There is a universally accepted unwritten rule that it takes 12 to 15 weeks to move a garbage bag of used clothing from your home to the thrift store. The mental load required to decide which pair of pants stay and which ones to cast off into the bins is so taxing, it only makes sense for it to languish in a car trunk until one can find an extra ten minutes in the week to donate it. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you it’s the natural order of the world.
That is, unless you ask local Minneapolis resident Doug Gleason, who defied all known logic and laws of physics by driving straight from his house with his old clothes to the local Savers in a single day.
“Well, I had nothing else better to do today, so I threw it in the car and dropped it off at the thrift store before checking out some of the used books. They even gave me a 20% coupon for donating, and it was just a bunch of novelty shirts that aren’t funny anymore! I should do this more often.” What kind of Herculean willpower does this man possess? Does he also not let his gas tank run all the way down to fumes?
The donation process has always been to let 50 pounds of clothes marinate in your car for several weeks on the off chance you change your mind about donating something, even if it doesn’t fit anymore. Gleason, however, shows a level of executive function we’ve only seen in NASA mission control or Hall of Fame quarterbacks. Hopefully, upon his death, he’ll donate his brain to science so they can study this outlier of outliers.
“Come to think of it, I have some old winter jackets at home. I should swing by with them again this afternoon.”
Jesus Christ! Does he not know that clothing isn’t meant to be donated right away, but to serve as a reminder while it collects dust in his Subaru hatchback, that he should do it weeks down the road when everything in his life has perfectly aligned and can handle the mental workload of interacting with another human being in the drop-off line? This guy has the resolve of a Tibetan monk hiking up a mountain in a blizzard, but for giving away clothes he bought before he got an office job.
