This a completely true story, and it is less than an hour old.

I just love spring.

It's getting warmer, and that can mean only one thing: the hookers are coming back to Park avenue and S. Sixth. There are a few plucky ones who hang out all year, but now that the weather isn't so bad (it was 90 yesterday!) they will soon be out en force.

I just got solicited while going through the drive-thru at Whataburger at South Sixth and (Ajo?). The woman was about forty years old, Hispanic, and she looked like a normal soccer mom. She was pretending to talk on a pay phone just past the window, so when you drive away you're still going slow with your window down. It's a perfect setup.

"Hey, want your dick sucked?"

Those of you who know me, know of the saran-wrapped man incident of 1994. That also happened to me while I was at a Whataburger drive-thru window, and I do not eat there that often.

The Saran Wrap man made an appearance in my short story, "A Trailer Park Fairy Tale." He didn't say anything to me in real life, but in the story he asks my protag if he can give him a blow job.

Now it really happened. Full circle.

I always look back at that first incident as a sort of turning point. I was having a bad day, on my way home from a gig with my band. I stop at the drive-thru, and while I'm waiting, the Saran Wrap man walks by on the sidewalk in front of me. A completely naked, fat black man wrapped head to toe in what I believe is Saran Wrap. The man looks at me for a moment, and he keeps going. As I pull out, he is gone.

A fraternity prank? A mental patient? A guy playing sex games, suddenly kicked out and trudging home? I don't know, but it was one of the weirdest things I'd ever seen.

Just when you start to think life is falling into a pattern, an inevitable system that doesn't exist except to support itself, a wrench comes flying out of nowhere and tosses gears everywhere.

Yet life still goes on.

The very next day, after that incident, I started writing what would eventually become my first published short story.

The hooker isn't nearly as provocative, until you put it in context. The circle is complete.

Life is strange, it is amazing, it is horrible. It is forty hours a week, doing the same thing over and over. It is hookers at the drive-thru.

It is without pattern, no matter what they say. Even if there is a full circle, it doesn't repeat itself. This day, this new day is different.

It is spring.