Man Plans

Every man has a plan for his life.  But by age twenty, he's chucked it and settled for Gomer Pyle reruns and Facebook entries.  A Man Plan never works out quite as a man expects.

Take women, for instance.  The Man Plan is designed, early on, to locate a gorgeous, desirable female, woo her, bag her, and take her home to meet his psychotic parents.  But the man settles for marriage instead.

A man's career plans are much the same.  He begins the Man Plan with a full-color chart that he designed in college with crayola and water paints, detailing the rise of his meteoric career and when, exactly, he will make his first million.  He settles for a job slinging fries at Wendys and, in the event that he is promoted to mid-level management or "fry supervisor", he decides that his management-level salary will now support a child.

Once a child arrives, however, the Man Plan is relegated to a dusty drawer in the garage, a space littered with stripped screws and mismatched nuts-and-bolts and oily rags.  Sometimes the man hangs out in this 25-watt space and weeps for his lost Man Plan, asking himself the question:  "Where did I go wrong?"

Nothing went wrong but everything, and the Man Plan now shifts into "empty-nest" mode, when the man dreams of the day when his children will move out of the house, the cat will keel, and when his wife will support him so he can pursue a career in oil painting or worm farming.  Naturally, however, the Man Plan runs aground on the reef of his wife's plans for a new wardrobe and her demands for a car that will start in the winter.

And, thus, the Man Plan augments yet again to "retirement".  

Naturally, however, a Man Plan for retirement is rarely realized in full because either:
A) the man dies of scurvy without ever going to sea
B) he must work as a greeter at Walmart until the cat dies
C) his wife meets a fresh male with a better Man Plan and removes herself to Bermuda where, for the next fifteen years, she lives off his pension and a steady diet of caviar and strawberry martinis

In the end, the typical male does find that he can implement one component of the Man Plan, but that only if he pre-plans his funeral arrangements.  He chooses to be buried at sea, and hopes that his ex-wife will drown digging his grave.