my rainy day song

of montreal's "a sentence of sorts in kongsvinger" from their album hissing fauna, are you the destroyer?

tell me something i don't know ...

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another life-altering shoe purchase

remember these?

yesterday afternoon, upon benefiting from information G gathered on a successful shoe recon mission downtown, i snuck out of my office between my two sets of tuesday office hours, treated myself to the first hot chocolate of the season from a fav local café and *finally procured the footware i think just might possibly change my life.

if you've been around here for a while (or if you've known me for a while in real time) you know all about me and these boots. you know that i have a friend, L, who owns the original pair, and you know that i've had some serious boot envy for well on two years. you also know that in times of personal trouble in the past, i've tried to buy these boots as a sort of talisman, only to face "we're not making them this season" frustration. now i'm not sure if the shoe gods over at franco sarto got wind of just how, er, challenging tuesdays around the ranch have become for me, or if the appearance of the Marvelous Boots is part of some larger scheme of shoe beneficence being bestowed on the world, but i'm not asking too many questions.

as i said to a colleague yesterday afternoon, while gushing about my acquisition, i know they're "just" boots, but to me they're a pretty weighty signifier. of what? at the moment, it's a little difficult to put into words, but here it goes. they're unapologetically intense and intensity, no wait ... *exhibiting intensity is something i tend to shy away from. i'm always afraid it's going to backfire; i'm scared that if i put it all on the line, it's really going to hurt (after years of racing at regattas, you'd think i would have learned that while it does hurt, the pain passes ... but no). as i've written here before, fear (of failure, of being foolish, of so many things) often holds me back. i'm at a place in my life right now, however, where it doesn't pay to be fearful, in fact, it might hurt me more to hold back. if something as frivolous as a pair of red boots is going to remind me that from time to time i should take a blinding (atmospheric?) leap, then i shouldn't be ashamed of listening to my inner shoe whore, who i think, thanks to the lyrics of the song by the band franz ferdinand, just might be named eleanor.