Criterion

My best friend Kenny was coming home for the weekend. Kenny had been away in the military and then college so he didn’t get home often. So when he did, it was a big deal for his friends.

Having so much time on your hands and so little to occupy your mind, people in Deadsville tend towards two extremes. Either numb yourself with alcohol, drugs, sports and other non-cognitive pursuits or start looking for increasingly convoluted and creative ways to look at and live in your life. My friends and me leaned towards the latter. So it had come to our attention that during the last few times that Kenny had visited, an odd confluence of events always happened. These events were:

- all of our pencils got sharpened

- the same crappy band played at the local bar

- our friend Stan got laid

None of these events ever happened without the others. If one happened – say, Stan got laid one night – you could accurately predict that Kenny was going to show up and that when we went to the bar, we would find that same crappy band back.

Now some of these were clearly related. Our pencils got sharpened because Kenny would almost always insist on playing Dungeons and Dragons and bring his pencil sharpener. So our pencils would get sharpened. And we almost always ended up playing D&D because the band sucked so we couldn’t go to the bar.

However, we never could figure out how the band’s tour schedule tied into Kenny’s travels. Nor could we figure out why Stan would always get laid that weekend and thus, miss seeing Kenny. Stan didn’t get laid very often. But you could always count on two things. First, it would always be the weekend that Kenny visited. Second, that Stan’s partner would always be fat and ugly. It became such a certainty that we used to joke about it.

Then one day Stan set us straight. A bunch of us were walking down the street when we passed a very attractive woman. While the rest of us spun around to ogle her as she disappeared in the distance, Stan just kept on walking. When one of us commented on how Stan only likes fat and ugly women, he corrected us with, “She doesn’t have to be fat”. At least some things could be explained.