Not the banal ones, of what to wear and who to vote for. Identity politics are the dry-docked Camaro on the front yard of modern America, a relic of a bygone era. As fashionable in certain circles as the swastika, and as irrelevant.

I mean the basic ones, of who I am and what I mean to do. I have largely abandoned my earlier aspirations to understand myself and to achieve a measure of professional distinction as a writer. Both are halting problems of one kind or another, hence undecidable.

Which leaves me to decide what to do instead.

I had gathered together all of my rejected stories and spent an evening reading through them to see whether I could determine what I was doing wrong. One thing struck me about all of them: I was overexplaining.

In fiction I am more often guilty of the reverse: sketching the specifics of a scene without building a scaffold to support it.

But in writing about my writing and myself, explanation is the rule rather than exception. Doubtless it becomes as tedious and insulting as Zelazny predicts, once the novelty wears off.

I explain too much, write too much, and so I write too little.

Two days ago I had a mole removed. Not cancerous, not quite, but close enough to be uncomfortable.

Time has been too much on my mind, of late. Would that I had written more, worn more sunscreen, watched the minutes with more care.

As Harlan Ellison wrote, “It’s later than you think.” But not, I think, too late to start.