Why is it taking me so long to finish this book I’m reading? I haven’t been that busy – just some volunteer translation. And the book’s interesting enough. And yet I’m proceeding at a very slow pace. I could finish it tonight and then offer up a late review, but my Kindle tells me there’s 2 hours of reading left.

So what to write instead? Post a YouTube video? Did that last night. Writing advice? The night before that. Report on my afternoon movie viewing? Today it was one of the Renfrew of the Mounted Police series, and it wasn’t memorable for anything except the original concept that a group of thieves at an airfield would kill their enemies by sabotaging their own airplanes – an expensive modus operandi, that one.

Today the weather was beautiful, and I didn’t get out in it at all. Should have, but the sidewalks are still icy, and I need to remember I’m an old man with hips made in China (I assume that’s where they were made – everything else is). When I was younger I had other excuses for not going for a walk, but this one should last me the rest of my life.

My volunteer translation project is moving along. I figure it’s better to take the tortoise strategy – I do one page a day, every day, rather than wearing myself out on a long, obsessive session one day, then being too tired of it the next day to do anything. I’m better than half-way through, so steady as she goes. That’s how I write novels too. When I write them at all.

Personal note: Like so many American men, I’ve gone about a year without a haircut. I’ve now reached the point where I can tie my mane up in a queue and it doesn’t all work itself out in floating strands over the course of the day. I remember a time, back during the tumultuous ‘70s, when I facetiously told my dad I was thinking of growing a bicentennial queue for 1776. He was not amused.

It’s not a ponytail, by the way. It’s tied low, at the nape of the neck. In my world, a ponytail sits high on the back of the head, and resembles the south end of a north-bound horse. Girls have ponytails. I have a queue.

One advantage is that when they come to take us away to the re-education camps, I might be able to sneak away through the crowd, disguised as an old member of the Weather Underground.