Funny T-Shirts and Mugs for the First Year of the Covid Era

The road to coronavirus humor was long. First I got stuck in some therapy of my own device, writing poetry. Lucid yet lyrical poetry about being stuck indoors and dealing with my corona stress and everyone else's. Some of it was good, I thought, but these days confessional poetry centered on the self doesn't get published much. I figured some of it was so abysmally bad that they made a rule for all of it.

Anyway. So here's how I've been fighting the covid nightmare so far. Well, in the beginning poetry was a solution, but sometimes my poetry is such a skinny little thing -- nothing to match the onslaught of the Bogeyman. The numbers kept coming and my verse simply wasn’t powerful enough. So I created some puzzles for kids with the message “All Will Be Well,” as well as lots of other jigsaw puzzles with fruit and butterflies and marine animals, hoping to get my own mind, too, away, from the grim news.

Well, nobody bought my All Will Be Well puzzles, possibly because in order to make them more difficult I made them quite weird, including lots of different birds in them – possibly because I, too, missed being in nature, surrounded by lots of different birds, not just the sparrows and pigeons we have in Bucharest.

With my power of positive thinking threatened repeatedly, I turned to all sorts of Zazzle products (they have over 1,000 types of products), including business cards. Somebody bought one of my designs, so that gave me hope. So I focused on products that sold better during this crisis: business cards, ink rubber stamps, and puzzles. Well, kids probably got tired of puzzles after the lockdown, so those didn’t sell anymore after a while, and then there are tons of business cards on Zazzle, which meant my chances of selling some of mine were little.

Long story short, I ended up creating some products for fun: lots of sneakers with gold stars and fireworks, some of them with this design made so small as to look like glitter -- and then, for the sheer fun of it, I made some better looking pink glitter after learning about it from online tutorial. Here are some of my athletic shoes.

Then I created some Christmas products, which took quite a while, as it was hard to get the templates just right. And eventually I went back to one of the oldest custom-printed products: the T-shirt.

So what to do on T-shirts? I figured I’d try some lateral thinking on a design of someone else’s which I got several referrals for in the past (I had included it in one of my Wizzley articles). The old T-shirt read, “I went outside once, the graphics weren’t that great.” People seemed to like it and a few of them bought it in successive years during the holiday season. But this year the graphics certainly looked more enticing outside – this old design didn’t work anymore. So I figured I’d write something myself, keeping from this design nothing but some of its great cadence. So I tried something with “I stayed indoors once,” which turned to “I was told to stay indoors once . . .” And then what? Something with the graphics? My first try was “and my computer couldn’t handle the whole of me anymore.” I wrote this on a piece of paper and went to bed.

Then I woke up the next day. Didn’t like the whole “computer couldn’t handle” thing (which was also quite verbose), and figured I should try something more “cool” – something like “my wife didn’t find me cool anymore.” But that wasn’t funny either. And who would want to walk about with this message on their T-shirt? So then I figured I’d play with the ubiquitous “be safe” notion and came up with “I was told to stay indoors once. Suddenly I wasn’t safe there anymore.” (With the variation: “I was told to stay indoors once. Suddenly it wasn’t safe there anymore.”) Finally, I thought, a coronavirus quote that has the right cadence and covid words and matching humor.

Here are some of these tees.

Well, actually, before these I made one while fiddling with the notion of “cool,” and wrote, “I was told to stay indoors once. Suddenly that wasn’t cool anymore.” Figured this would work well for boys addicted to gaming and digital screens. I don’t find it hilarious, but its tone seems to match that of preteen boys (and younger).

But what to write for girls? I started the same way and then wrote, “Suddenly my dolls weren’t cool anymore.” But then as I fiddled with the placement of the design on the tee I realized I didn’t like this statement that much. So I turned it into “I was told to stay indoors once. My dolls weren’t cool with that.” Now this quote I liked best! As I wrote it I kept thinking of my favorite nine-year-old niece, who tells her dolls stories and makes them sit on their butts at attention as she does so.

So here are these Covid tees for kids as well. (And not only for them!)

I hope you enjoy them!

If you'd rather buy a mug or magnet, I made some of those as well. Here are two of the mugs. Enjoy -- and be well!