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.)