Fuck Your Shoes

What is this procured, constantly constrained feeling right before my snow white cheeks magically meet with my toilet's second worst part to be? More importantly, what is the other feeling we all get; the rattling hollowness of our existence? Of course some, if not most- or realistically all of you, can go fuck yourself right out of my own little known existence. My experience, although thwarted to a degree, almost like a German monkey specifically trained in Russian sign language forced to the US to train Orcas in Orlando's failing SeaWorld for minimum wage, is limited to what I have lived.

In other words; fuck your shoes. I don't want to walk a mile in my pair let alone have to think of others bland and dissatisfying, or tasteful and fulfilling lifestyles. Shoes where lies manifest into thoughts and thoughts into action. Shoes where love holds strangers together and anger tears family apart. Shoes that have seen dark, damp allies with cardboard set alongside a full dumpster as home; and shoes living in a high rise apartment filled with expensive Christmas presents while a large, overly flamboyant red bow place atop a new car I've never heard of sits in a parking garage for a spouse to be surprised in the morning.

The two sided tale of life is simple; there is and there isn't. There either is corn in your shit, or there is not. You either are the love of one's life or another lover to be passed on. The systematic approach of life is nothing short of an insignificant stint with a pre-allotted timeslot for you to accomplish repetitive, minuscule tasks just in hopes of making a significant enough ripple in time that you can die knowing at least more than a grandson standing next to you on your death bed won't be the last person to whisper your name before being completely forgotten about and never mulled over.

Wow what a run on sentence!

You see your shoes, albeit completely different in every aspect from mine, and the man sitting next to you on your seven fifteen train, even the shoes you wore that this pair replaced, we, the royal we, are completely similar. The only difference between me and you is I'm writing this and you are reading it. We are so similar in fact, that there's a classification for our species we all use to blanket every woman, man and child under; Dust!

Wait, dust? I could have sworn he was going to say humans or Homo sapiens sapiens. Insignificance is a key to understanding. Being a speck of dust in a realm where red dwarfs and black holes are in turn minimalized by the next equally disproportioned and unfathomable behemoth discovery in space, seems insignificant when you're running late to your shitty job in your shitty car with a shitty McDonalds egg mcmuffin staining your shitty white dress suit shirt, thinking about shitting at work later in the day.

The equivalence to an ostrich sticking it's head in the sand and in turn vanquishing it's enemies in a single self-serving swoop; we, in turn, look up to the skies and say fuck you, you dirty cocksuckers; I have purpose on this shitty Earth, eating this shitty mcfuckin muffin and I'm going to prove to you that there is more to this than just repetition and sure death.

You have now replaced the classification for us, thank you! No longer will we be dust but our own individual and happy or unhappy selves. Now we, together you and I, are at a cross roads. Here you decide; am I dust or do I own my own pair of shoes. You fucking idiot! Were you not listening, you piece of shit? You're dust! Take your shitty shoes and shove em! Wait no, the cross roads. Sorry.

Individualism in our age, an age of sharing and liking, seems to dull down the variance of our said individualism. We are minuscule, tiny bumps scarring a unique (to us) circular ball floating in a black vacuum, which in turn is a minuscule tiny bump in its grander scheme of things. Who's grand scheme of things? Well, you, me, John and Andrew, Mike, Amy, Meredith and Merrylou, the Asian striper who gave four men herpes during a luncheon three days before Christmas. We bumps (not herpes bumps), all 7 billion of us, make a very strong argument countering insignificance. But just because we, me you and Merryloe the Asian stripper, show a fierce disdain towards said insignificance, doesn't mean we merrily have avoided all that the word encompasses.

Magnification is a tool dating back to the eleventh century. Reading stones, a little glass hemispherical lens, were used to scribe and read manuscripts. Words too small to read suddenly became visible in a sharp, contextual way. And just as reading stones helped ancient monks read manuscripts about masturbation or something similar(citation needed) all day, we love magnifying ourselves until we become this sharp, specific point. So sharp and so specific, we give ourselves these shoes to walk in. This intoxicating, freedom-of-shoe-wearing-or-lack-there-of-shoe-wearing-significance, without the in in front of the sig. This personifies who we are, letting us become individuals. This is life.

This Is Life? What a fucking shame.

The reason I said so rudely fuck your shoes isn't because I don't like red Nike Air Force Ones, it's because if we trade shoes and you walk in my beaten up two year old blue converse, you'll get some kind of foot fungus I haven't been able to rid myself of since joining the military.

