Antiques – lately
Cart before the horse or horse first? Do my pictures inspire the post or do the posts inspire my pictures? I edit. I cull. I choose. But did I take the pic with the post in mind. It goes both ways. I wondered. My original premise was to cull my vast collection. I’m lazy. I have digitized more than 100k color slides. That would be the number of slides, not the kilobytes of memory per pic. By now some date back decades. I’ve got them on my hard drive but Lightroom takes forever to load the images. Oh well. I’ll remain contemporary for the moment.
We go around and see lots of old stuff. There are always surprises. Naked Poetry? Yes, the title stopped me in my tracks. Growing up the NY Times had ads for Naked Lunch. More hype than reality. But for teen age boys, it sure did get the imagination running. I’ve told you the story – (well, again) – of my friend in Elkins who could read but not spell. He came back from the magazine rack all excited that they were selling a copy of “Pregnant” (Pageant). Oh well. I’m old. I just try on shoes without measuring. But I sure remember the shoe size measure device when I would buy shoes as a kid. Do not throw out any metal tins. They all seem to be collectable.
Luxury Shopping
I love this shot! Every once in a while the shot is good and the story is second place. Isn’t this a great graphical image. Night shot! This was near to impossible before digital. Now it’s easy. High fashion shoes and abayas don’t seem to be congruent. What does one wear out? And what goes with an abaya? Folks mostly wear sneakers or sandals. Sandals are great because it’s so damn hot. Sneakers are hot.
Oh! Another aside. “Oud or agarwood is one of the most popular scents on the market today. Oud is said to be the most expensive wood in the world; oud oil’s value is estimated to be 1.5 times the value of gold, and it is sometimes referred to as ‘liquid gold’.” My nurse told me about this scent. Everyone smells to high heaven. What with the “built in sauna” wearing an abaya, you do need a lot of scent.
High fashion shoes under an abaya? Pearls before swine? Sorry. No pork here. But you get my drift? Which reminds me… one of our nurses was stopped from entering with marzipan. She had brought it in and it contains like .001% alcohol! The Saudi customs officer stopped her triumphantly! She refused to give up her stuff. She argued and cried. Her husband left her. He was standing next to her with a block of Serrano ham in his bag…
So? What shoes do you wear under an abaya? Anything you like I’d guess. Incongruent? It’s not like you are solving a geometry theorem.
The Last Sneakers
The sneaker of my childhood was a high top Converse. After I started running at Stuyvesant High School, I was directed to Paragon Sports and got my first Adidas running/racing shoe. So I’ve been a lifelong Adidas guy. Lisa and the kids do Nike, Reebok and everything in between. J told me she wears size 7 ½ and buys 9 because her foot swells so much when she runs distance. I saw a Converse customizing store when I was in LA. I have some old Adidas with ugly green stripes (three) that I’m trying to replace. I don’t want fluorescent colors and patterns on my running shoe. And that’s pretty much the choice from Adidas these days. Even mighty Amazon was a bust. When I returned to NY and walked Chinatown, I found a cheap leather wallet and a soft black leather fanny pack. You just don’t pay a lot for these things especially when you know you don’t need to spend much. And there was a discount running shoe store. I skipped right past Nike and there was my Adidas shoe. I’d have liked the classic blue stripes. But as J had ridiculed, “No one wears, so no one buys, and no one sells – plain white.” Got ’em!!
So it occurs to me that I have had the current shoes for more years than I remember. I’m not that radical a sportsman that I will wear them down anytime soon. So these might be that last sneakers I get. If I had considered the moment, maybe I would have lingered over the choice longer. But, hey, we live forever don’t we?
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