Image via WikipediaI’ve tried wearing my favorite of the three, the pair sitting in the middle, deep forest green flats that I copped from some discount store in Brighton. They got me through last spring, summer, fall, and most of winter, before it became too cold to wear shoes with no socks. I hate just seeing them sit there. They await their sentence.
For a month I spoke of getting them fixed, but that was a while back. My new plan for them is to make something with them, some type of art or whatever. I want them nailed to my wall, but first something should be done to the inside of the shoe: photographs, decorations. I have a few ideas.
I will probably paint inside one of the shoes and paint on the sole of the other, probably the one with the hole that goes straight through. I want to paint in dark blue ink. And make it look messy, but clever. I think I can achieve that.
To the left of the green shoes are my old red vinyl shoes, my favorite dancing shoes, man-made in China. I want to draw two pictures of pinup girls and put them inside the shoe to hang up. It's appropriate. The shoes are not heels, but they are heel enough for me, with slip-slide bottoms that have become so worn on my outer edges of my heels (due to my supinating) that they make me walk crooked. I haven't worn them in six months because of that and the nagging of my mother, who fears I'll ruin my posture in wearing ill-conditioned shoes.
The third pair is quite unique: leather made, embroidered, and very colorful. I‘d receive so many compliments whenever I wore them: "Where did you get those shoes?!" "Oh my god they're so cute!" blah blah blah. I don't wear shoes, or clothing, or anything for that matter, to receive compliments. It's nice or whatever, but also kind of annoying. I must just have really good taste.
My plan for the last pair will include hot candle wax, white paint, and clear lacquer. I want them to look like I stepped in a puddle of indeterminate white goo on my way to school, and I just let it dry, not bothering to clean or even wipe it off. Apathy is so attractive.
I don’t know why I keep these shoes that I can no longer wear, other than my pipe dream of "making art" with them.
I don’t know why I keep most things, except it makes me happy for the moment that they are collected. It’s also fun to look back over the piles of kept garbage that have accumulated over the years and try to remember what I was thinking at that time. I guess I’m a pack rat, but not in the traditional sense. I don’t horde everything; in fact I’m quite fond of throwing out a lot of bullshit.
And I do, regularly. I have friends who are true pack rats, who keep their clothes from high-school that do not fit and aren’t worth saving, who keep stacks of old, water-stained magazines left to the devices of dust mites, with collections under their beds looking like a combination of what you'd find at a rummage sale, North Broad street, and the basement of the Mütter Museum. I like clutter, but not a lot of it. Not like that.
When I collect things (pieces of paper I find on the street, small toys, bits of cloth, lost things) I keep them laying around for a little while before I catalogue them in some way. Some found things get taped to my walls, others get documented into a notebook, others lay in folders, shoe boxes, coffee cans (like the old love notes I used to save, later burned).
I welcome the disorder, so long as I can contain it and personalize it. It’s just something to do, something like a hobby, making art.
Note: I wrote this in college. The shoes mentioned in the above story have all been thrown away, or are perhaps somewhere in the depths of the closet in my old bedroom in Philadelphia. I still want to do this shoe project, perhaps with some old shoes currently in my collection.
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