just in case

i am a just in case carrier. in my backpack, you'd find the normal essentials like wallet, phone, burt's bees plus the superessentials like pens, nail file, kleenex plus unusual but not outrageous bandaids, dental floss, tylenol plus the sort of random shit that i needed once but didn't have at the time so now i carry it around all the time like one plastic spoon. 

one plastic spoon is not large. it doesn't take up a lot of space, doesn't weigh much. and it's dead useful. you get a yogurt at the airport or the gas station during a road trip, say, and presto, you need a spoon. 

but thing is you rarely need a spoon. and super rarely do you need a spoon and you could not have procured one, say, near the yogurts in the cold case. 

that spoon isn't the huge deal, though. just a plastic spoon. the huge deal is not the spoon. the huge deal is that carrying around a plastic spoon is a bit of a gateway drug to carrying around a pack of cards, warm gloves in the summertime, five pens and two pencils, your contact lens prescription, and a random red plastic whistle that you don't know where it came from but hey it might be useful at some as-yet unknown future point on the space-time continuum. 

so you see the problem, right? one thing leads to another and pretty soon i can't find the spoon when i need it, if i even remember i have it, so i am at the airport eating yogurt with a plastic spoon i picked up next to the cold case where i bought the yogurt and i finish the yogurt and i am on the verge of tossing the spoon with the yogurt container when i think, hey maybe keep the spoon... just in case...