The relative utility of sixteen year old shoes

that hurt my knees when I wear them

In my closet I have a pair of sixteen year old shoes that hurt my knees.

They are not particularly attractive. They are not particularly useful.

And yet, they have been in a garbage can and retrieved several times over the last four years.

I wear them once or twice during a particularly wet week, when most of my other shoes are soggy.

They hurt my knees, look terrible and, have just the kind of odour that you would imagine associated with sixteen year old shoes that have seen the inside of a dumpster more than twice..

And yet, the relatively little use I have for them seems to justify my tripping over them for fifty of the fifty two weeks of the year.

They delight me when I slide into them. Not because they are comfortable. They are so familiar. It’s like they unlock an old gait that I no longer use. They remind me of how I used to be. I get in touch with my old sole.

old sole words…

We humans live within a limited time frame.

We have limited space.

And the capitalist machine would like us to…