It’s 2013 already. The rate at which calendar pages blow past means there’s not enough time to school you on the ever titillating suffixal differences — which are also cultural and racial — between the -er and the -a. White folks want to say the word soooo badly it’s funny.    

I am a compulsive list-maker. I keep the calendars that kept the appointments, lists and abandoned ideas from years gone by.   

The end is an equation with a repeating decimal. Worse yet, the end is like spending decades watching a television stuck on a channel broadcasting shows with dreadful, predictable endings, yet living another day to watch those same shows again.    

There is a profoundly false sense of security not only on the campus of the University of Cincinnati but also surrounding it, and this isn’t anything new.   

 Even Christopher Smitherman and Christopher Finney must roll over in the middle of the night in the strange bed they share and look at one another and wonder: How the hell’d this happen   

Once upon a time, there lived a presumptuous and possibly troubled, grown-ass man who made his living by pitching his voice cartoonishly high to the precipice of nasal annoyance.    

I was awakened by these sentences in the pre-dawn darkness of Sunday morning. Makes sense. It was our dear mother’s favorite time of day, her favorite day of the week.  

Asking the beautiful, shiny revelers occupying the part of Vine Street comprising Gateway Quarter to recall and meditate on the April 2001 riots, curfews and economic boycotts that erupted after then-police officer Stephen Roach shot and killed Timothy Thomas on Republic Street is impossible.  

I have never before felt so simultaneously relieved to vote and deterred from it in all my life. And it’s because of astounding voter turnout.  

This is an all-out race and class war. If you’re voting for the re-election of President Barack Obama then you’re either black; an unthreatened/progressive white; or a minority who’s been offended, discounted or demonized by Gov. Mitt Romney, Republicans and/or the Tea Party.   

News of the Oct. 10 death of Skandal (government name: Marcus Mitchell, aka Skan, Skandizzle and Skandal Da Ruckus Man) after a protracted battle with leukemia pinged through the ether like a metal ball in a pinball game.   

Miami University is a sick, sick campus in desperate need of the largest group therapy session ever recorded, top-rung leadership more palpably concerned with student safety and a less corporate approach to media relations.  

I was a ripe, sitting target for a bully when I entered the fourth grade at Heritage Hill Elementary School in Springdale: I was a shy 9-year-old; my single mother was settling her three kids after abruptly leaving our father and bouncing about in a station wagon.
  

What now passes for Black Entertainment Television (BET) gives me a headache, makes me woozy and embarrassed. Didn’t always.  

Like an Old Testament miracle, Chick-fil-A founders last week reversed themselves and decided to stop contributing chicken sandwich money to organizations spearheading the right-wing conservative movement to dismantle same-sex marriage nationwide.