A brief story, completely unrelated to the photos below:

I was in Home Depot this past Sunday, buying gravel with my contractor friend Orion. We’re standing in the checkout line, getting ready to put the payment forth on 20 bags of rock, when a gentleman of about 50 saunters into the store. This man looks like the quintessential construction worker; grey hair in a ponytail, paint and sheetrock dust covering his garments, and a face that told the story of his multiple tours on a swift boat in the canals of Vietnam.

Anyway, Orion turns to me, and says, “Is that guy wearing a fucking Whynatte hoodie???”

I look up at the construction worker, but his thorax is blocked by the cash register. I can see that he’s wearing a hoodie, and I catch a glimpse of some white lettering on the front. “You’ve got to run up there and find out if he’s wearing a Whynatte hoodie,” I tell Orion.

Orion darts after this man, and returns with a look of glee in his eyes. Indeed, the fellow was wearing a Whynatte hoodie. Orion reports that, when asked about the origin of the hoodie, the man said, “I don’t have a clue where I got it from, or what it is, but people come up and ask me about it all of the time.”

Orion informed him that the Whynatte is actually an alcoholic beverage, which made the man very happy to hear, most likely because the majority of construction workers are alcoholics with serious meth habits. I was happy because it’s good to know that people are asking him about the hoodie all of the time (see: recognition, brand). Orion was happy because he found out that he would go porpoise hunting with his biological father in the spring time.

The following photos, while extremely interesting, will not be discussed in further detail:

What I find interesting, is the fact that this man did not know where he had received the Whynatte hoodie that he was wearing. I, for one, do not have any articles of clothing which I wear on a regular basis, yet do not know the origin of.

Also of interest is the fact that the hoodie he was wearing was a one of a kind color. It was this sort of off grey color, and we only made one of them, and the one we made belonged to a friend named Tom. So, this construction worker doesn’t know how he ended up with it, and somehow it made its way from Tom to him.

I consulted Matt, my Ivy League educated friend about this situation, and this was his modest, reasonable conclusion:

Tom clearly ripped off that sweatshirt in a drunken stupor and left it in a bar in Mexico City, where the man — a migrant bounty hunter looking for a change of profession — donned it, and that very same night in a peyote-induced craze decided that he would move to the city of Atlanta and become a construction worker.

Allow me to suggest, for a moment, that maybe that man in the Whynatte hoodie was actually Tom. Is it too much of a stretch to say that perhaps when Orion and I entered the Home Depot, we were actually transported through a time portal into the year 2032? We did think it strange that everyone was wearing helmets in the store, but dismissed it as a reaction to the cold weather. What we may have actually seen was Tom at the age of 50. When Orion asked him where he had gotten the hoodie, so many years had passed, that he couldn’t remember where he had gotten it from.