Hello and Jon, on the floor.

This morning I petted Hello, the cat my family feeds. I happened upon it as it lay lounging in the sunlight, like pagan royalty. Without explanation I flopped prone down next to it, and extended my hand. Hello took little notice, and continued to service the immediate needs of its back by rolling back and forth on the carpet. However, my hand, proving by its movements to be more in line with Hello's agenda of satisfying ever-present itch, established for itself a place of primacy among Hello's fund of nearby objects against which to rub an itchy body. I thought to myself how itchiness truly is ever-present for Hello. This cat's life is devoted to the stimulation of its fur, and it will be not be sated. Considered renaming cat Sisyphus. Or, I thought, if not a single physical craving, there is a small set of basic appetites--itchiness, hunger, horniness--that Hello will tend to for its feline lifetime. And there I was, stupidly stretched out on the floor, scratching the cat, helping it along merrily merrily merrily. I saw in Hello some reduction of myself: although I boast a chorus of (perhaps) subtler and more sophisticated iterations of desire, it is difficult not to think of the range of my behavior as at root an ongoing, elaborate, idiotic scratch.

These were my thoughts just before Hello started playing with my hand: biting it, holding it in its front paws, kicking at it with its back paws--behavior apparently gratuitous. And me, playing along, also without explanation.