If the Shoe Fits

I've been called a cheap bastard more than once and I'd like to take this opportunity to refute those allegations; they're just not true. Well, they are true, sort of, but it's not like you think.

I'm frugal. Thrifty, even.

Sometimes.

I like to live well. Hell, I can blow money like a drunken sailor. Thankfully, I've never gotten drunk and blown a sailor, but I have seen a few cute Navy chicas that I wouldn't mind setting sail upon. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a girl in uniform, or out of uniform. Hell, I'm just a fan of girls in general. Frankly, it all comes down to this simple little nugget, everything has a maximum value to me and if I don't feel like I'm getting enough bang for my buck, I'm not going to buy. I do like the finer things and I've got a serious addiction to electronics and high-end camera gear. Unfortunately, I have champagne tastes and a Champale budget.

Wtf is Champale, you ask? I'm not Wikipedia, Google that shit yourself.

What a coincidence! I've got a party for your mouth too!

More like cheap HO HO HO.

You know shit's classy when it comes in a can.

In all honesty, I do have to admit that sometimes I can be really cheap. Hell, I can squeeze a nickel so tightly that the buffalo shits. Seriously though, there's just some shit that I don't want to spend any money on. For example, I never, ever want to have to buy shit for work, but when I absolutely have to, I spend the least amount of money that I possibly can and I try to fix and patch things as they start to wear out, thereby extending their life and keeping my money in my pocket just a little while longer. I don't want to have to pay to go to work. I mean, isn't the whole idea of my having a job is so that I can take someone else's money? Why the fuck would I want to spend my own?

I've mentioned before that I supplement my income by moonlighting at a local restaurant and we are required to wear an all black uniform. I was forced to buy a bunch of shirts from them (fuckers), but I had to supply everything else. Thankfully, I already owned everything else, the right pants, socks, shoes and a belt. Hell, I've had most of that stuff for over ten years and it's because I actually spent good money on those clothes that they've lasted so long. The pants are still in excellent shape, the socks have seen better days, belts last forever and we'll talk about the shoes in just a minute, 

Let's start with the socks...

Yeah, I know, socks. Bear with me, I'll get there. Patience is a fucking virtue, you know and I'm totally full of virtue. Well, I'm full of something, anyway.

Out of all of the restaurant clothing that I own, my socks are the newest and the things that I buy most often. It fucking kills me. For me, having to buy clothes for work is basically akin to handing my employer cash. My cash. Fuck that shit. So, I buy the cheapest black socks that I can find. My current batch has lasted me through two years of fairly heavy use, which is good I guess, but they're at the end of their life cycle. Lately, every time that I've put one on, my foot has gone through the heel and I would try to fix them, but I don't know how to sew, much less darn socks, so there's just no fixing them. Into the trash they go. 

I went to Kohl's to look for whatever it was that I forgot to buy and saw that they had socks and underwear on sale. Talk about serendipity. I grabbed a pack of black socks and I even decided to splurge on some underwear and t-shirts. I couldn't find price tags on anything, but that stuff is usually pretty inexpensive, so no big deal. Not being a big fan of shopping, I took my sale booty directly to the register. There was only one cashier open, but I was next in line, so it was cool, The first item to ring up was $36. $36? For fucking underwear? I had just been in Wal-Mart the day before and had the exact same package in my hand but didn't buy it because I was too cheap to spend $12.50 and now that lower price seemed like one hell of a bargain. If I wasn't willing to pay $12.50 for it, I certainly wasn't about to spend $36. I apologized and asked the cashier to put it back. I looked behind me and saw that several people had formed a line, The next item rang up. $24 for three t-shirts. No fucking way. I put those back, too. Yeah, I was that fucking guy. The line grew longer. The $16 socks went back too. In the end, I only bought one thing, a pair of Punisher boxer shorts that came in a really cool tin and were on clearance for 80% off of the already low clearance price. They cost me $4.20 which is ironic, because I mostly bought it to keep my weed in the tin. Serendipity, The line was halfway down the aisle and it was all my fault. I should have felt bad, but I didn't. Fuck those people.

You can put your weed in there.

Well, I still had to buy new socks and I managed to do so, finding a pack of five pairs of black socks and five pairs of white for only $7.50. I needed white socks too, but hadn't wanted to spend the money on them, but it was a great deal, so I bought them, Hell, I got socks, underwear and t-shirts at Wal-Mart for less money than the package of underwear would have cost me at Kohl's.

