“There’s the thing you plan to do, and then there’s the thing you end up doing. Most of us start off our lives with some Plan A which we abandon... switching to a Plan B, which becomes our life.”
Excerpts from THE ACCURSED ITEMS by J. Robert Lennon
as listened to on THIS AMERICAN LIFE: Plan B (May 2013 episode).
A Minnie Mouse doll you found by the roadside and brought home intending to run it through the washer and give it to your infant son but which looked no less forlorn after washing and was abandoned on a basement shelf only to be found by your son eight years later and mistaken for a once-loved toy that he himself had forsaken leading to his first real experience of guilt and shame.
Love letters seized by federal agents in an unsuccessful drug raid, tested in a lab for traces of cocaine, exhaustively read for references to drug contacts, sealed in a labeled plastic bag, and packed along with a plush bear holding a plastic red heart into an unlabeled brown cardboard box, itself, loaded into a truck with hundreds of similar boxes when the police headquarters was moved, and forever lost.
An icicle preserved in the freezer by a child, which, when discovered months later, is thought to be evidence of a problem with the appliance, leading to a costly and inconclusive diagnostic exam by a repairman.
A biscuit crushed into the slush of a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot.
The orange toboggan whisking her to her death.
The houseplant that will not die.
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Upon graduating high school decided to skip college for a music career and sailed for Seattle but marooned in Olympia for a few miserable months that emptied back out to California to a glorified file clerk position made bearable only by the design classes taken on the side in order to build a portfolio that would impress the administration enough that they open the gates to Art Center where madness was required to gain the kind of skills to land the kind of job that led to the kind of restlessness that lit the fuse to escape to Austin where things are less complicated and life is complete despite the job offer in San Francisco hanging in the air.