Shoes On The Highway

(another old one and originally posted on Your Packaging Sucks!!)

On many occasions, I’ve been minding my own business and driving down a highway. Out of the blue, there is a shoe lying on the roadway. This has happened enough times that I’ve made mental notes about it.

The last time this happened, I questioned the origin of these shoes. Where do they come from and why is it always only one lone shoe? There are the questions that I would like answered and with no reasonable answers provided, I’ve come up with a few of my own.

Perhaps someone is tooling down the highway and scanning the wonderful selection of tunes provided on the radio dial. They settle on a station playing some crappy Elton John song, which segue ways into an incredibly nifty song that literally blows a shoe off and out the back window. Since most radio tunes clock in at about four minutes and most cars are traveling at the allotted speed limit (work with me here), we’re talking several miles. Is it really worth the time to backtrack that many miles for a tattered Nike with much road wear and a lace that is hanging together with one thread and a prayer? Probably not.

Personally, I will swerve across many lanes of traffic just to run over an abandoned flip-flop. If ever there was a footwear faux pas, it would be the flip-flop. Time permitting, I will even get out of my vehicle and club these shoes with a tire-tool or any available blunt object. Hopefully, this senseless act of violence would forever silence the hellaciously annoying sound that these shoes make. Excessive? Perhaps, but I tend to be an extremist.

Another theory involves someone hitchhiking a little too close to the traffic and in particular, one of those gas guzzling bastards from Hell, yes, a SUV. One SUV going at a good clip would hit a body so hard that it would only leave a shoe. The rest of the person would look like an incredibly life-like hood ornament. Grizzly, but life-like and also missing a shoe.