Now that was fucking exciting, wasn't it?

Let's talk about those shoes.

My work shoes are the one thing that I don't cheap out on. My current pair were very expensive when I bought them, over twelve years ago, but if I'm going to be on my feet as much as I am, I want the most comfortable and durable shoes that money can buy. I used to buy the cheap ones that were made for restaurant work, but they would always fall apart and I would end up going through two to three pairs a year at an average cost of thirty dollars each, until I took a friend's advice and invested in a much more expensive pair of shoes. While they originally set me back $150, I have saved about $90 a year since I acquired them. They are still extremely comfortable and in great shape except for one minor little problem; the soles like to keep peeling off.

I usually start noticing this when I start tripping over things. It's kind of hard to miss and more than a little embarrassing as I go windmilling through the workplace trying to regain my balance. Thankfully, this is something that I can fix and I usually just end up gluing the sole back to the shoe. It's a pretty simple fix and usually, it isn't a problem. Usually.

After occasionally tripping over things for the past few weeks, I decided to break down and fix my shoes. I had used silicone to fix them the last time, but I was looking for a more permanent solution or at least something that would last longer than the silicone did. While at the store, I perused row after row of glues and adhesives. There was super glue, gorilla glue and all kinds of other shit, but the lowest price was three dollars and I just didn't want to shell out that much money. That was when I saw it. It was like the clouds had parted and a shaft of light beamed down upon the packaging. Forever Glue. Four tubes to a pack and only 97¢. Bingo!

All of these deals. It's like a cheap bastard's wet dream.

I paid for my things and juggled them on the way out the door and to the car, hoping that I wouldn't drop anything along the way, because here in Washington state, you're only supposed to use reusable bags and I absolutely refuse to carry one of those things around because any man that carries one of those things around looks gayer than cum on a mustache. Besides, I look retarded enough already, I don't need any extra help.

Sweet, I've managed to be offensive to gays and the mentally disabled in the same paragraph. Sorry, but if you came here looking for political correctness, well, fuck you. I really don't have anything against anyone, I just like being an asshole. Every morning when I wake up, I look at myself in the mirror and I say, "I'm proud to be a cunt and I'm going to piss people off today." And then I smile, because that's how I find my happy place. If I were royalty, I would be the Duke of Douchebag. It's fun, you should try it sometime. It's like a breath of fresh air.

Anyway, plastic bags don't seem to exist at any of the stores in this county (I think there's a law), but for some reason, we give them out at the restaurant, so that leaves only paper bags and God forbid you should take a paper bag, because now you're a fucking tree killer in the land of tree hugging hippies and everyone around you will give you the stink eye and suddenly you're the town pariah. It's fear and loathing in Bellingham. Besides, those bags cost a nickel. Fuck that shit, I'm not using some gay ass man purse, paying for a paper bag that should be free in the first place, or worrying about the wrath of hippies. Fuck it, I'll carry everything myself.

Of course, there is one particular benefit that can be directly attributed to paper bags.

Plus, they're perfect for my selfies.

I'm sexy and I know it.

I arrived home and had to make several trips to carry all of my crap into the house, which pissed me off, because I'm an everything in one trip kind of guy and you can't carry everything in one trip when you don't have any fucking bags. I swear to fucking everything that I hold holy, which is absolutely nothing, that I am going to buy a case of plastic bags and carry those fucking things everywhere, just so I can enjoy the horrified looks on the faces of the locals. Fucking paper bag Nazi bastards.

I put away all of the crap that I had spent my money, took a shower, made dinner, relaxed a little and then it was time to do the deed. I grabbed my work shoes and the Forever Glue and I headed into the kitchen where the light was best.

Forever Glue. So simple, even a moron could use it.

I peeled back the sole of the first shoe and cleaned off the remains of the old silicone, before appling the Forever Glue to the inside of the shoe.

I may have been a bit overzealous in my application of glue. As I squeezed the two pieces of the shoe together, I felt a wetness hit the palm of my hand and my fingers. Fuck. I quickly pulled my hand away from the shoe, but some of my fingers were now stuck together and there was a miniature  glue pond sitting in the palm of my hand. Fuck me.

