Remember walking down every street and looking up and seeing pairs of shoes dangling from the power lines. When you saw this as a kid for the first time it baffled you as it should on the rare occasion you come across this now. I saw a pair of shoes up on some power lines the other day for the first time in years, it completely caught me off guard. I had totally forgotten that this existed.

Now that I start to think about this more/read the Wikipedia page on shoe tossing...

Tangent: If you read my Headlines Heading to Loudon piece you read a complaint I had about the people working for the internet. How the hell is there no fake picture of the 2014 Kevin Harvick #4 Budweiser car, yet there is a fricken Wikipedia page for Shoe Tossing whose body contains 1400 words?

Anyway, I was thinking about this shoe tossing thing while reading the Wiki page and I started remembering that this used to be a weird form of art, pre accessible spray paint and pre pre spray paint being kept in a vault, apparently known to some as ‘shoefiti’. People would collect old shoes tie the laces together and decorate shit. I never really understood it but I don’t understand most visual art... ooo it’s pretty? I don’t know how deep the “artist” was thinking when he painted or threw shoes or whatever. The only time I’d want to waste my time speculating is if I was incredibly high with a couple funny friends or if I was on an acid trip. Sure some of it is pretty, aesthetically, and occasionally I will instantly relate to a picture on a deeper level but then my brain turns on and says... they’re shoes on a power line.

It was also a super dick move, especially in it’s time. I grew up with people who loved to wrestle and fuck with you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fight for my life to keep my bathing suit in my possession while in the presence of chicks from school. We used to play kill the man with the ball with out of bounds and if you ran out of bounds whoever was closest to you would get one free chance to throw the ball at you... and I think we all know where they were aiming. It was really a freeforall. I credit my being a night person to the sleepovers I had as a kid. If you fell asleep first there was a chance you would get handcuffed, (by those toy handcuffs with the release tab only we cut that off because it was too easy to get out of), then obviously the focus would go to the sharpie’d dick on the face. That fun only ended when there was no room left on the skin you had showing. From there, if you were a heavy sleeper we would go for the nipples or pubic region with the sharpie or to the shaving cream. While we would occasionally go for the classic shaving cream on the hand and then tickle the face for an earned laugh, most of these sleepovers just turned into a sack whack contest. Since the handcuffs were the toy ones with the release tab cut it was still possible to get out of if concentrated upon, so the person would get their face covered with a mountain of shaving cream and then would wake up to a swift punch to the nuts, unable to fight back because he was handcuffed and covered in shaving cream... Are we on the same page yet? Sorry, this went a bit off the rails. I hope that was at least a little funny and not completely shocking slash homoerotic. It was all done in good fun. While we may not all hang out anymore we still all consider each other friends.

For one reason or another nobody I knew ever got into the shoe tossing thing though. Wow, what a long way to go for something that could have been said what feels like an hour ago. Luckily for me, I was one of the smaller kids, we never got into this shoe tossing thing. We may have all been assholes to one another but we never wanted to have someone go home and tell their parents on them I guess is how I would put it. Nobody ever complained about bullying because it was a better time. But at no point can I remember a time where anyone even mentioned the shoes hanging from the power lines probably because nobody wanted to get into doing that and we all knew if someone broke the seal it would open the floodgates... kiddies that’s how you use two cliches back to back to finish a fuckin sentence.

The people that did get into the actual bullying aspect (which isn’t what we did but rather when there is hate in your heart for the person you are toying with) of this are mostly in the poor communities, which is where I was going with the first sentence of two paragraphs ago. Though it would suck to be poor in 2013 and have someone constantly beating you up and throwing your shoes up in a tree, the government will happily supply your family with a new pair... my face is red but I am biting my lip... it was far worse when shoe tossing was really at it’s peak. I’m talking back when it was okay to get drunk after work and backhand your kid for losing another pair of sneakers. This fad was taking place back when people had less resources and more pride, aka a much worse time to go home to pops, who just got off a long work day and whom had just polished off his fifth Mai Tai, and tell him you need new shoes.

Wow, I should have ended with “shoefiti” on second thought I will...