Also, slightly less importantly, individualism vanishes.

We fight constantly, screaming and kicking that we are here and we are people who have separate lives and different thoughts from others; different likes and dislikes and different wang and breast sizes. Fuck you is what I'm, again, saying. Fuck you and your self-righteousness; your ignorant bliss. There is and there isn't. You are choosing life's there isn't.

The definition of life from a Meriam Webster dictionary:

A: the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body

B: a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings

C: an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism (see metabolism 1), growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction

2a: the sequence of physical and mental experiences that make up the existence of an individual

For perspective of the life I am now discussing, please reference 2a.

My definition of life, because I'm so fucking witty is;

A rationale or state of being, of a minimal and acute structure built upon the biological factors of human nature and heavily influenced by foreign entities.

But life? Life is a word that can hold endless meaning. Life is what we wake up to daily. It's eating tacos on a Wednesday and scraping a knee falling from a bike. Life is sweating on a dancefloor and making love in your bedroom. Life is shitting your pants in a dark nightclub. Life is watching those you love the most disappear slowly from your memory as the last moment you shared with them turns from seconds ago, to years ago, to decades ago. Life encompasses all that we know, enshrouded in all of the bullshit, propaganda, love, feelings, emotions, friends, enemies, objects, experiences, appliances, landscapes, authors, artist, leaders, time and every other factor of an equation I'm not mathematically fit to put together.

An equation so impossibly large and complex, it would need each individual experience of every second of everyday, categorized, compacted or expanded, to fit together inside a four letter word. A breeze carrying a scent, surprising your sense of smell and conjuring a memory thought forgotten. Seeing a familiar face in a bustling crowd striking a terribly close resemblance to a long lost love one, flooding you with hope or hate. Falling to your knees as the strength leaves your body looking on helplessly as paramedics try to resuscitate your motionless four year old child. A friend smiles through tight lips as anger and rage build up inside you, knowing this friend, this best friend, has fucked the love of your life more than handful of times behind your trusting back.

Life isn't defined through a cut and dry explanation defined by a book filled with words. Each passing moment in any part of the universe could affect your life; your specific, insignificant life. A memory of fear can help you avoid a similar outcome in the present, and that same memory can just as easily make you miss something magnificent.

And so, you find significance. With every part of you, (mind, body and soul (sitation needed)), experiencing and learning and processing information from day to day, minute by minute, second by second; we create uniqueness. Life is the definition of what we yearn to live, what, if you didn't choose dust- gives purpose. A compass's needle, without a foreign entity's distortion, reliantly pointing towards its magnetic pull.

Life is constant. Life is re-sharpening; a constant re-magnification of oneself. When a new pair of shoes is adorned, life can continue on a similar path as the ones worn out and discarded.

Or…

Or, something amazing can happen.

A history lesson

Modesty is a tricky trait. Some learn at a young age braggarts are considered to be taken with a grain of salt. They're the kinds of people who ask for help and just as soon as they are called upon, reply they are busy. They come off as pompous and arrogant and easily avoided by those looking to avoid them because, well, all they fucking do is talk about themselves. But on the off chance you are reading this and have gotten past the six paragraphs above this one and decided maybe, maybe I'll give this ignorant fuck head a try at persuading me to carry on through this tedious text, skip ahead! I don't want to lose you, not here, not like this.

Not like this…

For all of you eager enough and dumb enough to think I may have enough wisdom to churn some sort of feeling inside of you, I'm going to hurt you. I'm going to betray you. I'm going to slap your ass that's wiggling in the air. I'm going to apply pressure to your (hopefully) dry butthole and deliver an about average (citation needed) penis inside of that ass. I want- and need- you to walk in my shoes. It's not an impressive story at all really, but with a very brief insight into my short and insignificant life, (INSERT YOUR SHITTY LIFE STORY).

A Foreign Entity's Distortion

The reason this book sucks is simple; I wrote it. But just because you hate it doesn't mean everyone will. Hopefully I can learn to like it so there's at least one person. My brother would probably say he likes it no matter what. So two? My Mom would tell me the truth, however. One worry is the time it takes me two scribe the information I feel befitting to share to you optimistic fucks out there. As I write I keep checking myself, to make sure I can decipher the dumb sentences I somehow still string together. Rewriting and rereading, correcting second grade grammar mistakes and fixing first grade spelling errors.

