This is my caption on drugs.

Under normal circumstances, I'm not one to accuse unseen strangers of using hallucinogenic drugs on the job. Nor do I have many competitive tendencies.

That said, I'd like to announce that I wholeheartedly forgive the judges of the New Yorker's cartoon caption contest for neglecting to select my recent entry as one of the finalists. Drug addiction is a disease, and those who suffer from it deserve forgiveness, understanding, and help -- not criticism.

If you're unfamiliar with the caption contest, it works like this: Each week, the New Yorker publishes an uncaptioned cartoon and invites readers to send in caption suggestions. The editors then meet to select three finalists, based on criteria such as humor, creativity, wit, and which entries look like they have the fewest bugs crawling on them. The three finalists are then published so that readers from across the country and around the world can vote for the best caption.

The entry I submitted was for a cartoon that depicted a string quintet on a stage. Four instrumentalists were looking in shock and anguish at a truck with monster wheels that had apparently driven onstage, crushing their chairs, music stands, etc. The fifth instrumentalist was standing calmly out in front of them, center stage, mouth open, apparently addressing the audience. Now I'm not saying that my entry ("License plate CAE 7706, your vehicle is parked in a tow-away zone.") is better than the three captions that were published in this week's issue; I'm just saying that mine is better than at least one of them.

Nevertheless, I hereby graciously congratulate the three finalists.

And, of course, I'm not really upset with the judges. I'm sure that they do their best, and I'm sure that they have many more important things to do throughout the day than read cartoon captions. I'm sure that the caption judging is the LAST thing on their to-do lists before they get to go home, and naturally they want to finish it as quickly as possible so they can go home and watch C-SPAN.

And C-SPAN, I've heard, is much funnier when you're high.