A Man in a Box

Alice in Chains sings a song called "Man in a Box." It's a pretty vulgar, coarse description of a dead guy considering the world from his supine repose inside a coffin. I found myself contemplating the world last weekend from inside my own box. It wasn't dirty and debased as the Heavy Metal anthem illustrated. It was bright and brilliant, it was sanitized and crisp, it was a tanning bed.

When my wife raised the idea of 'fake baking' I thought: "I've never been tanning...might as well check it off the bucket list." So on Friday we went to Color Me Tan, a charming little establishment just a few blocks from our house that promises to save us all from worrying about "the weather or messy sand." (two things I spend way too much time worrying about, I assure you)

If you've never been tanning, let me share the basic spirit of the experience with you: it's terrifying. You go into a little room, take off all your clothes, douse yourself in orange-cremscicle-smelling lotion and turn into a human hot-pocket. Once you lay down on the tanning bed, bathed in the most unnaturally imposing light imaginable, you have to close the top of the bed over yourself in order to get the full effect. For someone with even the most mild clostrophobia, this is somewhat of an intimidating feat. Once you've the lid is closed, the top of the bed (complete with a series of mind-numbing flourescant lights) is just a few inches from your nose. If you listen carefully, you can actually hear your skin cells silently calling out "Why have you forsaken us?"

After a few minutes my breathing stabilized. I had on my neato little goggles to protect my eyes (Holly took the pink ones so I got the manlier green) and was trying to fight my natural habit of resting my hands on my chest--a bad idea when looking to avoid giving yourself a racing stripe.

As a beginner, I had seven minutes of baking time so I only had brief period for reverie. My mind began to consider the rather base situation I was in: naked on my back in a tight capsule. I couldn't help but have a little "pre-ja vú" (a term I just invented to describe deja-vú before the event has happened at all) that I'd probably again be in a situation a lot like this, but under less...living...circumstances.

I thought about the great scene from the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead (originally a fantastic play by Tom Stoppard that was made into an equally fantastic movie starring Gary Oldman and Tom Roth). In the scene, which I really hope you'll click on the link and watch, Oldman considers the future of eternity in a box. His logic is air tight in its comedic candor (I'll let you watch rather than do it a disservice in the retelling) and he quickly arrives at the line that I think is central to my tanning bed encapsulation: "Life in a box is better than no life at all."

So here's where I try to close out the rather broad metaphor I've gotten myself entrapped in here. We all live in little boxes to some degree. Some are our own creation and others have been constructed around us. Life on the outside might be much better; it could be drastically worse. There's really no way of knowing without opening the lid. Leave death in a box to playwrights and poets. When you open your eyes to the inside of a lid, do you want to see what's on the other side?

I enjoyed my tanning experience. I don't really think that I look any tanner and am not sure how soon I'll do it again. I'm glad, though, that I got a little time to consider the world. Life in a tanning bed, after all, is better than no life at all.