My kids were goofing around with the hose in the front yard yesterday, sending jets of water hither and yon, as young children are wont to do on a summer day. Their gleeful shrieks and general happy hubbub eventually enticed the dumb neighbor kid to check the situation out.

It wasn’t long before he was staring down the business end of the hose, and in very short order my oldest son blasted him with it, giving him a healthy faceful of our municipal water district’s flagship product. The neighbor kid yelped and screamed, which of course was not unexpected—I myself had hollered and protested when I found myself the recipient of a hoseborne shower some minutes before—but I was nearly dumbstruck by what the neighbor kid said next, his brow furrowed in confusion:

"Why am I wet?"

It was all I could do to keep from either cussing or throwing my hedge clippers at him, just to punish him for saying something so stupid. Although I can’t bring myself to actually believe he failed to comprehend his situation’s underlying causality, such an utterance was so staggeringly inane as to itself defy comprehension.

This kid has got to be missing a chromosome somewhere.