Of the many amusements for which I have no especial talent—crosswords and chess come painfully to mind—the one that is nagging me now is The New Yorker's biweekly cartoon caption contest.

I like to think I am a reasonably clever guy. I don't go around saying it, but I have to admit sometimes I'm thinking it. But whenever I see that cartoon, my mind goes utterly blank. I mean, take a look at this week's:


I got nothin. NOTHIN. Zilch. Put a gun to my head, you'd have to shoot me. I could not for the life of me come up with a caption. Not just not come up with a halfway witty one, but nothing at all. Nada. Well, maybe "Grrrr." I mean, how sad is that?

And the thing that bugs me about it is that there's this common thread that runs through all those New Yorker cartoons. This kind of smug cocktail party urbanity, slyly self-deprecating, but self-congratulatory at the same time. I mean, it's not like I don't get the captions, I just can't come up with them myself.

And this has started to gnaw at me. Little by little, issue by issue, ever since they started this contest a year or more ago. At first I sort of brushed it off. I was like, so this week's caption escapes me. It's a fluke. Next issue it'll come to me just like that. But then the next issue would come, and nothing.

Even the no-brainers got past me. I must have stared at the one where this couple is entertaining a friend in their apartment amongst all this ridiculously supersized furniture my whole commute to work when it came out. And the winning caption from Janice Sniker of Fremont Ohio (OHIO, for the love of God!) was so obvious: "You know how it is—first you buy the giant-screen television, then nothing else seems to match." What did I come up with after a forty minute commute? "Gee, your furniture is big." Um, grrr?

Now, recently, Metro has started a caption contest, and this is adding to the creeping certainty that I've got early-onset Alzheimer's. Because these I can do. It's horrifying. I mean:

I was on it.