Saturday 3 March 2007

Arrangement Of Smallstones

It’s been ages since I had a stone in my shoe. Everyone knows how to estimate too big. Everyone knows. It almost feels like the good old days.
If you want to know how good your bare skin can draw (no gripping mechanism allowed; just flat skin-on-idea) you must pay attention here. Your foot will trace a knob of gravel in your brain, and may create some landmark knobbles that you will be excited to look at with eyes when you eventually take off your shoe. You will have decided, for example, that the shape is 1980s computer monitor with a conical flask coming out the right-hand-side. You can now (at a safe place on the pavement) take off your shoe and shake out the apple-pip-sized rock. On your first several attempts, what you uncover at this point will appear to have none of the landmarks that your foot so confidently drew in your brain. (You may even be so disappointed that you desire to put the stone back in your shoe so that you can look at the old picture again – I don’t know how widespread this feeling is – it may just be me and few others.) Perhaps though, with practice, as you reach old age, your foot-drawing will become more and more accurate, ‘til eyes and foot converge.
I have never put a stone in my shoe on purpose. This is a method you could try. It would, however, destroy the great and awesome complex unpredictable pattern of which moments you get a stone in your shoe. At the moment, for me, it’s been AGES. When will I next get a stone in my shoe? When will I next get a stone in my shoe? And, when will someone fall in love with me?

2 comments:

Jack Gander said...

I once had a stone in my shoe, I don't know if you know, and I kept it there for a time. I wanted to adapt; that didn't last too long, though. I want to film you.

M said...

I haven't had a stone in my shoe for a very long time indeed. [That may change soon, however, as these cheap Omani (purchased in Oman, that is; made, naturellement, en chine) trainers I'm wearing have a substantial fissure under the ball of my foot. Finding said fissure was, contrarily, a blessed relief, since it contradicted the suggestion that my sweat glands had all headed south.]

I digress.

Stones in my shoes I had always viewed as nothing but an irritant. Yet it was always a disconcertingly welcome irritant - and I think I now know why. For which I thank you.