Kickin’ It

One other thing I forgot to mention – the interest in additional footwear came from the following process. First, I put away all the specialty footwear (the dress shoes, the cowboy boots, the saddle bucks for strategic swing-dance purposes). This cut the numbers down quite a bit.
Then, I put away the Clarks muckers from last year’s Europe trip. There is something wrong with the soles – the left one pops when I walk so loudly that I can hear it over my iPhone podcasts while walking on carpet. On any surface harder than mud, the squish-squish-squish sound of air is plainly audible and incredibly annoying, and I expect to have a blowout any second. Shame, too, because they are right comfy, but they also do this weird thing that will randomly result in a massive shooting pain in one big toe or the other as I push off with that foot while walking.
Then, I put away all the Docs.
(Pick your jaw up off the floor.)
This left me with the following:
* Oxblood Bass loafers, which date back to undergrad days. I put some shoe trees in them to try to stretch them out to the point I can comfortably wear them again, as they are a bit snug and I am retaining liquor.
* Brown Ecco lace-up casuals, from the honeymoon. Again, very comfy, but they also do that weird toe-thing from time to time. They also feel like they might be just a hair too big, which may contribute to the toe thing…any podiatrists or shoe-horses want to comment?
* New Balance 680 gray athletic shoes. I think they are walking shoes, bought for the B2B one year, and I still wear them when I need the Steve Jobs look. (Or today, for instance.)
* White Adidas Stan Smith 2s, bought in a moment of madness and rarely worn because the Seinfeld is not a good look for me. It’s not 1991 any more.
* Brown Clarks loafers, bought a few years back and then largely forgotten about. In fact, I thought I had donated them, or those probably would have been the honeymoon kicks and the Eccos would never have been bought. Definitely comfortable, but also definitely banged up a little, and the combination of roundish shape and pebbly leather just doesn’t quite look right somehow.
And that’s basically it. Take the Docs off the table, and I am left with two or three not-quites and a couple of not-hardlys.
The thing is, my shoe…problem…largely stems from my time in DC, where I had to have something that would look mildly presentable (for IT, anyway), would be comfortable enough for a couple miles’ walking every day, and would stand up to rain and snow. When I got to California, the snow and walking issues went by the boards, to be replaced by the necessity of steel toes (and ideally ESD, but good luck getting all that in one shoe) for the next three years.
The point is, I am not really at a point now where I have to take the “horses for courses” approach to my footwear. All it has to do is be comfy and look good. (Not causing random inexplicable pain falls under “comfy”.)
I don’t know what the point of that is, but that’s just by way of explaining where I’m coming from with the whole “why is he taking his day off to look at shoes?” question.