Sometimes you can see something coming. This little voice somewhere inside you says: "Oh, this is going to be bad," but both of you know there's nothing you can do about except it keep going. It's the poor man's ESP, the Tiawanese off-brand action figure of prophecy with all its rough edges and bad paint jobs.

And it will hit you in the strangest places. Just last week, I was on the S-Bahn platform at Tiergarten, and I saw a little lady reading the S-Bahn map while holding the leash of a huge dog. A assumed it was a pit bull, because I assume all huge black dogs with brown belly fur are pit bulls, but I don't actually know. But, as far as this story is concerned, it was a huge, evil dog of hell, kept chained by Odin before his throne of skulls, wearing a tight orange spandex shirt. I wish I were making that part up, but I'm not. I'm really not.

I look at the dog, and the dog looks at me. We stare. I blink. He doesn't doesn't. "This," I say, "is going to bad places." I walk on, past the old lady toward my exit, and the dog jumps at me, gurgling. I don't know if he wanted to play or tie knots in my arteries, but it's all pretty much the same to me; having over a hundred pounds of dog jump at you on a stone train stop looks pretty much the same, either way you cut it. But the little lady caught him before he actually made it to me, save for a nice swat on my legs with one of its hell-paws, so I guess I'll never know. I'll never know.

What I do know is that prostitutes on Oranienburger Straße are very....persistent, we'll say. I'll just say here that I don't really have anything against being solicited, really, because it's their job. It's what they do. My job is to turn say "no" and go on with my life. As long as both of our parts are respected, I'm cool. An arm around the shoulder? That's a bit much, but it's not binding, so to speak, and again, as long as I can shrug it off and go on, no problem.

But in no way does grabbing onto my arm with both hands, looping them around the elbow, and pulling as hard as you can fit into the social contract between prostitute and disinterested person who just wants a beer. No, when DPWJWB says "no," and leans forward against your weight and pulls forward, I'm pretty sure that's a sign that this isn't going to go your way. I mean, there were hundreds of people in the street that night; there had to be someone up for her....services.

And here again, I knew this wasn't going to go anywhere good as soon as I saw her. Both of us did, me and the other American on my hall; we both knew that one of us was going to get it, and Lo! and Behold, it was I. I must have a kind of prostitute/hell dog beacon around my neck. Or maybe it's something more fundimental, something innate and unavoidable, like a stomach ache after a bag of gummy bears. Have I met my destiny? If I have, I must embrace it, take up my cross and sell my speeder at Mos Eisley space port. But if this turns out to be some kind of innane evolutionary adaptation that's run its course, like the appendix, me and Darwin are going to have some words.