There oughta be a word, and I oughta be able to make it up. But I’m either too lazy, too stupid, or too sleepy to do that, so I’ll stick with a lot of well-known words to describe a phenomenon that I suspect we are all familiar with. I’ll start with Dishwasher Syndrome.

I admire the writer John Scalzi for several reasons, including his impressive body of work and the fact that he is the father of a 13-year-old girl. If you’ve never been the father of a 13-year-old girl, then you don’t know. You THINK you know. You DON’T.

When the average person ponders Greek philosophers, most of whom are now dead, we tend to skip over the really interesting ones and focus on the empiricists. This is odd, considering that empiricists were historically the least liked of ancient Greeks. They were never invited to philosophy parties. They were teased all the time about their dumb talk of trees falling in forests not making sounds, etc. Tim Tebow has been treated better that empiricists.

Wallace Amos is an American success story by any measure. A child of a broken home, Wally dropped out of high school to join the Air Force, where he had a distinguished career. After discharge, he moved up in the entertainment business from literally the bottom, starting as a secretary and becoming the first African American talent agent at the famous William Morris Agency.

I entered 2012 the same way I left it, by which I mean wearing the same clothes. So no big deal. I’m notoriously unsentimental about the New Year’s holiday, although “notoriously” is a relative term; I guess you could check with some of my friends. Let’s just say none of them invited me to parties.

There’s something to be said for waiting in line, something that probably shouldn’t be printed in a family newspaper. Let’s just say that it causes me to reflect a lot on human nature – mine and that of the humans ahead of me. I mean, ATMs have been a fixture for 30 years. You should know how to use them by now.

It was an easy climb, at least for a skinny teenager. One foot on a concrete fence, the other on a small shed. It was all in the legs, and in seconds I was on the roof.

An old friend met me for coffee in Edmonds last Saturday, and as we stood on the sidewalk afterward in the drizzle, wrapping things up, I pointed out the Edmonds Bookstore just down the block. “Want to go look around?” I asked and he shook his head, rolled his eyes, and took a couple of steps backward for good measure. For all I know he was close to reaching for a gun or a big chunk of kryptonite.

A couple of times a year, I make tacos for myself. It could be more than a couple of times, since I’m thinking that saturated fat has an effect on my memory. There’s no skill involved in these tacos; in fact, skill would probably ruin the experience. Tacos are simple creatures, tortillas and filling, although I’ve certainly had some fancy ones. This is not the point.

There are people in this world who would not take kindly to your observation that they appear to be losing weight, but statistically speaking these are people you don’t know. Statistically speaking, the average man or woman in this country is overweight, something that makes me wonder if I really understand what “average” means.

According to AARP, an otherwise reputable organization, I am some sort of senior citizen. This is ridiculous, as loyal readers know. I’m barely past adolescence. I haven’t picked a major yet. I’m #this close# to moving back in with my parents. I eat CRAZY stuff. What it feels like, in fact, is that I’ve been somehow crammed into a grown-up costume at a moment when I wasn’t paying attention, possibly during a colonoscopy.

It was a dark and stormy night. In the distance, a dog was barking. Could have been a couple of dogs. And the lights went out, then, not in a flickering way but just out, boom. Our first power outage of any duration in this house in years, brought on by wind or human error, we never found out. It was minor, only my immediate neighborhood; from the window I could see lights on a block away. It was unfair.

Thirty years ago, as three former U.S. Presidents – Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon – gathered for a photograph, Sen. Robert Dole made an observation. “There they are,” he commented. “See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Evil.”

My daughter, at the age of 26, began graduate school this fall. I approve of this for several reasons, among them my general belief in higher education and my other general belief in things I don’t have to pay for.

The sign was pretty clear, as far as signs go. Big. Bright. Flashing. “Accident at 50th,” it said. “Expect long delays.” This was at an onramp to I-5 on Saturday afternoon, up here in Snohomish County, far away from 50th. I was heading downtown, needing to get there at a specific time and for a specific reason, which I will explain.

I’m a skeptic when it comes to memories, mine in particular, having been burned a few times in this column. Meaning I’ve written about something that happened years ago, only to be corrected after publication by a person who shall remain nameless but has the initials My Mom.

There was a sense of irony in last week’s news, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go. “Irony” is a loaded term, policed as it is by word-usage authorities (i.e., anyone who likes to comment online), and as much fun as it is to annoy those people I want to be accurate. So there was just a sense of irony, a feeling, a mood. And while there was plenty of news, a sure sign that summer is over, a fair amount of it focused on “Occupy Wall Street” and its franchises around the country.

In this house, October rides in on syllabi, as if a strong September wind blew through an open window and scattered many, many pieces of white paper. I live with a college professor who spends all summer thinking about her fall classes and then most of an autumn weekend printing stuff out.

I’ve found myself thinking of Kurt Vonnegut’s calendar recently. The late Mr. Vonnegut, at various times and places throughout his long career, suggested that four seasons weren’t enough, that we needed to insert two more into our annual line-up. These would bracket winter, as I remember, and he called them Locking and Unlocking.

I see my father all the time. It’s been eight years since he passed away, and still I recognize him, on the street, in the store, walking by. Not so much in the mirror, but sometimes mirrors can be tricky. If there’s a resemblance, though, it stops with superficial genetics, which is why I spot him in strangers. I want to call him an American archetype, although I’m sure he exists in another cultures.