But what the fuck is going to happen when I finish my last sentence of this book-o-bullshit, look back and actually clear out entire sections of beliefs I no longer believe? What happens when I reread what I think about politics? How the whole system is a morally corrupt cesspool where both sides throw pebbles, and they both hold thick plastic shields, while simultaneously butt-fuck each other with tons of lube and consent, for nothing other than pleasure in bed.

And that is the example. A foreign entity's distortion on your compass. Not necessarily just your moral compass as well, however it is encompassed (ha) inside this compass. Life's compass. As I just explained, life is bigger than the individual. One of my least favorite quotes of all time?

"I'm not lucky, I work hard."

To a degree this is, to my understanding, saying:

"I worked above and beyond the normal status quo and made it to a point in my life where I'm in control; I have the power I originally set out for because of that work and luck has nothing to do with it."

So with that I leave you a tale of true luck;

The Simple Tale of You

With each breath of precious oxygen flurrying in and out of your flaring nostrils comes a tale too tall to tell; the simple tale of you. As tedious of a tale to tell goes, this tremendous trail of trifling troubles and tribulations traveling through trillions of tiny tantalizing theories to get to one single point; you sitting

standing

walking

running

laying

or any other form of comfortable, or uncomfortable reading positions, this exact word of this exact sentence. Contemplation or rationalization, although we are not there yet, can lead to a possible, or more probable, impossible number of possibilities that would lead to you not reading this exact word of this exact sentence. For some, like Gabe Treller of Franklin Lakes NJ, was on his way to his first day at a promising new job, and stumbled upon this book on the 5:15am train. He was about halfway through the first sentence when a brick thrown off a passing truck struck his seats window, sending his heart into a score of medical problems the passengers surrounding him had no hope in helping him with.

Your tale, much like Gabe's, begins at the start of Friedmann and Lemaitre's proposal; The Big Bang. To be fair, even this might not be the beginning of your personal anecdote. However, thinking like this risks perpetually propelling you to ponder your pointless past. So the Big Bang, (a theory I choose to believe), is a sufficient enough starting point. This big bang occurred about fourteen billion years ago, and in of itself is shrouded in mystery, and only guesses and theories can explain what, when and how this event occurred. For brevity's sake, followed closely by mine, I will not furrow our brows completely, and simply put this time frame in a manner understood easily.

Generations of humans have exponentially raised the life expectancy through medical, technological, and the all-around consensus that killing each other is detrimental to the species. Of course we are not all perfect, and some, more than others, including large groups and organizations still love killing the ever loving shit out of each other. Furthermore, this adds to the mountain of possibilities, and more importantly, the expectation that you should not be reading this exact word in this exact sentence.

With the help of imagination and intimidation, I myself will force you to come to realize telling your simple tale is in fact not so simple. Instead of starting at the beginning, I will start at the end.

You!

Who knows and who cares, but sometime ago, the exact moment having been forgotten, your mother and father fucked furiously, or faintly, forgoing the folly of fathering you. In odds that are staggeringly against you being here, a males testicles, or more importantly your father's testicles, can produce between forty million to one billion sperm in a single ejaculation. So one out of forty million to one billion chance of you making it to your mother's egg after your father ejaculated deeply in your mother's cooch. Congratulations on this, for you, like many others, are likely not to overcome those odds again in any area of your lifespan. Be that as it may, you have, and more importantly, unlike Gabe Treller, made it here.

With those numbers freshly in mind, we go back. Your grandparents are now the ones diddling each other's privates to procure their offspring. Now we have a number of proper proportions that should slap your puissant perception that you were

Meant to be

With the simple tale of you reaching a rationalization of the exact opposite meaning of simple, you can attempt an impossible equation to see how irrational the chances of you being here are, or take another route. Blame religion. However if you do that, the story of you is not as exciting, and your life is nothing more than a preplanned plight to playout as your creator intended, and you in fact are supposed to be here in this exact moment reading this exact sentence, and you know how the rest goes. Or you don't. Because God works in mysterious ways. Cheeky fucker he is.

For those of you still believing in chance and choices and thinking about how many of your children that will never see this sentence because they now reside in a tissue or sock, I urge you to think exactly how lucky you truly are. Keep going from generation to generation, fucking all the way back to the first of your family's honorable name. Now sprinkle in life. Near death experiences in your adolescence you still refuse to share with parents. Wars that grandparents fought valiantly or despicably in. Ladders and stairs? Those things kill thousands. If you compiled and categorized all the people that lived on this planet in a book, you would need an equally sized book to compile and categorize all the people that died on this planet. If you look at anything in arm's length from you, chances are there is something that's just waiting to pull the fucking trigger to the gun against your temple.

