From the North 40: My best laid, half-cracked plans

Today’s column is brought to you by anxiety, a wholly owned subsidiary of deep dilemma, which is on a mission to provide my every thought a bumpy ride on the worry bus to crazy town.

The problem is that thoughts are like seeds, like billowing fluffy-bottomed seeds off a cottonwood tree. Our brains produce these cottony seeds by the millions. They float around aimlessly, getting sucked into your lungs, drug into the house and mashed into the carpet. They pile up in drifts and, for the most part, basically come to nothing. The most you can hope for is that a bunch of the seeds will feed some hungry birds.

But every once in a while, when the conditions are right, a thought will sprout into a gloriously life-filled squiggle that will take root in a minuscule, yet grand, display of life.

It is at that moment of root-taking that the problem changes, and it changes for the worse. Unspeakably worse. Because, at that moment, your thought becomes not a cottonwood tree, but rather an idea.

And an idea is trouble. It’s basically a child.

We call an idea a “brainchild,” right? That literally translates to the child of your brain.

You want to do the best you can for this child. You yearn to do right by it.You nurture it with time and effort and watch it grow big and strong. You try to raise it right, develop its strengths, teach it to compensate for or accept its weaknesses. You really pour your heart and soul into it. You think it is, if not brilliant, at least ready to be sent out into the public without fear of embarrassment or nonacceptance.

Your idea, that brainchild has become a plan, a fully formed and mature plan and you are reasonably proud of it.

But really: At that point, you should just disown that brainchild.

Like, if the plan were a childchild who you were sending off to college, you would be best off just saying “Goodbye. Good luck, darling! Write if you get work. I love you and I’m so very proud of you!” — then changing your name and moving to another state, without delay, before that plan comes back to you.

Don’t even pack. Just grab your car keys and every scrap of money you can dig out of the couch and go. You’ll get a new driver’s license and credit cards along with your new identity once you get to safety.

Because the thing that comes back to you kind of looks like your original plan, the spawn of your brain that is, essentially a part of you, but it’s something else, something not-quite-right-ish. Not evil, but foreign, not just of you any longer.

Here’s the thing: The problem with the new plan is not just that it’s been influenced in ways not of your imagining — that is startling, but that isn't going to kill you — rather, the problem is that the new plan shows where you failed in developing it in the first place.

All of a sudden, you realize you weren’t raising a near-brilliant child of your brain from a single little seed of a thought, you created a Frankenstein plan from a mishmash of seeds stitched together with ill-conceived notions and brought to life by a lightning bolt of mindless hope. You fed it lies, and taught it all the wrong life lessons.

The new plan, the not-your-plan, reveals all of your own faults.

There’s the rub.

Yeah, I really did send my house plan sketches to an architect and she sent some proposal drawings back, one based on the actual, accurately measured out dimensions and the other based on her more reasoned ideas of layout. Basically, she illustrated my lack of both attention to detail and understanding of what passes for customary expectations of a living space.

So now I’m the anxious homeless, looser eating ice cream on the worry bus, halfway to crazy town — kind of hoping we could get there quicker, before my ice cream runs out.

(If you have any decorating or style ideas, please come get me. Hurry. Take the A-train, it travels nonstop to my destination in crazy town at [email protected].)