i discovered this morning, while getting ready for work, that Tiger had destroyed my three oldest pairs of chucks.

i love chucks. i wear chucks often. they’re comfortable, they go with my personal style in a lot of circumstances, and it’s just sort of a thing. i have not been without a pair of wearable chucks since the early nineties. i always have chucks. i often have chucks in various states of disrepair, specifically for coordinating the amount of slack my outfit conveys. chucks rule!

but, sadly, now i am down from six pair to only three.

my oldest pair was a pair of royal blue lo-tops that dated from my days working for worldwide access. i actually gave them up as unsuitable for daily wear when i was working at nttc, and started keeping them at work for days when it rained and my shoes got wet on the way to work. they stayed at my desk for that at fastweb, too. when i started working at the university, they crept back into the closet, however. the soles were pretty worn and floppy (in that chucks floppy sole way), but the uppers were still fine, really, so i started wearing them again on occasion. they were a very faded blue, and covered with doodles from when i had been trapped in meetings at verio.

those were my last pair of pre-nike chucks, which no doubt accounts for their exceptional staying power.

then i had two pair of hi-tops, both purchased at the same time, about 6 years ago. one was maroon; the other black.

the maroon hi-tops were the only pair of chucks i have ever experienced significant structural failure on: two of the shoelace rivets ripped out of the canvas on the left shoe, leaving a gaping hole where the shoe couldn’t be laced. i, being an industrious sort of person, just laced the shoe up differently and kept on wearing them — since the rivets tore out shortly after i got the shoe, and i wasn’t going to give up yet. the soles were still pretty intact, and, apart from the rivet tear, the canvas still in reasonable shape. i’d spent a lot of quality ink doodling on the rubber sole on the arch of the foot. i liked those shoes. they were my only red shoes, and they went with a surprising number of things.

and finally, my beat-up black hi-tops. i actually have a new pair of black hi-tops, bought a few months ago. the old black ones had seen a lot of wear and were sort of raggedy, so i decided to get a nicer pair. but the old ones were really broken-in and super comfy, and really, the perfect shoe to wear when i just wanted to convey a general sense of how i couldn’t really care less about pretty much anything.

but they’re all gone now. my poor shoes. i loved my shoes, but i took them out to the garbage on my way to work today. my poor old shoes, unloved and left to rot away in a white plastic bag in the garbage bin. they deserved a nobler end than that!