Sure, it's Friday night and I could be out chillin' on the town. But instead I'm here ranting about shoes. Well, I plan to go see Gran Torino later tonight. I heard it was good. Then maybe order a pizza. But about those shoes...
It was June and I was just hired to my new job. I needed a good pair of work shoes. Something that looked nice, as my Frankensteinish gray Sketchers just weren’t going to pass in the workforce. I compare my beat up sneakers with the Modern Prometheus due to the fact that the shoe’s leather – or whatever its composition may be – began tearing along one of the seams on the inner side of the foot; a problem I remedied by hand-stitching the fastidious fissure with black thread. Nevertheless, it is a good shoe and I still wear it to the day of this posting.
In preparation for the onset of my fledgling career, I paid a little visit to Target (pronounced tar-ZHEY for you French speakers). I wanted a shoe, and I wanted cheap. Surely the Zhey could provide. And they did. The brand, I believe, was Mossimo. I have a plain black Mossimo shirt, which is kind of dressy and I like. The shoes, on the other hand, suck.
Right from the get-go I remarked their lack of comfort. My heels grew calluses and my feet began to hurt. Oh, my aching sole! (Terrible, yes; but I had to do it) After months of wearing these, one of the laces snapped and something really caught my eye. Only the outer weaving of the lace had snapped; and the core around which it had been woven… was bright purple. PURPLE! On a stately-looking, professional man’s dress shoe!
After I had replaced both laces, a thought crossed my mind and I followed it on a whim. Taking the still intact original lace and a handy pocket knife, I sliced the outer weaving of the shoestring, emulating the snap of its twin. What I saw confirmed my suspicions. The lace’s core…was brown. I initially thought that maybe Mossimo was saving a dollar by going to their supplier, picking out the cheapest, most unwanted color of yarn, and using it as their shoelace cores.
As it turned out, that is not so! These laces are recycled! I can’t say enough bad things about these shoes. Even the material out of which they were constructed began cracking around high stress points; namely at the joints of the toes. One nice thing I can say is that even after my few months of wearing these, the solid rubber soles did not crack once, unlike a pair of dress shoes that I wore throughout most of high school.
But with the shoe string snappage, I deemed it time to upgrade to a far superior, if not much more costly, pair of shoes. Which, as it just so happens to be, is a wonderful segway into my review of the Dr. Scholl’s Harrington black work shoe.
Also view this highly educational video on shoes!
WARNING: language in this video is not very appropriate for anyone.
