SLU IN STEREO

The Whole Foods in South Lake Union: You were the human stereo at the salad bar, wearing a backpack that doubled as a sound system pumping out club-level decibels. Did you just get back from Burning Man? If you're so enamored of the club environment that you must bring it with you everywhere, would it kill you to have better taste in music?

MADISON AND BOREN, PENIS IN HAND

You were walking with your penis hanging out of your pants. Occasionally, absentmindedly, you touched it. Then you walked into a store.

CHILDHOOD = SADNESS

You: a hyper, red-haired kid waiting for a light on Capitol Hill. "Mommy, when we get home, can we play a little?" you asked. You have already mastered the art of asking for just a little. She said yes.

AMAZON, PRIMED

It was unclear how you got there, but suddenly you were caught in plastic twine strung up between street trees on Stewart Street, near Seventh Avenue—in the temporary federal security zone for when President Xi Jinping was in town. You were wearing an Amazon Prime T-shirt. Flustered, you untangled your bike from the mess.

SHAKE WHAT OFF?

You were driving down Broadway in a beat-up coupe, car-dancing to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off." Your sunglasses were cheap, your shimmy game strong. But what were you shaking off so expertly?

EVER-REST AT CINERAMA

At the end of the man-versus-nature escapade called Everest, the screen is filled with dead bodies. When the credits rolled on this anti-dramatic nightmare and the lights rose in the majestic Cinerama, your heads were tilted back and your mouths were agape—not from shock, but from actual sleep. People passed you on the way out, torn between wanting to wake you and not wanting to disrupt the only enjoyable thing they had seen for the past couple hours.

INNOCENT WHEN YOU DREAM

The cabinet with the FREE sign had been on the stoop for a good two or three days at that point, and finally it had a good use. At 9:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, you were standing but asleep, your head resting on the cabinet, your face barely visible under your hood, sheltered from the rest of the world.

STEP ONE

Downtown at Fourth and University, you were walking fast as you held your cell phone away from your ear. "I need to know," you told the ear on the other end, "where's an AA meeting right now?"

TREE ASSAULT IN DENNY PARK

Confidential to the tan, muscular bald guy throwing what looked like acorns at very specific parts of the surrounding trees: Don't worry. The one ring has been destroyed. The Ents are no threat. Or were you trying to kill a squirrel with its own food? If so, that hardly explains why you then entered a crab pose and began to crawl toward the sidewalk.

SLOW AND SNOTTY

You were walking down Harvard Avenue at a turtle's pace with a jug of milk and two feet of thick, clear snot hanging from your nose. You stopped as if in a stupor and your head hung down. Let's hope you get the help you need.

TABLED ON THOMAS

You were both balancing a queen-size mattress on your heads as you hup-hupped down the hill. Taken together, you looked like a walking dinner table. In this way, you were also the furniture you were moving.

FREE MOPS, USED

You proudly leaned a bunch of unwanted mops against a large tree that resides on a quiet block on Capitol Hill. As if someone wanted your old Swiffer. As if this tree had not suffered enough indignities.

PINE STREET (DOG) SERENADE

You were walking a golden Labradoodle as a wailing ambulance rushed down Pine Street. Your dog quickly sat and began to howl an answer to the ambulance. It continued to do this for some time after the ambulance passed, and the creature's beautiful howl—more soulful than a siren but no less urgent—made you and everyone else around stop and smile.

"NERD" WAS TAKEN

You were driving a red Mini Cooper downtown with a vanity plate that read "PROG." This makes you the baddest iconoclast in Washington.

THE HAND-RAVING OF BUS 49

Hey, you, the one in the red Mercer Island sweatshirt practicing an elaborate hand-raving routine on the 49 bus: Was that bagpipe electronica you were listening to on your headphones? No matter. When you made your hands into the shape of a turtle (or was it a bird?), you took that shit next level.

SECRET-SERVICE CODE NAME: SINGLE?

You were playing with your phone at the end of a Starbucks counter in the downtown security zone, looking all dapper in your black suit with a coiled earpiece sticking out of your collar. You had nice shoes and broad ex-military shoulders. No doubt you know how to body-tackle a threat to national security! Are you on Tinder? We can be discreet.