Charles Jensen | Writer

Friends, I spent most of my holiday vacation shoe shopping.

Faithful kinemapoetics readers understand: this never ends well.

I was looking for one of two pairs of shoes:

a white sneaker with red details
a white sneaker with light blue details

In my head, I was probably envisioning Nikes or Adidas as the mostly likely candidates, but when it comes to shoes, I like to think of myself as open to experimentation, like a college student.

Unfortunately, I was about as deluded as Kristy Swanson in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she said, “All I want to do is go to Europe, marry Christian Slater, and die!” Although these days you probably could marry Christian Slater, and it might actually kill you.

So I visited the cheap mall, where the outlet stores lived, and I went into each of the 897654357 shoes stores. I’ve done this before, you might recall. Well, I found 1 store that had white shoes with red on them, Nikes even, and their largest size? Size 9.

I got in my car and left Liliput in search of a shoe store that might actually carry a grown-ass man’s shoe size. Over the next few days, I visited no less than three malls, including their surrounding ephemeral sprawl, to find something, anything.

The closest I came was this:

Biggest size: 9.

Why the rush, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. For the past year or so, I’ve been wearing a pair of Sketchers sneakers which, while cute and stuff, have exacerbated my plantar fasciitis to the point where the pain is just awful, wretched. I’ll never own another pair of Sketchers as long as I live, mark me there—buy-one-get-one-half-off be damned!

But in the end, I decided it was more important for me to get the right shoe that to get the shoe I could take home with me that day, so I went home and ordered the Diesel shoe from an online retailer and expedited the shipping.

They aren’t here yet.