Insert Foot on high fashion Halloween.

When I (believed I) was a big shot Hollywood musician (drummer) long before any of you were alive, my day job was working in the warehouse of a Santa Monica art publisher.

When I say “art,” I mean whale and Patrick Nagel posters like the cover of Duran Duran’s Rio, which was one of the many kinds of posters I sent to highly culturally enriched shopping malls all over America.

If you had a Bob Talbot ocean animal poster during the early to mid-90s, there’s about a one in six chance my fingerprints are on it. Creepy, I know. It’s like I was in your house or something.

I say this to make point: I’ve seen a lot of cardboard boxes. And Halloween is coming. There’s a connection. I promise.

Some orders went in small tubes and others big enough to fit in large wooden crates that we built. If you guys ever feel your masculinity dimming, I recommend quickly finding a forklift and unloading a truck somewhere. The world would be an infinitely better place if governments stopped waging war and just issued everyone a forklift to drive a couple times a week. You might not even need Viagra anymore.

So I’ve seen a lot of cardboard boxes delivered over the years. Yet my 20-year-old daughter’s ability to move commercial product in and out of our apartment is still stunning to a grizzled cardboard veteran like myself.

I bend over to lift boxes from my doorstep so often, I canceled my gym membership because I no longer need to pay a monthly fee to hurt my back. Like everything else in our pandemic world, it’s far more convenient to injure oneself at home.

My daughter, whom we’ll call Olivia, because that’s her name, is what fancy people call a “fashionista” (which rhymes with “Sandinista” and immediately needs to be inserted into a punk rock song somewhere). Olivia works in a store that has two levels full of clothes I don’t understand, especially when I find out how much people pay for them. She let me come inside once, but I had to be escorted by a woman.

Yeah, this is still a Halloween column … I appreciating the patience.

My daughter has had boxes coming the past few weeks like there’s a large vacuum tube running straight from the nearest UPS warehouse to my front door.

Since she’s 20 and understands her legal obligation to ask her father for money no fewer than three times per day—no matter how much money she earns at her upscale clothing employer—I finally got curious and asked what I’m buying so much of lately.

“Stuff for my Halloween costume, Dad,” she told me, as if I’m stupid.

“Are you going to a party on Mars and need to fund the mission to get there?” I asked.

This was the part of the conversation when I remembered how terribly mean banks are to people in their early 20s. Because they used to pick on me and always take my money for no reason … just like what they’re doing to my poor daughter now.

That sound you suddenly hear in the distance is my mom reading that and laughing hysterically.

Fearing the answer–I ask very few questions because of terror/remembering being 20–I took a Xanax and asked what exactly she was going to be for Halloween.

I don’t remember anything after that.

That’s not true. I don’t remember details, thankfully, but I do recall her saying she has five Halloween outfits.

Five. I’m almost certain I don’t have five “outfits” of any kind. I know this because I recently went on a weeklong business trip to Washington, D.C. and forgot to pack underwear.

But I’m not a girl with a social life who changes clothes more frequently than Taylor Swift.

Not only does Olivia have five Halloween outfits the details of which I refuse to remember, but someone who also works at her fancy-people store decided the staff should wear themed outfits the week before Halloween. So maybe it makes sense.

Halloween is bigger than ever; as it should be. It’s really a fun holiday, even for those of us who thought maybe we’d grown out of it (tends to happen to middle-aged people who stop drinking).

So, I guess what I’m asking is, anyone want to go trick or treating?

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.