Footwear: A Diatribe (NSFW)

by Fred P. Insoll

I’m having an Andy Rooney moment here.

Or maybe a Godzilla moment: I feel like I’d like to shoot space lasers out my eyes and vaporize --- wait for it --- ALL MODERN FOOTWEAR.

Jesus, I’m tellin ya. Six months ago it was bad enough; I was looking for shoes then, too. But at that time I gave up, and just put duct tape inside the soles of my brown Rockports to keep them from leaking. Which didn’t work as soon as the duct tape wore down after about five minutes, but anyway.

Now, though. Have you BEEN IN a shoe department lately? I’m lookin’ at you, Academy Sports. Or any fershlugginer shoe alcove, really. Shoe hut. I don’t know what they call them in the industry. They should call them SHOE SHITSHOWS. Because that’s what we have going on: shitshows!!!

Let me get straight to the point and stop all this vamping: the issue here is “mesh uppers.” Overnight, it seems like, every shoe and its inbred step-cousin is made out of “mesh uppers.”

Yes, it was bad enough six months ago --- I guess at that time they were still vaguely hybrid abortions of shoenetic engineering and societal devolution. But now. Now they are full on mesh uppers, glued onto some kind of fruity foam-injected plastic sole (and since these shoes have no souls whatsoever, maybe let’s call that something else. Like “plaswalk” or another appropriately NewSpeak type of term.)

Are you people buying this garbage???

Are ya? Apparently so... I haven’t heard any complaints. I guess your little “celebrities” have been modelling them and now you’re all hot to trot and get yourselves a pair.

You know what’s really galling too?

I will tell you.

They want to charge 60 or 70 dollars or more, i.e. the same price as a normal shoe used to cost. I guess they want people to think they are desirable or something, despite being made out of extruded plastic mesh.

Then too what I love is that there are 50 or 60 “options” on display anywhere you go, THAT ARE ALL BASICALLY THE SAME OPTION. I.e., just differently colored plastic mesh, or mesh running crosswise or zigzag or overlapping several perpendicular layers of mesh. But it’s all mesh, mesh, mesh from here to eternity. Mesh extruded out your ass for as long as the day is long.

(I bet they literally have some Asian they’ve bred to excrete this stuff out his (or her?) ass. I have nothing against Asians, mind you, but I know how our Shoe Overlords love to exploit the overseas help.)

Boy they really phased this one in in the blink of an eye. Maybe it was the plan all along. When you look at how freaky regular leather tennis shoes started to get in the 80s and 90s, you can see that they probably already had it in mind.

“Just get ’em used to funky crapola and gewgaws everywhere, and soon we’ll have them right where we want them...”

Buying our unreal reality and wearing it on their feet, in other words. Yes, it’s a sick sick world, a top-to-bottom mind control cult of manufactured humans and simulacra simulating circumlocution.

Overnight, too. Overnight they ship in all this “product,” throw it out there, and nobody bats an eye. Really impressive, I have to say. Kudos to them on their shitty shoe coup! Must be a lot cheaper to produce, I bet. But don’t lower the prices, oh no, that would alert people and give the game away. Why, if it costs a lot, it MUST be worth a lot, eh? What bandits. What droll brigands of the high seas, raking it in just like their East India Company forebears.

Also it’s more technologically advanced-seeming, and all tech is an advancement, yes?

* * * * *

Now in other amusing news on the “shoe front,” I will just throw in this little paradox I noticed: the more MINIMAL a shoe is, generally speaking, the more it costs. Ah yes, this denotes taste and sophistication, this avoidance of crapulicious gewgaws and vomitious decorations. YOU must be part of the select few, the 10 or 20 percent of upper middle class brainiacs who demand elegant style! Why you rascal (or vixen), you.

We’ll charge YOU $170 or $220 or more for that lifestyle luxury. Yes, you would THINK that less gewgaws might equal lower production costs --- and isn’t the promise of mass production that good design doesn’t really have to cost more? A one-time cost keeping some sunlight-dreading designer in Adobe subscription dues, and then we can all reap the rewards of his/her canny eye.

But no... No, let’s gloss over that fine point.

And anyway. Even if you GOT the dough, you still ain’t gettin’ off that easy. This high end crapola may be minimalist, with (sometimes) decent materials, but the knife-twist here is that we always try to make it just a LITTLE obnoxiously pretentious. We just throw in SOME ingenious twist to make sure you look like a total asshat who has to have $170 “sophisticated” togs.

Ah yes, shoe buying is not a simple matter for the more Rooney-esque among us. Those of us who can remember farther back than last week’s manufactured social controversy --- like five or six months back even --- are up shit shoe creek without a paddle. Fred P., out!