you are an idiot. what are you wearing on your feet?!?!? are those SHOES?!?!?! you disgust me.

and you would disgust Adam Sternbergh if he were here right now. writer, author, literary wordsmith, prose monger, sentence spinner, and better, smarter person than you, mr. S has dilligently uncovered a vast conspiracy to make your feet useless: you can trace this conspiracy all the way back to the first shoemaker in human history, a man by the name of larry: das evil shüe macher guy, who’s din of insidious laughter continues to ring through to this day, i’m sure, if we had but the wit to listen.

you see, according to Sternbergh, millions of years of evolution of bodies similar to ours have culminated in the perfect biological apparatus intended to spirit you from place to place with an efficiency and speed unmatched by any other mostly hairless, bi-pedal creatures that have survived into the modern age, of which there are none. these are your feet, and you are complicit in effing up that perfection every time you tie up your laces. and, of course, mr. S would know, since, as i’ve mentioned, he writes about stuff.

on the continuum of human accomplishments throughout the ages, the “invention” of shoes is a blemish, a blight on our record. if i may, i’d like to offer up a comparison of shoe propagation to the programmatic destruction of jews during the holocaust. i don’t intend to follow up that comparison with any supporting discussion of why i made it, or try to convince you how the shoe issue pervades every aspect of our culture from flat-earthers to vegans to reality television shows about why people like you will never be worth a tinker’s damn, because you’ve already demonstrated (what with your current status as a knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, shoe-donning moron) that you’re incapable of getting the reference anyway. “what was the holomacaust… oh i’m soooooooo dumb, duuude!” and so on. what have you got against jews anyway?!?! allow me to spoon feed you what you should have against them: their enduring use of SANDALS!

you see, for all your posturing and your creativity and your “technological advancements”, you collective judases, you forget one little thing, and that’s the fact that nature has already figured out everything. consider a study completed in 1940 proving that barefoot rickshaw drivers in india had “unusually healthy feet”, but, even more importantly, rickshaw drivers in india are known to have lived especially long and enriching lives free of complication and hardship in a literal paradise on earth; people who never had to supplement their vast rickshaw-hauling incomes by crawling into sewers to free up the clogs caused by a higher social caste’s copious, curry scented effluence, or sell their children into prostitution, or to science for that matter, in order to advance studies on hair removal products. so eat shit techno-dick! the shoes on your non-rickshaw pulling feet are an insult to all the glory and wonder those indian men and women stood for… uhhhh… back then, but not the ones who pull rickshaws in shoes today, people who obviously suck.

if we all pulled rickshaws in bare feet, imagine how much further we would have progressed by now… we might be pulling rickshaws in bare feet on mars for chrissakes! we haven’t even pulled rickshaws on the moon yet. sure, we drove some carts around, but we did so… IN BOOTS! [sigh]

the only way to even begin to approach this situation with any kind of conscientious, positive mental outlook is by considering the fact that nature didn’t just hand over to us with a prehensile appendage only ONE single pair of perfect body parts providing us any kind of utility; nature also provided us a wallet, and you can help reverse thousands of years of podiatric blasphemy by NOT USING IT to buy any more shoes that the eminent doctor mister Sternbergh does not ALSO wear himself, or currently owns any kind of stock in, or doesn’t write about incessently in his column applying only to real persons living in new york city — the single most naturally aesthetic city in any part of the world that matters to anybody.

people, you’ve been squandering a gift bestowed upon you by god or nature, probably. you spit in the face of all that is righteous and good in this world for the sake of fashion or avoiding possible infection delivered into your bloodstream via a shard of broken glass or an unusually aggressive discarded gum wrapper on the sidewalk. you’re caught in a self-perpetuating market of commercial excess, perpetrated upon you by people who have probably NEVER BEEN TO A LULU LEMON STORE, or produced their own greeting cards out of hemp. they don’t understand you, and they don’t understand your feet. use your foot to send a clear message by kicking these criminals to the consumerist curb, i say, and thereupon soak your toes in their blood and mushy remains, which is like nature’s own version of epsom salts. i’m sure your dogs’ll appreciate that.

if i’ve learned ANYTHING in the last couple minutes, it is that people have a choice. just like voters have a choice when it comes to our leaders, between a man who would probably mug you if you encountered him in a rarely visited room in the white house, or a different person that is not even a man… and another man who would probably mug you somewhere in the white house because he’s having a flashback from the ‘nam. just like gay people have a choice to be straight or in hiding, just like a drug addict has a choice between heroin and meth, you have the choice to be barefoot or traipse around in your goofy ass shoes. i hope you have the sense to make the right decision. namaste.