When you haven’t mowed the lawn for an awful long time, you wonder two things. When I pull the chord, will the engine catch and turn over? And, if I get the thing started, does it have any shot at getting through the thicket that’s grown while I was busy doing other things?

Wondering is almost a waste of time though. Pull the chord. Push forward. Find out.

So here I am, fresh out of the time machine, in a different place, a different person, all the cells in my body having very probably replaced themselves in the offing. Part of any theory of self involves a continuity between the mind in one moment and the next. The kid who scraped his knee falling of his bike when he was eight is the same person as the man who lays here on the small couch by the front window, typing away, at fifty-one.

That seems like just a story we tell ourselves though, a necessary lie.

Humans don’t love impermanence. We don’t truck well with ambiguity. And a sense of self is sort of the foundation of our idea of ourselves as distinct and worthwhile individuals. The older I get the more I like the idea of a floating consciousness, one not attached to the past, one that just exists right now, the inner workings of an individual with a hazy memory and good intentions.

This is a long and arduous way of saying that I’d love to explain to you what I’ve been up to over the last two years, but it would just be a story, a way of making sense out of the daily chaos that accrues into weekly and monthly versions of the same.

And anyway the opening metaphor doesn’t really work. I have an electric mower now. Chordless. It starts if I’ve remembered to charge the battery, and it cuts quietly and efficiently. It even pushes itself forward, if I ask it to.