Humor is sometimes useful. The current Corona Virus induced run on toilet paper got me and a couple of old friends talking. Between Army days, hunting trips, and traveling in countries with less than ideal “facilities”, the three of us have all suffered through paperless situations, and miraculously, survived.

If you are having this kind of conversation, even via text message (maybe even more so if via text message), you can bet the people you are having the conversation with are good friends, and probably old friends. The kind of people you can share anything with, and you won’t be judged. Tim, Mark and I are old, old friends. We’ve all known each other since grade school and Boy Scout days back in the ‘60s. We definitely qualify as both good, and old, friends.

We started creating a list of items we’v all used at one time or another, when there wasn’t a square to spare:

– Paper towels

– Paper napkins

– Handkerchiefs (which hardly anyone carries anymore)

– T-shirts

– Leaves

– Plants (not poison ivy though)

– Corn Husks

– Jumping in a lake

Of course, we couldn’t let it go. We added other items people could use, if push came to shove:

– Your old copy of The Whole Earth Catalog

– Changing a $20 bill into $1 bills, and using judiciously

– Old stock certificates issued by Enron, Continental Bank, and Worldcom

There were other suggestions, but I won’t print them here. We all had a good laugh, and eventually the messages started dying off, but not quite.

When all was said and done, Tim had the best story. He was traveling in Leningrad in 1979. The hotel he was staying in had a common bathroom for all to use. In the bathroom, there was no toilet paper. Instead, there were perfectly cut up squares of the official Soviet newspaper “Pravda”. In the USSR, lack of toilet paper was seen as a job creation opportunity. Someone had been delegated to cutting the paper in perfect squares for use as toilet paper. As my friend Tim was contemplating this at the time, an idea came to him. He took one of the squares, and in Russian wrote: “The Truth hurts in Soviet toilets” and stuck it on the bathroom wall. In Russian, Pravda means truth.

We all laughed at that one, and then the conversation, mercifully, ended.

As an addendum, Pravda was the official Newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was the newspaper of the Communist Party Central Committee from 1912-1991. We may finally know why Lenin was so angry, as he crushed a copy of Pravda in his hand in this famous picture.