New Kicks: An Ode

I have new goddamn shoes.

I’m not much of a brand whore. I happily rep the big Apple, of course. When it comes to tech I’ll front for Sony, Stanton, LG, and a couple others. Clothes? Gap jeans are readily available, Armani Exchange has the occasional fitted-but-still-hetero shirt, but I mostly like the Nordstrom house brands. But shoes, shit, that’s another matter entirely.
Everyone gets brandwhorey about shoes. Women are, in my experience, magnetically fucking drawn to them; crazy black hole shit, unavoidable. And designer sneakers have become the male domain, with the black guys heading towards the jacked up court-ready foot-SUVs and the white guys laying it down for indie cred Chucks, big-tongued skater kicks, and other flat, arch-maiming epitomes of urban podia-foolishness. Shoes are stupid, but we love them dearly. We ignore the word from on high; we know we should all shuffle about in airy, simple, supportive Jesus-style sandals, and yet we fuck our feet up nice and good for hot kicks. We are flawed and weak for our shoes.

I am flawed and weak for Pumas. They’re not so bad for my feet, actually, but they are much much too expensive. I had a black-steel-silver pair of Mostros, a “lifestyle shoe” (seen amongst its kind in the Puma online store) that I loved dearly. Mostros are the king-hell shoe, the mutant lovechild of a slipper, a running shoe, a climbing shoe, your favorite 3rd Grade velcro sneakers, and an octopus. They are unfathomably comfortable from the first steps and look fascinatingly good with everything short of a suit. My sad-cloud-palate Mostros were my goddamn shoes_, and they had a good two or three months left of active duty in them when they were prematurely disposed of by an overzealous housekeeper. I was crushed, and the other Mostro color schemes out then couldn’t begin to console me. I found solace months later in a pair of suede Blackouts1670256, which I have since well loved in the gym and everywhere else.

Today I went to find dress casual shoes, and did indeed find a very amiable pair of black leather oxfords by Kenneth Cole (who I am very close to adding to the front-for list as he increasingly infiltrates my wardrobe). But my real prize is a pair of black-gray-metallic gold linen Mostros. Yeah, fucking linen_, as if it were possible for those kicks to get any crazier. I wore my crazy linen shoes854063 to dinner and was walking extra steps just be in Mostros again.

Shoes make us stupid. Thank you Puma.