I like to make excuses when confronted with annoying questions relating to various responsibilities that I’ve neglected.

“Nick, why didn’t you turn in the homework assignment?”

Because my dog ate my homework, I took my dog to my dentist appointment, my dentist ate my dog, I ate my dentist and I wound up in the emergency room with clean teeth and a savage case of constipation.

Cannibalism has its drawbacks, but I’ve yet to experience any real regrets as a result of my rampant excuse-making. Making excuses is the perfect way to deflect blame and preserve my pristine self-concept. You see – I’m a winner. Winners don’t make mistakes. We make excuses.

This column has been pretty good so far. I’m writing about making excuses and I seem to be heading toward some sort of logical conclusion. It’s going to be a pretty fun journey for the next few hundred words, isn’t it? Not really. I’m about to transition to something completely irrelevant. This transition will be crude and amateurish. The remainder of this article will be crude and amateurish. This is the transition.

Celery tastes like dirty water. “Mork & Mindy” was the best show on TV for the entire duration of its 95- episode run. The first time I ate a Now and Later, the candy got stuck to my braces and ripped one of the brackets off my tooth. There’s this one scene in “Commando” where Arnold Schwarzenegger holds Sully over the edge of a cliff and tells him that he’s holding him with his weak arm. He then drops Sully to his doom. Millard Fillmore was the 13th President of the United States.

Whoa. Where the hell did that nonsense come from? It was completely incoherent. Now I look like a shitty writer who’s so desperate for ideas that he’s forced to spew nonsense in order to meet his 5 p.m. Wednesday deadline. Let me assure you that this is all a terrible misunderstanding. It’s not 4:41 p.m. on Wednesday. My deadline isn’t 19 minutes away. I’m not rushing this article so that I can collect another $15 check from the Nexus and buy a box of NHL hockey trading cards from Kmart.

What actually happened is this: My roommate commandeered my computer and tried his hand at writing my column. He sucked at writing, so he quit after two paragraphs. Then he ate my new dog. Then I kicked him out of my house and told him to never come back again. Now I’m back at the keyboard writing about excuses.

I recently realized that excuses aren’t actually very cool after all. It’s a cowardly practice to deny responsibility for your mistakes. If you consistently engage in this sort of behavior, then you might soon find yourself completely alienated from those who have grown weary of your bullshittery. I’ve been meaning to do some additional research on this topic, but this might be difficult because I’ve just been abducted by aliens.

Alien civilization is far more advanced than I ever thought it would be. These aliens are perfect. They don’t lie, swear, swindle or eat fast food. They merely sit around and talk about Marxism all day. I’m not entirely sure why they kidnapped me from my home in the middle of the night, but I consider myself lucky to be among them. They know everything. Their extensive knowledge has allowed me to continue to my exploration of excuse-making.

The little green men tell me that making excuses is indeed an undesirable life strategy. They tell me this strategy can effectively decrease the negative psychological impact of personal failure in the short term, but that it has the ugly long-term consequence of causing mass delusion in those who utilize it extensively. These sad souls come to see themselves as victims of a cruel game. The reality is that they’re typically to blame for their own sad state.

The aliens tell me that each person should take responsibility for their own life if they wish to live to their highest potential. This lesson wasn’t lost on me. I hereby apologize for this article. It would’ve been a lot better, but my newest dog ate my keyboard.

A few years back, Daily Nexus columnist Nick Pasto commandeered an excuse Rolodex from the producers of “Seinfeld.” They later discontinued the show.