I always have to remind myself that on television people and puppets actually can get along, which never made much sense to me.

For instance, on television you might have a friend who is a puppet, and the subject would just never come up, but in the real world it would be very hard to be friends with a puppet because you would always be able to do certain things that it couldn’t, like sleep or digest food. Then finally, after many years of friendship, there would be alienation due to the fact that people grow old and die but puppets never age and are functionally immortal.

For instance you might be on your death bed and you can feel that cold thin veil settling over you, so you dismiss your family and call your best puppet friend Mr. Biscuits to your side, and he sort of waddles up next to you with an awkward look on his face.

“Come closer old friend, I can hardly see your face.”
“Is.. is this better?”
”...Do you remember when we were young and it was spring, we walked in the hills there above the town and it felt so wonderful just to be alive and warm in the sun…”
“Yes, I remember.”
You start to cry because you realize you are going to die soon.
“I wish I could…”
It is hard to talk.
“Well, listen.. you know me, I’ve never been very religious. I’ve tried to live a good life, I have, I just…”
Then Mr. Biscuits gets all silent because in situations like this he usually likes to sing a song called Cheer Up, Frowny-Face, but he senses it might not be appropriate at this particular time.
”... Do you think there could be something after this? Do you ever think about that? Not heaven, necessarily, just maybe… I don’t know… a second chance.”

Mr. Biscuits would just make a hmmm sound and stare at the pictures of your kids and your wife that have been placed next to the bed. He is not being helpful at all.
“Well, yes, hmmm, that’s a tough one,” he’d say.

Puppets don’t understand life and death. That’s why puppets and humans would not get along, even if puppets could be real and all. In the beginning they would resent us in their way for the glory we have in our youth, but as time passed we would deteriorate and, surrounded by entropy, begin to covet their endless, dreamlike half-lives. Senses no longer flushed with the illusions of beauty, we would see that our friendships were just long juggling acts involving mutual jealousy, bitterness and misunderstanding.

The dead envy the living and the living, in the end, envy the puppets. Such is the way of things here on Earth.