"The arresting officer found enough cones in the back of my station wagon to elevate the bust into the category of larceny. Only I knew that I'd actually been caught on my second cone run. Had I been caught with the hundred or so already stashed in my apartment building, perhaps we would have been talking grand larceny.... And that is how I found myself unemployed and with a criminal record a month shy of my twenty-third birthday. I began wondering if I was going to turn out to be a Really Bad Person. Being a Really Bad Person was a shitty job, but somebody has to do it, I reasoned. Perhaps stealing traffic cones was only my first step downward. I think that was the summer I realized that we are really not all stars of our own show, and that happy endings - even happy middles, for God's sake - were absolutely in doubt."
- Stephen King, "Cone Head"
This was written several years ago for a series in the New Yorker called "Lowest Ebb" where various famous and/or successful people wrote about the worst point in their lives. I saved it because my friends and I passed the time by stealing traffic cones in high school.
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