For Want of a Nail...

I've taken to leaving my shoes around the AssVac lately...

Those are my red Keds. They make me run really fast. They also make me feel like I have bone spurs in my heels.

I started this habit when it was hot. I'd take two steps in the house at the end of what counts for me as a day, and suddenly my feet would feel all suffocated and confused. They couldn't stand to be constrained for one more second...

This is an old picture. You can tell because Destructo actually managed to break this pair of Crocs the other day. Kicked the strap clear off the left one with her right foot, she did, while she was walking, and even Johnny can't put the poor humpties together again.

You'd almost think the piggies would be cool enough in Crocs, but no. Because, see, I'm one of these fashion-forward people who wear socks with everything. My feet may not be small (size 9 1/2) and my step may not be dainty (I clomp like a stormtrooper, in other words) but my pedal extremities are delicate, I tell you. At the slightest insult, they blister like a pair of bastards in a holy-water bath.

I don't like these shoes. They're LL Bean, they were a gift, and I am an ungrateful sow. But they make my feet look flat and large, like a Don Martin character from the old Mad Magazine. So bleah. I've had them for five years and worn them twice. Both times with an off-shoulder shirt I have that's the exact same color. Matchy-matchy!

I even -- for the thirty seconds I allowed myself to be convinced they were not the ugliest, most uncomfortable footwear on the planet -- wore socks with Birkenstocks. I don't wear them with flip-flops, but only because I can't possibly wear flip-flops. Oh my god, the chafing between my toes! And I gave up wearing high heels, years ago, for even the fanciest of occasions, cultivating instead a fashion sense that allows me to craft appropriate ensembles around a snappy pair of boots.

Yes, it's possible I raised more than one glass in Teddy's honor after the aborted wake on Friday afternoon. Why do you ask?

The only shoes I don't wear socks with are the $4 faux-Keds I wear to mow the lawn. They started out as real shoes but rapidly decompensated.

Now I swear I keep finding them in places other than where I left them, as if they spend their nights creeping around.

I don't know which is spookier: those shoes, that picture, or the fact that I took it the last time I mowed the lawn and the date-stamp on the shot is August 8th.

"Decompensation" is a new word in my vocabulary. Wikipedia defines it as "the functional deterioration of a previously working structure or system." It's supposed to be a medical term, but I think it's okay if I use it here. Those shoes, after all, really do appear to be pining for the Norwegian fjords, don't you think? Although, for the grammar geeks among you, if I'd written that definition, I would have hyphenated "previously-working."

In order to realize this shot is old, you'd have to know what I know, which is that I left those shoes in my sister's living room two weeks ago, the day I learned my new four-dollar word.

Sometimes, I'm afraid I might be rapidly decompensating, too. But then I remember that the structure or system in question must not only be fart-in-a-windstorm useless, but it must also have been, at one point previously, working.

Phew!