Sneakers
I was talking to someone earlier today who said they felt like a scrambled egg, which is exactly how I feel on this spooky Friday the 13th afternoon! That’s a long way to say: The new words were just not happening, so instead, I have an old but still relevant Enthusiasms for you. I did, in fact, just buy a new pair of sneakers, which are the same as my old ones, which are now falling apart—the state I prefer them in, to a point.
Anywho, without further ado: Sneakers (2020).
While I do know how to find the hidden shop inside Bodega, I’m in no way cool enough to actually go there—I can 100% see myself just grabbing a Snapple and GTFO’ing before anyone noticed me. This is just to say: I don't know anything about anything. Sneaker culture has its own fandom and language and heroes and everything, which I very much admire but am very much not a part of. This is just about me and my shoes.
Anyways, sneakers! More than any other kind of shoe, they carry a feeling of possibility with them. Maybe it’s because growing up, I’d get my new sneaks each fall, and my mom wouldn’t let me wear them until school started. There’d be a few weeks of coveting the sneakers in their box and walking around the house with them on, dreaming of the day when, finally, I’d get to put them on for real. With that, there was the anticipation of a whole new year ahead, a whole new me, maybe—older and wiser and perhaps cooler, finally with the shoes to prove it. It was, admittedly, a lot to ask of my footwear.
But that feeling has never really gone away. Every new pair of sneakers is, for me, a new start. I still tend to buy sneakers the way my mom did for us way back when—one pair for the year, or at least for a long while. When the time comes around to buy a pair again, the previous ones are barely hanging on—dirty and tattered and, on occasion, worn enough that my big toe starts coming through. While fastidiousness is one way to love a thing, mine is more on the side of one-eyed teddy bears. (I did go through a brief phase in middle school where I carried around this anti-scuff stuff for polishing my shoes at a moment’s notice, but I swung back the other way and started spray-painting them instead.) It’s probably why my mom was so vigilant about keeping my brand-new sneakers nice for as long as possible. There was a near 100% chance I’d fuck them up almost as soon as I put them on.
This year, the joke is that shoes as a concept are, well—yeah.1 My new sneakers and I aren’t going anywhere fast. But, I guess, it’s worth remembering that not all beginnings have to be momentous. All I have to do is take them out of the box.