A few years ago in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Howard Moskowitz, a fascinating man with a doctorate from Harvard in psychophysics.

I’m going to avoid the cliché by sideswiping it, a postmodern skill I’m still working on. I was born too late for The Irony Age, but I try to keep a handle on sentiment and hope for the best.

First of all, let me say that I think you’re doing a wonderful thing. You have my respect, admiration and appreciation. My hat’s off to you. Way to go. Keep it up, too. You are reading a newspaper.

There’s not a morbid bone in my body, you know. Creaky bones, but nothing dark. I don’t dwell, at least not these days.

This is how crazy I’ve become: The other day I made frozen yogurt.

Given the nature of this column, I long ago passed the threshold for at least the appearance of narcissism. In a world of war, disease, ecological disasters, financial crisis and Mel Gibson, surely there’s something else to write about besides my stupid life.

One day before the sun came out – and I’m confident that’s the way we’ll always refer to 2010 in the future – my son and I watched a documentary about the early days of the space program.

had an unpleasant Fourth of July, not that you asked, mostly due to rowdy neighbors who made questionable, extralegal choices regarding explosives.

I hauled the ironing board out of the closet the other day, and heading down the hall past my son’s room I decided to make a joke. “Hey,” I said, trying to distract him from Mass Effect Halo Galaxy Land or something, “did you ever see one of these before?”

To suggest that modern society has developed a severe attention deficit wouldn’t be original or even fair, considering that I’m as a guilty as anyone and boy I can’t remember where I was going with this. Wait. Now I do, sorry.

I had lunch this past weekend with friends in Kirkland, enjoying the company and the view of Lake Washington and looking, I imagine, like the resident of Snohomish County that I am, wearing jeans instead of shorts. Everyone else had on shorts. Even the dogs.

You either understand The HD Effect or you will. You sit there, smug and satisfied, knowing that your old TV is perfectly fine, and then something happens. It breaks, something, and you go to high definition. And you spend a weekend watching The Rodent Network, because rodents are interesting when they’re all nice and sharply defined.

“Have you seen the truck yet?” asked the owner of the place, an older man with gray hair, whose eyes narrowed but sparkled, a half-smile crossing his craggy face.

The other day my optometrist told me I have young eyes. Just came right out and said, “You have young eyes.” I couldn’t wait to tell my wife. “The optometrist said I have young eyes,” I told her, eager to share.

A guy came to my door the other day and we spent a few minutes engaging in socially acceptable discourse, although with different motives. He was trying to get me to invest in some home improvement products. I was sort of bored that day.

You can’t choose your relatives, it’s been said, although I don’t know why we have to pick on family. We don’t have a choice in a lot of matters, including weather, neighbors, and pants that supposedly have a 32-inch waist but apparently were designed for Scarlett O’Hara.

Spring and walking are both redemptive for me, since warm weather and atonement go hand in hand and I have a multitude of sins, a lot of them involving refined sugar. Winter. It can send you to some bad places, and most of those serve doughnuts.

I was trying to be domestic the other day, looking at a full sink and wishing someone would get around to inventing a machine that washes dishes for you, so I put on some Beach Boys music. I tend to flail sometimes when it comes to inspiration. My 20-year-old son was not inspired at all, although he liked the music, and after listening for a bit he had a good question

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” a friend of mine said once, with a serious look on her face. “That’s so funny,” I said. “I was just now thinking the exact same thing!” In a true and just world, I would get more credit for jokes.

I’m tempted to extrapolate, the polite way of saying I want to make stuff up. I can’t help it. I want to give him a story, a history and a life full of odd coincidences and trivial choices that turned out to be momentous when viewed through the lens of hindsight. I at least want to make him 33 years old, and therefore a contemporary of a Springfield, Illinois man who was just starting a career in law.