The UNDERWEAR wasn't really the problem . . .

Police in Gillette, Wyoming, are looking for the guy in the underwear who was cruising the town's tanning parlors. According to the Gillette News-Record, Police started their investigation just before 4 p.m. Saturday when a 17-year-old girl working at Avenue Tans reported the man's odd behavior.

[Police Lieutenant Noland] Peacock said the suspect bought a tanning session and went into the booth. A short time later, he allegedly stepped out and asked for assistance, but he was wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, Peacock said. An attendant helped him, but the man emerged soon after, this time wearing only his underwear, Peacock said. That time, he asked to use the bathroom.

After he left, workers discovered that he had urinated in the medicine cabinet and on other bathroom fixtures, Peacock said.

The fellow apparently repeated this odd behavior at four other tanning parlors in town, as well as passing up a chance to do the same at the Campbell County Recreation Center, when he learning that he'd have to wait for a tanning session there.

It is always possible that our protagonist is entirely psychotic, living in a world created inside his own skull, with no correspondence at all between it and objective reality. In that case, the story is merely sad -- a medical problem.

But I suggest that the repetition at several tanning parlors, along with his diversion from one upon learning there would be a wait, points to some other backstory. I suggest that, to him, this was behavior which -- if grotesque -- remained entirely explicable. It was sensible in a way that you or I would understand if it were explained to us.

I will award the brass figlagee, with bronze oak-leaf cluster, to the reader able to provide the most plausible beginning, middle and end to this odd straw-in-the-wind.