A kick in the arse for order.
As a society we need rules. It’s just how we’re programmed. Rules and order bring stability to our lives and help us function. From the beginning of time we have felt the urge to bring order to our lives. For example. Cave men built walls of small pebbles at the entrances of their caves to mark in and out paths. This was so the guys dragging women back home by their hair to satisfy another urge, wouldn’t bump into the men dragging the woolly mammoth bones out to the trailer to take to the tip on clean up day (usually a Thursday, because there were no weekends in prehistoric times, so they could do chores like going to the tip and mowing the lawns whenever they wanted. Not mowing lawns so much because there wasn't much grass and what grass there was got eaten by the Wooly Mammoths. That was a bonus, but the downside was the Wooly Mammoths shit all over the place and so while the cavemen didn't have to mow lawns they did spend a lot of time cleaning up huge plies of shit. After a couple of thousand years of this the cavemen decided they would rather mow lawns than spend hours up to their elbows in poo, so they hunted the Wooly Mammoths to extinction.)
In the modern world some of our urges have to be suppressed. For example, we don’t drag women around by the hair anymore. That urge has been tucked away in the 'inactive projects' section of our brain, but the need for order in all things is still as strong as ever. It permeates every facet of our lives which is why it will come as no surprise that I saw large ripples across the normally still waters of the pond of order the other day, when I spied this very unorthodox footwear.
Is it a shoe? A quick glance may seed that impression with you. But look again…yes, those sides are disturbingly open. There are small holes that allow a view of the toes (in this case the white sock from the owners ’25 pairs of socks for 50 cents’ pack is covering them)
So our natural conclusion is to class this as a sandal yes? But no. There’s way too much fake leather for this to be classed as a sandal. How much is too much? I've sent one of these... things... to the Sandal Affairs Directorate headquarters in Guam for precise measurement by a team of Norwegian scientists using lasers and one of those rulers with the slidey things on it. But even to the untrained eye (by untrained I mean an eye that hasn’t been in the head of a person that has attended the Sandal Affairs 5 year Sandal Identification course) it is clear that this item of footwear exceeds the amount of covering that enables it to exist under the classification of sandal.
My friend Raphael, who has very little going on in his life, took the time most people would spend having a life, to consider the monstrosity you see before you and he came up with name SCHWANDAL.
Not a shoe, not a sandal. A freak. An outcast destined to inhabit that desolate wasteland between the two official and approved types of footwear. This is the child playing in the minefield out in no mans land people. This is unacceptable. This brings chaos where there was order and it goes against everything our forefathers set in motion when those first rocks were arranged like little stony motorway lane barriers at the entrance to their caves.
Slip on a shoe, pull on a sandal, but there is no room in our modern civilized society for a SCHWANDAL. They must be stamped out. The owner of this particular pair got a beating, caveman style and then we burned his Schwandals on a ceremonial funeral pyre. He’ll thank us later and I am pretty sure he’s going to tell the police that he doesn’t want to go ahead and press charges.
