16th May 2004, early evening | Comments (19)
When I was a child the newspapers were always filled with stories about excesses in EU agricultural production: Butter Mountains, Milk Lakes, and Grain Hills were a part of everyday news reports.
San Francisco, it seems, has a similar problem, but in this case it’s with shoes. They might not put it in their guidebooks, and you sure as hell won’t see Governor Schwarzenegger talk about it on TV, but take it from me, this town has more shoes that it knows what to do with.
Why do I say that? Well, I don’t think a single day has passed that I haven’t seen a pair of shoes, sometimes with laces, sometimes without, placed neatly on the sidewalk, resting atop a wall, or in the middle of the road, as though their occupant had been driven from them, cartoon-style, by the impact of a car.
Sometimes the shoes are old and battered, sometimes they’re shiny and new. But regardless of their state, they’re always side-by-side, perfectly aligned, and utterly alone.
Now, the fact that the streets of San Francisco are infested with stray shoes is odd enough, but what’s doubly strange is that many of the homeless people here are wandering around in bare feet. Why this should be, I do not know. Maybe the homeless people and the shoes move in different social circles? Maybe San Francisco’s great unwashed feel shoes to be restrictive of their freedom? (Maybe the shoes feel San Francisco’s great unwashed are restrictive of their freedom? Who can tell.)
Whatever the reason, this proliferation of ownerless shoes is just another example of the city’s curious charm.
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