Why is is that?

Because everything is about sex.

Since I’m both sensible and lazy, I joined in the San Francisco Iditarod, an event clearly superior to the original. For starters, there wasn’t a single dog in the race. And instead of sleds, teams of humans in preposterous outfits pulled shopping carts through San Francisco’s main thoroughfares. Empty shopping carts are notoriously unstable, so each of the dozens of teams filled their carts with large quantities of beer and wine.

After police on motorcycles showed up to block traffic, the hundreds of participants raced through town screaming and barking, much to the delight of tourists who saw the San Francisco sights they expected.

In order to avoid heat prostration, exhaustion, et cetera, the Iditarod organizers forced the enthusiastic racers to take twenty-minute rest breaks every few hundred meters. The participants took advantage of every stop; they drank prodigious amounts of beer and wine to replace the fluids lost in the previous sprint.

The racers consumed most of the alcohol by the fifth leg, and that’s when the trouble started. The exhausted participants had difficulty controlling the empty, unstable carts. I watched a number of weak Iditarodders stumble and fall when they failed to negotiate the sharp turn onto the Embarcadero’s uneven brick roadway. I was distressed by the sight of so many bloody elbows and knees and so many overturned shopping carts in puddles of spilled beer that I left.

I sped away from the grim tableau on my bicycle and enjoyed a restorative burrito.

This is going to be fun!

“You sure have a big mouth,” she said.

“And a gracious good afternoon to you,” I replied. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

“It seems that everyone in town has heard about a certain incident with the meat helmets,” Vaughn grumbled, “which was supposed to be our little secret.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I protested, “I was very discreet.”

“Do you call it discreet when you tell half the people we know what happened?” Vaughn shot back.

“Look, I can keep a secret,” I protested, “so don’t blame me if the people I tell them to can’t.”

Actually, I don’t know a single thing about Flexner except that he wrote an essay, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” which was published in the October 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The title alone is enough for me to conclude that Flexner was a brilliant guy.

I’m thinking of doing a variation on Flexner’s article; I’ll call it, “The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge.” I suspect thinking about such a piece is as far as I’ll get; I’m too lazy to actually write it.

I can’t eat a carrot in front of Hilda. If I do, she disparages them as, “the laziest of the lower fruits, creatures that rejoice in the underworld.”

I almost never tell anyone they’re wrong, even of it’s an objectively true observation that no carrot has ever joined the fruit tribe. Hilda doesn’t need to know that.

“Much alcohol was drunk,” he reported, “and so was I.”

I suppose there’s really not too much to saw about a wake that’s not more or less a priori knowledge.