Shoe Laces that Untie Themselves

The first step in realizing that life is a never ending series of tedious tasks and unrealized happiness is when you graduate from the easy-to-wear, easy-to-use velcro shoes of prekindergarten to the tied laces of elementary. And at this point life begins to suck, as you then start to realize that universe is not apathetic but in facts hates everything, and by everything it specifically hates you.

So your laces will never be tied, and the knots will never be tight enough, unless your parent tied it for you then it cuts off your circulation.

Oh and everyone else in the world always have perfect laces, expect for you. Since this one task that 5-year-olds have mastered behind your capability is still far beyond your mental reach.

So here you are a full grown “adult”, walking through the parking lot of a grocery store with a bag full of Poptarts and another full of chocolate milk mix, since the usage of quotation marks earlier in this sentence implies that you are just pretending to be an adult. Which is highlighted by that fact that you’re still too scared to park between two cars in the denser areas of the parking lot closer to the store so you park in the far back corner next to the Taco Bell and the drug deal.

And as soon as you stop at the cross walk and look both ways before you cross, completely ignoring the lack of cross traffic, and work up the courage to cross without a large hand to walk you, you feel the slight whipping on the back of your right leg coming from the untied shoelace from your left shoe.

Your shoe, which you swear you just tied, has once again cursed you by magically loosening itself and giving you a light reminder that you’re now more or less going to have a limb until you give it the attention that it desires.

But you’re in public, about the cross a cross walk in a parking lot and there’s plenty of other fully grown adults around you who will judge every move you make any sort of nonadult like movement. In this case everyone in a 300 yard radius will judge you for tying your shoe in public, because if you were a real adult it would have already been tied you small mewling infant.

So instead of taking thirty seconds to tie your shoe, you decide to walk it, and this only brings more pain. As you walk like your left leg is trying to escape the sex dungeon of your body, and you pull on its leash to attempt to bring it in for a forth round of S&M, you hobble across to cross walk with your left foot making only half strides as kicking your shoe off in public will ultimately require you to ether change your name and leave the state or commit Seppuku. And seeing as you don’t have the funds for a fake ID, you better start polishing your katana.

You continue your hobble through the parking lot, avoiding eye contact with the Prius that grudgingly stopped at the stop sign for you, and as we all know the biggest judgmental assholes on the planet drive Priuses. Ego wounded but not killed you march on, and by march I mean you start a game of personal skip rope as the shoelace is now orbiting it’s point of origin and attempting to trip you. Tripping in public is almost as bad as kicking your shoe off, but it would only require two years of self exile, and the forfeit of breeding rights.

Now hobbled across the cross walk, you realize that you forgot where you parked. A feat only to made by the stupid or the elderly, (there is quite an overlap) and seeing as you are just now considered an adult, you’re assumed to be stupid. To avoid being labeled the village idiot of your smallish metropolitan suburb you play it off as if every single license plate you see is a hilarious linguistic joke that only you see, and by doing this you point and laugh at every car you pass that isn’t yours. Considering you park in the next county over to avoid parking next to another car, you find yourself point and laughing to almost near exhaustion. Luckily no one around you thinks you’re stupid, but just easily amused, which is a symptom of stupidity but you take it anyway.

Finally spotting your car as the police carry away the mass of dead bodies from the botched undercover drug deal you now think it’s safe to be able to tie your shoe, since the police are busy thinking of witty one liners and practicing taking their sunglasses on and off.

You bend down into the “girl peeing in the woods” position because as you squatted, on the way down you forgot why you were bending and ended up not stepping your left foot forward so that your hands can comfortably reach the rebellious lace.

So now you look like a girl peeing in the woods in a parking lot. And considering you don’t need to squat to pee, because squatting to pee while have a penis is counterproductive to urination, you look like a hobo taking a dump in the parking lot, just with nicer (that’s being kind) clothes. In order to rectify this mistake in bodily position and maintain your commitment to a squatting position you attempt to go from the hobo toilet to the Tim Tebow, this doesn’t go over well as your left knee builds up momentum and then releases it as you move your torso off of it and it slams into your chin, causing you to bite your tongue as you fall back and land flat on your back. Seppuku won’t cover this, this is public self immolation territory.

Recovering and grabbing your can of chocolate milk mix that had begun to roll away to avoid the humiliation of being associated with you. You recover by getting into a full Tim Tebow with minimal wobbling as you try to maintain your balance.

Then you discover that your shoelace isn’t just untied, it’s knotted. It didn’t loosen, your idiot right foot stepped on the lace on the wrong side and pull the knot tighter. Now in full view of Jesus Christ our lord and savior you attempt to untie the knot, but since the world is designed around humans with dexterous, elegant long and skinny fingers, your fist sausages that just flail about aren’t much help with this delicate task.

A full two minutes into the knot untying experience you finally pull the last thread and the knot comes apart like a beautiful rose blooming, actually probably not the best visual considering roses don’t open as much as other flowers, picture a flower that opens up all the way and that’s what the shoelace looked like. I don’t know I’m not a trained florist.

Anyway, now with a truly untied shoe you go to the progress of retying, which only causes that one song from that episode of Spongebob to crawl into your head, and once again your stuck with the monumental task of trying to visualize how

“You put your laces in each hand,
go under and over again, take your loop-de-loop and pull,
and your shoes are looking cool.
You go over and back, left to right, loop-de-loop and hold ‘em tight.”

Could possibly describe to you how to tie your shoe. Then realizing that the aforementioned mentally superior five year olds figured out the instructions in the song and learned to tie their shoes in the course of twenty minutes and it took you years of practice in the vain attempt to gain your father’s approval, and considering how he swore the vow of silence when you first disappointed him (take the year of your last birthday and minus your current age, and it’s your birthday of that year) and you haven’t heard him speak once in your life, the shoe tying wasn’t enough.

Holding back your tears once again, you cross the laces and go under, make the loop, and have the bunny run around the tree and then jump back into its burrow, but instead you have Hitler ride around Berlin in his motorcade and then drive into his secret underground bunker as the Red Army invades, since you learned to tie your shoes watching the History Channel as suppose to Spongebob.

Finally the deed is done and your left shoe appears to be tied by a one handed sea lion (flippered), but you take that victory since sea lions are actually kind of awesome. But then your brain tells you that the tension on your right foot greatly differs from the tension on your left foot. This sensation continues to grow until you grudgingly, like a Prius at a stop sign, Tebow down to tie your right shoe.

Once again the image of Spongebob with a guitar riding a shoe roller-coaster appears in your brain and the song once agains begins to baffle you.

This time the tears begin to roll, your body has had enough today, and as you tighten the noose on Saddam Hussein for his execution in 2006 (you learned to tie your shoes during a dictator biopic marathon), you pulled to0 tightly and the lace snaps like the neck of an Iraqi fascist ruler, and your fists clinching the strands of laces both hit your chin again causing you to bite your tongue and fall back yet again.

The universe has won, and you pull yourself up, and you sit in your car and eat the entire box of Poptarts in an effort to comfort yourself.

Point being you should build a time machine and go back to remarket Velcro shoes as adult shoes.

The Devil doth have a mortal form.