Day 25: Comfortable shoes

To whom it may concern:

I must admit that the term "comfortable shoes" makes me a little nervous.  I hear it and my mind automatically goes to 

.

I realize this may be an offensive opinion.  I  know people who wear these shoes.  I  have friends that wear these "comfortable  shoes".  I even love people who wear them.  I accept people as people, no matter the footwear, but - at the same time - everyone is entitled to their opinion.  And this next, specific opinion, I fear, I may offend those friends even more:

These shoes may be comfortable, but they are also horrible.  

I have heard all the pro-arguments and rhetorical appeals for these creepy, gloved-toes shoes:  

• Pathos:  They are SO comfortable while I am also freeing my feet!
• Ethos:  I've done the research!  To date the design concept behind toe shoes is the best solution for fictional, body-friendly footwear due to the allowance of "ground feel" they allow while still maintaining the foot's dynamic flexibility and the proprioceptive sense of the foot.
• Kairos:  I'm into minimalist footwear, just like the other cool kids.
• Logic:  If barefoot is the default state of our feet, it follows that the default design of footwear should be to provide some benefit to the foot (protection, insulation, or even style) while still allowing for the default (bare) function of the foot.

I should make it clear that I completely support a person's right to choose shoes.  But, in this case, I will also offer my strongest rhetorical appeal:  when I see these shoes out and about in the world, I am uncomfortable.  I feel like Haley Joel Osment's character in The Sixth Sense:

Day 10: Dobject's Comfortable Shoes

            OK, I’ll admit it: I have a fetish. Well, OK, maybe it’s not really that drastic, but if you had to compare me to the average breathless Sears shoe department shopper, I’d say I spend more time than usual thinking about the shape of my foot and how it will most comfortably deflect off of and conform itself onto artificial and organic surfaces and how I may best stuff my leg flippers into a pair of very expensive toe-receptacles. I probably can’t help it too much since I’m flat footed and I am sort of forced to think like a closet foot fetishist least I suffer the eternal suffering and woeful damnation that is foot-induced joint and back pain.

            Shoe shopping is always interesting for me. It’s like shopping for the perfect prescription medicine: I’d like not to spend all day testing them out if I can avoid it, but it’s a necessary and, sometimes, even holistically exciting endeavor when it’s time to bite the bullet wallet. It’s part exciting outing to put my amassed banks of locomotor-based-triva into practical use, and part day-trip after which to fantasize owning that awesome pair of shoes that comes with the pocket calculator and complementary stick of gum that felt like wearing a rockfish strapped to the bottom of my foot. Oh well.

            Most recently when I bought my latest pair of shoes (a pair of leather street smart/outdoorsy Merrills with my SuperFeet inserts: I won’t wear much else unless it’s been breathed on by Vibrim) I actually considered buying a pair of shoes designed for home-bodied geriatrics: comfortable flexible sole, soft outer and upper, Velcro with no weird laces, and they were cleverly camouflaged like a pair of bedroom slippers. I spent half an hour in heated deliberation, pacing up and down the isles with the intense and completive look of a Grecian philosopher unraveling the mysteries of the sublime before my girlfriend wisely escorted me to the sneaker section in the back because the store was closing in twenty minutes.

            It was lucky she did, because I would probably be wearing them around campus and downtown right now and trying to pass them off as super-cool ninja “shoes” that hurt my feet. Who knows, maybe I’ll start some kind of shoe-fad like the Vibram Five-Fingers (and, yes-- I own a pair. They’re exactly like walking on your bare feet: now with a $70 surcharge. They are wonderful. You will never walk the same afterwards. Everyone will resent you in public.)

Day 3: Pobject's Comfortable Shoes

I can’t let go. Not yet.

I almost feel they’ve got some purpose yet to serve.

I’ve never had a pair like them.

Some people get this way about socks or underwear, or T-shirts with some sort of sentimental significance.

(I once wore my Pink Floyd’s The Wall T-shirt until it nearly feel apart.

My senior year, in the front stacks of the Helena High library, I stood facing Angela Lopach. We were posing for our Most-Likely-To-Succeed photo. She smiled and faced the camera, an open book face up in one palm. I grinned wryly, my arms crossed defiantly over my chest.

Have we succeeded? I’m not sure I know how to measure that.

Several years later I wore it still, armpits gone and a terrible gash gaping between the Judge and the Schoolmaster.)

I put them out of active duty on August 26, 2012. I could never wear them running anymore; they’d kill my feet. Even the pair that replaced them is near retirement. How many hundreds of miles are you supposed to put into a pair? Double that, triple it maybe, maybe add a few dozen. Maybe you’d come close.

Now they come out for short strolls, for yard work, for Yo La Tengo concerts when I need to validate my cool-hipster cred.

   ☑ black plastic-rimmed glasses

   ☑ ironic cargo shorts

   ☑ plaid shirt

   ☑ two-year-old holey running shoes (no socks)

(Q: How much does a hipster weigh?  A: An Instagram.)

How much longer do they have?

I suspect they’ve got some time left. Their successors (same size, same style, slightly different je ne sais quoi) are nowhere nearly so comfortable.

When they go, I’d like to give them a Viking funeral: set them afire on a tiny raft and push them into the French Broad, flagrantly thumbing my nose at a dozen state, county, and local ordinances and sending noxious chemically fumes into the troposphere.

That’s how they’d want it.

I’m pretty sure.

Day 3: Lobject's Comfortable Shoes

Fifty pounds proved I was pregnant for most of 2012

in my stomach and ankles mostly until the last weeks

Avoid salt and elevate those feet and don’t walk or lift

or stand too long and whatever you do get comfortable

shoes so the skin pooling in unnatural shapes isn’t

pushed out the top, floppy. Eleven hours on a Tuesday

gave in to Shoe Mart—$9.99 for a pair should have

been two sizes too big, ugly black sweater on my toes,

temporary fix until Friday off my feet for a few days

turned four months and home from the hospital

and boy was I ever glad for those comfortable shoes.