Day One: Had a pair in the mid-nineties. Tore the shit out of my heel so bad I used to tape cardboard to the backs of my feet. The price of being cool was high back then. Now three decades have passed and I’m still trying to be cool like I was at 15. This time around it’s not quite as painful. They’re tight but not drawing blood. Either Docs are made to be less painful when breaking in, or my skin is harder in middle age.
Day Two: Turns out Day One was a fluke. I thought I’d experienced the worst of it — a tight compression on the top and sides of the feet. Wow, was I wrong. Day One was prepping you for what’s to come. To tenderize the flesh for the onslaught of Day Two. That’s when the real work begins. The incessant rubbing of bunched-up sock and the inner seams of leather. I can feel the boots actively creating blisters on the tops of my feet and the sides of my small toes. The pain is real, but I keep reminding myself that it’s only temporary. That I am retaining something of my youth by clinging to yesteryear’s fashion.
Day Three: The pain has grown. Getting them on this morning felt a bit like trying to towel-dry a second-degree burn. A legit tear rolled down my left cheek as I stood up to leave. I have to walk in slow and gentle steps, in a sort of tender hobble. People have started looking at me strangely at work. I return them a pathetic smile followed by the inevitable wince from the soreness. My feet no longer feel like part of my body but two throbbing orbs of heat and pain below my knee. I spend a lot of time in my office just staring at the boots. They look cool, I keep telling myself. I look cool…
Day Four: I can no longer take them off. I tried last night when I got home, but the pain it caused was unbearable. It now feels like trying to remove a layer of my own flesh, so I slept with them on. I was able to take off my jeans before bed by pulling them over the Docs (thanks Gen Z for the baggy denim trend). But now all movement has been reduced to an excruciating limp. I called into work today as I was not able to pull the baggy jeans back on. I’m sitting at my home office desk in boxer briefs with ice packs resting on the tops of the boots in an attempt to dull the throbbing.
Day Five: Today, I didn’t even call into work. I’m not pretending to be on Teams and haven’t even opened my email. I’ve just been lying on the sofa, biting on a leather belt as each new wave of agony pulses through my body. Whatever carnage these boots have inflicted on my feet has caused some kind of infection that now possesses the rest of this wretched husk. I’d call 911, but the thought of emergency services trying to cut them off, and the white-hot torture that could cause, keeps me from dialing. Instead, I’ve chosen to just lie with my eyes closed, trying to control my breathing as best I can, and focus on the in-between — that sweet reprieve from the throbbing pain.
Day Six: Something has changed. The pain hasn’t necessarily stopped but has transmuted into a kind of enlightened suffering. An awareness has emerged from the depths of this agony that now fills me with a new strength as I face what I now know to be the inevitable outcome of this journey: the great beyond of death itself. In a way, I sort of feel what those soldiers must have felt, huddled together on landing crafts as they approached the Normandy shore, the mist clearing to reveal a triumphant and certain death. Perhaps not quite as intense a feeling, but the same in that I don’t know if I can reverse this outcome. This stiff black leather has now become more than an accessory. It has become a death sentence.
Day Seven: All pain gives way to a glorious release — a weightless elevation into the light of eternity. Here I remain for a short period as a singular consciousness. A capsule of sorts, where my awareness clings to its familiar unified form. But I can feel it starting to slip away into the great collective. Like a broken hourglass whose grains of sand drip out into a vast desert. Soon, I will become part of something so large and beautiful and terrifying and beyond the scope of a singular consciousness to grasp. The great mass of spirit that serves some core function in the existence of things. I won’t understand until I’m fully incorporated. But here, there is no concern about being cool. Here, where we will all inevitably transcend, all pain and vanity are utterly irrelevant, as are the bodies we once inhabited. Here, we must all cast off our Dr. Martens, our chunky loafers, our corporeal shells, and enter our next phase of existence.
Beyond the Collapse of Time and Matter: From the great floating nebula of human consciousness we acknowledge human suffering as real and wish to soothe this great pain. We praise those who give life and nurture existence. We praise those who elevate that rudimentary state of being to its highest levels, for that is the work that provides us with its greatest contributions. We praise those who manage to endure this great suffering and transcend from a higher plane of mortal existence, be it from human cruelty or just stiff English leather. Soon you will join us. Soon we we will all be one, existing beyond this insignificant accident of evolution called humanity. One small grain of sand in a vast and vanishing desert.