Wow. This isn't even the hard part of the story guys. We still have to get from our ancestors naming themselves, to swinging from trees in Southern Africa. And from primates to rodents. Rodents to fish. Fish to single celled organisms. Organisms to a scarred and inhospitable ball flying and colliding through space. From a ball to the god damn Big Bang. And again, for brevities sake, all of this is being condensed to a point where anyone with a high school diploma is shouting how fucking dumb I am for leaving out other theories and large chunks of our understanding of the creation of our universe. Shit, I should just use that last line- our understanding of the creation of our universe- and people would realize the luck involved.

You are one lucky piece of shit, you, floating there on a shit world orbiting a shit sun in an even shittier solar system. And luck gets a bad rap. I worked hard! Luck had nothing to do with it. To that I say fuck you. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather could have died shitting out a chicken bone in a field somewhere. Luck is the center of my universe and whether you like it or not, luck is the center of yours as well.

So now that the preliminary point of your life not being simple is freshly in our hearts, I digress with my reason for writing this weird segment. Luck, divine intervention, fate, reason; however you want to phrase the essence of the word I'm trying to convey, isn't an enemy to throw away and shame. It should be embraced. Luck is the reason you are here reading this exact line in this exact sentence at this exact moment. Wow, cool. But as others look down on the word, I too feel the word "luck" has a bit of a childish demeanor to it; hell, that's one of the reasons it is such a powerful word. So instead of calling a spade a spade, I like to call it:

The foreign entity's distortion.

Working hard with no luck involved isn't portraying itself in a just manner. It's just not true. What the quote side steps is that everyone is affected, positively and negatively, by the/a foreign entity's distortion.

What the fuck are you saying, man?

A foreign entity is anything. It's you, it's your mom and dad, sister and cousin. It's a UPS driver delivering a dildo in the mail. It's the dildo that being delivered. It's how the dildo was made, and who owns it. The money spent by you on the dildo, the money collected by the dildo owner. A foreign entity is a sickness; influenza and cancer. A foreign entity is a stranger saying thank you. An empty parking space next to the door you wanted to enter. Anything that effects your shoes, is a foreign entity.

A fart?

Yeah sure, foreign entity.

A fart from Hitler?

Sure, that fart from Hitler could have affected you today, butterfly effect and all. Maybe it turned out to be a shart, and Hitler had to clean himself instead of ordering a mass cleansing of his inferiors that day.

But a foreign entity, although can be anything, has to be specific to you. After all, who else really matters besides you? The reasons for an accent, the way you brush your teeth, the perfume and cologne you apply, political views; all shaped by foreign entities.

Foreign entities are always pulling our compass needle away from our true north. It's their job to shape us, and more importantly, create our life, giving us our individuality. The creation of a foreign entity can be for any reason, good or bad. And take the word "creation" carefully. It's not that each individual foreign entity is gunning for you, (although many today are). It's that no matter where your shoes land on any part of this planet, there's always someone, something, drawing your attention.

I'm reading this shitty book for you to tell me there's "things" in the world influencing me? Please, refrain from calling me a fucking idiot.

I'm not saying this isn't a known truth you fuck-face-penis-shaped-nose. I'm laying a continuous foundation, and giving you my terms of how I choose to describe things I've learned in the past. So, a recap… What is a foreign entity? Anything. Everything?

Back to luck, and diving head first into perception

I know, I'm sporadic. I left the main argument of the quote unanswered. For good reason, no less. The main lesson of the quote-

I'm not lucky I work hard

-is that hard work pays off. That waking up with a drive to accomplish what needs to be done is how things are done. Of course waking up and crushing the list of to dos on the fridge will get you ahead of the pack you fucking idiot. And this is where the quote loses its appeal.

I get it, hard work pays off. But that's just like me making up a useless term, like foreign entities, to explain everything around us affects us in different ways. The quote is everything that's wrong in today's society. More so, the society that we, I, live in.

Where one sees the benefits to an alarm clock set to 5am so they can drive to the gym to get a quick workout in during the colder months, waking themselves up by shocking the body into action.

Where arriving to work an hour ahead of their coworkers to cross t's and dot i's.

Staying an hour late to finish a project a week ahead of time.

