13. Beige Boxes

(2 minutes of out-of-the-flattened-box jokes)

I am finding masks now in all my clothes. Whenever I put my hands in my pockets, I find a mask. For some reason, I still get surprised as if I found twenty bucks in an old jacket. Twenty bucks is definitely sweeter than a mask. Although at the current rate of inflation, soon enough a mask will cost more than $20. I'd brand them COVID-20.

My favorite hobby during the pandemic was cutting, flattening and throwing away cardboard boxes. As an astute financial analyst, I observed that Amazon's stock price was correlated to the number of boxes I tore per week. With the piles of boxes I had, I could have built a real bar chart graph to represent the stock price over time.

The boxes came in all sizes. I had one big enough that I re-purposed to be my barbershop. I was tired of spending 20 minutes vacuuming whenever my wife cut my hair in the garage so I built the Beige Box Barbershop. I lowered a camping chair into the box and I would climb down with a kitchen ladder for my appointments. All the cut hair was confined to the box's perimeter and cleaning it was a breeze. It was brilliant. I should have patented it.

At the height of the pandemic, the color of our house changed from eggshell white to Amazon fulfillment center beige. You couldn't escape the boxes on the floor. They were like World War II landmines: everywhere and when you stepped on them, the packaging air pillows exploded.

On the weekends, I filled the trunk and the back seat to the roof with just boxes and drove to the dumpster. I looked like a crazy hoarder driving around with a car full of shipping boxes. To my relief, I wasn't alone. It was actually hard to find parking at the dumpster as if we were going to a club on a Friday night.

There was a social network of people who convened every Saturday to get rid of boxes. We instantly felt a bond toward each other but were afraid to talk to one another. We all had masks on and would rather dive in a dumpster container than break the six-feet invisible barrier.

The large boxes were hard to carry for a distance so I balanced them on the top of my head as if I were carrying potable water in a remote African village. I pretended this was all normal and that this was just a hippie capitalist way of strengthening my spine and fixing my bad posture.

I am glad those dark days are over. Gas is too expensive now to drive to the dumpster every week. In the next pandemic, I will make masks from cardboard boxes instead of throwing them out. Amazon will compete with my COVID-20 masks and brand theirs COVID-19.99.

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