Shiny Things

No reflective essay whoopdidoo today, just lust for shoes.

Yesterday, I saw a woman with bright green doc martens. Like this but shorter:


I kept glancing at her as I approached the table she was sitting at, as I passed, and even once as I climbed the staircase near her. When I was on the stairs we actually made eye contact. She probably thought I was scoping her out, or maybe she understood it was shoe lust.


I wish I had been wearing something appropriately shiny to match. My flower docs maybe. I got these lovelies a looooooooong time ago in Toronto, City of Shoes, home to a holy site for shoe lust pilgrimage: the Bata Shoe Museum. This is an entire freestanding, four-story museum devoted to the history and aesthetics of freaking shoes!!! I'll give you a moment to bask in the glory of this idea ...

...


OK.
A couple days ago, a friend posted on FB that she missed her old blue combat boots after seeing a woman walk across her campus sporting a pair. I don't know if the ones she saw…

He's pretty shiny, right?
I have a habit of leaving cryptic notes for myself, often in the form of untitled lists scrawled on scraps of paper then tucked away to be found at some later date. I wonder over them.What was the moment in which this group of words seemed important? What was I thinking? What is on this list that is still important? Sometimes they result in lovely serendipities.

For instance, I have a tattered, creased sheet of grid paper I have held onto for 23 years. (It's somewhere in the attic right now.) At a funny angle on the back side (I've no idea what's on the front) is a list of titles of books about theater (Towards a Poor Theatre ... Empty Space ... ) And set off a bit, a guessed-at name: "Castlevetro?" I hurriedly made this list after a conversation with the Great Condee, my dramatic theory professor, whom I coouldn't embarass myself in front of by admitting I didn't know what he was talking about. For a long time I kept this li…

David made fun of me when I told him, two weeks ago, that I had "started writing the first post" for this blog.
"You don't get it, do you?" he asked, knowing perfectly well that I do.
I probably threatened to throw something at him.
I erased that fragment of first post. It was too mannered and laborious. It was all about what I want this blog to be about. It was all about my anxiety of influence re certain other writers (namely George Eliot), and about the wonder of coming upon a manuscript of Middlemarch in the British Library about 5 million years ago, and the little paperback reproduction of her quotation-filled blotter I bought in the gift shop.
The paperback looks like this. (I haven't actually read it.) Miraculously, I was able to find it in less than 5 minutes, despite the shocking disarray of my bookshelves ... it was on the attic stairs. (more on bookshelves in some other post)

In the intervening two weeks, I have made a list of possible topics for blog …