Lately, I've been thinking a lot about boxes.
I don't think that this thought pattern is delirious or even peculiar. It's justifiable. I'm moving next week. As I write this, I'm sitting in a room filled with boxes, after a full day of packing boxes, typing on a computer which arrived in a box, listening to music on a phone that I only recently unboxed.
Boxes are a staple of our culture that haven't been endowed with the same level of cultural notoriety as I think they should. When was the last time you thought about the eccentricity of the mundane cardboard box? Is it not utterly mad that we live in a world where one hundred billion cardboard boxes appear each year, to ride in the metallic bellies of mechanical beasts that hardly any of us understand? Each box travels more of the world than most of us will in our whole lives, and that they should is the bare minimum expectation. God knows what happens when they fail to meet this expectation: high prices, unrest, starvation, and genera…