Coming home, cooking with music blasting to make your hips gyrate

Catching up on world news before calling it a day and pulling the blankets up to your smiling face and closing eyes, to repeat the same routine the next day

By all accounts, this person I'm describing works way harder than a large proportion of the population. Hell, they work harder than anyone they know, give or take a few exceptions. You can see it on their face; in what they wear and how they carry themselves. And if they use the quote above, it ties their life together. It gives them meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. In their eyes, in their perception, they have achieved what they wanted by working their sexy ass right off. Congratulations!

Fuck luck, that's you waking up at five am to keep that booty in shape. You driving in an hour ahead of time to statistically position yourself ahead of coworkers on your plane of coexistence. Staying an hour late to finish the projects that bosses love giving you. You cook and clean all by yourself, maybe for a family of four too. Hell, I bet you take shits that require one wipe, too! The only interference of foreign entities move you forward; no matter good nor bad. Fuck luck, you say.

For some, this rally of pure hard work paying off is a golden egg. From dust you rose with nothing and now, content in life, hold on to what you love and, more importantly, choose to love in your life. A constant uphill battle, you went right when life said go right. You went forward when life said stand still. You froze when life said jump. No matter what I write can resonate with you, for you have beaten the odds and can now smile ear to ear knowing you, and only you with your shoes, have followed your compass and through countless errors and foreign entities, found the one thing you sought after. You can say hard work pays off because you lived the life of working hard and it payed off.

But those rallying around the quote today are not the exception; they have not risen from the dust to be greeted by those laden in gold. Those reposting and liking the quote, thinking to themselves, getting giddy from self-absorption, are those so stuck in a way of thought it makes me do the exact opposite of smile. Not frown either. Scowl?

The quote signifies those who have "made it", above the threshold of "where I don't want to be". And where you don't want to be is poverty. Living in a cardboard box without shoes. Working three jobs to stay afloat.

But we know, luck is everything. Luck is you being born in Newton, Oregon opposed to Ruwa, Zimbabwe. Born into a loving household, compared to a disheveled one. Luck is being able to afford an education, even if you are stuck with paying off loans. Luck is finding a craft your good at and turning it into a profit. Luck is being able to afford owning a car. Foreign entities fuck with every aspect of everyone's individualism. So, preaching, or even worse, sharing, "hard work pays off" is just saying you're an irrational individual. Instead of seeing everything around you, you choose what to look at around you. You see a nickel on the ground and because you picked it up you're five cents richer. You didn't stop to think about the person who is now five cents poorer, because that is not the perception of your reality. Only things you accomplish or see accomplished around you truly matter. You are stuck in the way you think.

That only you matter.

Perception is an eerie thought. Behind the eyes that allow you to fumble through a day's cycle sits the most important part of individualism; the brain. The brain is our boat to salvation from insignificance. It perceives the information it receives and rationalizes it, creating thoughts, memories and actions. But perception, our own perception of the day is exactly that, our own. Our brains are not linked to each other, so watching a play unfold on a football field will result in a different reaction by multiple people watching it. Even if it's a similar reaction, a quick, jumping from the couch while screaming yes looking for the others doing the same to high five and celebrate, still is a different perception of the actual event. Maybe the celebration is for the excitement of the game, maybe it's for a specific team or even just a specific player. Maybe it's for rooting against the other team or, maybe it's to spite someone rooting for the other team.

The reality, our perception of the situation is that both are celebrating the play. But that's a collective perception. Fuck that, I'm not interested in the collective we. Individualism, remember? Individually, our perception of the play is our perception of the play, no one else's. No one truly knows why you jumped for joy unless you tell them your perception of the events that partook. Yes, it looks like the excitement stemmed from the play, but the root cause is only known by you.

This example is simple. We, the collective we, are not simple. We are complex beings with complex lives and shoes and individualism and our own foreign entities, and the first person perspective is not as easily on display for others as it is during a football play. We cannot see into another's thoughts (yet), and they cannot see into ours. We have since adapted to this by creating communication, but no matter the form, nothing is as intense as your own perception.

And nor should it! Your perception is what drives you forward. It's what makes you who you are; what shapes and forms your thoughts and actions. It is another key to individualism. To significance. With a shared perception (biologically), two would become one. The same sights would bring the same thoughts to two different individuals, making them shared; the same. If we linked perceptions together, we would be drones with the same train of thought, acting and thinking as one.

But the key is to understand the sight of your perception. You may see in front of you food and think satiation. You may see a car flying down the road and think asshole.