of a table and cross its legs,

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and look, it's naked.

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The indignant have a word
they cannot say alone--

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here, here.

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The soothers say-- there, there.

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The dog's confused.

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He's neither fowl nor fish.

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He cannot go to Esalen
and find himself.

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He scowls into the new
communications dish.

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Remember how you dropped
that barbecued rib

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in your lap, that
casual affair in '98

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where everyone wore white?

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Remember how the girls were all
named Faith and Prudence then?

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Today, the supermarket carts
are full of little Melodies

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and Heathers.

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Virtue's gotten mild,
to say the least.

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That's pretty good, the mother
says, that's pretty pretty.

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Grandma falls asleep, and there,
the dog has had the child.

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Between the looking
forward and remembering,

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it's hard to find a
moment for the present.

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I remember space from
when it was a nothing.

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Now, we know it's full with
very little room for vacancy.

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The latest limit on the
emptiness was on the radio

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today.

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What's not, said scientists,
is smaller than we thought.

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Perhaps, it is the
thought they're

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measuring, as
everything we know must

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fit inside the temples, where
a sky by God is understandable.

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It isn't nothing
we cannot imagine.

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Nothing is the very
stuff of faith.

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It's something we've forgotten,
something we are missing

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in our human grade and groove.

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The thinker stands still
thinking of himself,

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while there, in his
abandoned microscope,

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a million mountains move."

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