Well, guys, we regret to inform you, but it's official: The fruit salad of our lives has one less banana.
Ben Carson's quest for the presidential nomination, according to NBC News, is officially no mas.
The famed surgeon announced the news during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and after weeks of barely registering in primaries and polls.
"There's a lot of people who love me, they just won't vote for me," Carson said during his speech.
Not that it was unexpected at this point, given that in the wake of not-even-slightly moving the needle on Super Tuesday, he stated he does "not see a political path forward" for his candidacy.
He also had a thing or two to say about the current state of affairs in terms of the primary field he just left.
Thursday night, Carson did not participate in the 11th Republican candidate debate, and he's probably glad he didn't, given that the two biggest highlights of the night involved discussion of penis size and (what might have been) a candidate eating a booger.
He said of that level of dialogue in, you know, the race to determine the most powerful person in the world, was "kinda funny but it's very sad that we've reached that point."
After all, with frontrunner Donald Trump on the verge of exposing himself and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz ingesting a mystery globule (all on national television!), only Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have to gain.
"We cannot afford to give the Democrats this kind of ammunition," he said. "We have already supplied them with an enormous amount of material. Could we just stop?"
But it might not yet be curtains for Carson's political foray.
Word on the street is, some GOP bigwigs might have bent his ear on what a wonderful U.S. Senator from Florida he would make (yep, they always end up here, don't they?). That's the seat Marco Rubio is vacating to run for president. The GOP primary field in that race is crowded, and its frontrunner at this point, according to polls, is U.S. Congressman David Jolly, but plenty of respondents to said polls have no idea who anyone in the race is, and probably don't know what the Senate does. (Seriously, have you tried asking your neighbor who their Congressional representative is? Yeah, don't, unless you're in the mood for a good cry.)
Carson, who has been on the national political stage for about a year, give or take, has the kind of name recognition that could really appeal to voters (for many of whom, familiarity trumps [that's too easy] qualifications or even the ability to string together a coherent sentence).
So stay tuned on that front.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2016.