I wasn't going to worry about the glue just yet, because I still had another shoe to fix and why should I go through the trouble to clean up the glue when I still had another shoe to fix and would only need to clean up the glue again? I decided that using less glue on the other shoe would be a good idea, except that it wasn't a practical idea, as the second shoe was more damaged than the first. I liberally applied the Forever Glue and squeezes the show together. I watched as the glue flooded out of the sides of the shoe and coated me hand and the bottom of the shoe. I tried to pull my hand away from the shoe, but it was too late. My hand was stuck fast to the bottom of the shoe.

While I wasn't exactly happy with my hand being stuck to the shoe, I wasn't really worried, either. While I personally didn't know how to remove super glue, I knew that it could be done and so I used Google to search for a solution to my predicament. While the bond of the glue may be strong and permanent, super glue does have an Achilles heel in the form of acetone, which can be most commonly found in nail polish remover, which every single woman in the United States of America owns and carries with them at all times. Don't try to dispute me on this, it's a known fact.

I let out a sigh of relief and knew that I was in the clear. There just happens to be a woman living under the same roof and so I found Lisa, played show and tell with my hand and the fucking shoe and asked her if I could use her nail polish remover to separate the conjoined twins that my hand and that fucking shoe had become.

"I don't have any," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I don't have any nail polish remover. What part of that is so hard to understand? she answered. "I don't paint my nails, so I don't need any nail polish remover,"

Heresy! And while I'm at it, WTF? There's like a couple of hundred million chicks in this country and I just happen to live under the same roof as the only woman that doesn't own a fucking bottle of nail polish remover. Great, just fucking great. What the hell was I supposed to do? I certainly didn't want to go out in public looking like a total fucktard (you'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I'm not), but it didn't look as if I had a choice and it was starting to get late, I wanted to get the damn shoe off of my hand and go to work in the morning, I needed to get my ass in gear and get to the store before it closed. Everything closes early around here, except for my night job.

I got in the car and headed for Fred Meyer, which is owned by Kroger and is kind of like Target, but more expensive, Please note that I do not recommend driving a motor vehicle with a shoe glued to your hand. It's a bit challenging. As I pulled into the parking lot of the store, I could see that they were already closed. Damn it! I headed for Wal-Mart. When I got there, I parked the car and made a run for the door, trying to be seen by as few people as possible. As I walked through the automatic door, I heard a voice call to me.

"Sir? I'm sorry, but we're closed."

Noooooooooooooooooooo...

I turned and saw the Wal-Mart employee who had managed to offend me so. I tried to decide if I should kill him or not. In the end, my infinite mercy won out and I spared his life, I explained my situation, pleading with him and I once again played show and tell with that fucking shoe.

He burst out laughing. That motherfucker. And after I spared his fucking life, too. How dare he? I wanted to throat punch that son of a bitch, but I restrained myself.

"I'm sorry, sir," he spit out between bursts og laughter, "but we're closed and ther's nothing that I can do,

I was totally fucked and completely out of options, but then I remembered that there is a 24 hour Walgreen's just down the road and I made a beeline for it. I ran inside the store and headed for the cosmetics section, finding what I needed almost immediately. I grabbed that bottle of nail polish remover and turned around which was when I noticed that there were five or six people staring at me and the shoe glued to my hand. Fer fuck's sake, people, there's no need to be rude. Haven't you ever seen a dumbass with their hand glued to a shoe before?

I walked away without saying a word and went straight to the cash register. It was a bit of a bitch trying to get the money out of my wallet and it didn't help that the cashier kept giggling, but at least she took pity on me  and helped me get some money out to pay for my purchase. She then asked me if I needed a bag. Oh, hell no! I'm not falling into that trap! I grabbed my purchase and left the store, heading for the car. I planned on pouring that magical elixir all over my hand as soon as possible. When I went to open the bottle, there was just one small problem, I needed to use both hands and I couldn't, because one of them was super glued to a fucking shoe! I did the only thing that I could do and I opened the bottle with my teeth, broke the seal and poured that shit all over my hand. I then decided that it would be an opportune time to drop the bottle and spill about half of its contents on the ground. I quickly scooped the bottle back up, but once again it was too late and the damage had been done. The shoe was only about half loosened from my skin.

There was absolutely no way in hell that I was going to humiliate myself yet again by walking into Walgreen's and buying another bottle of nail polish remover. Nope, not gonna' happen. I looked at my hand and I looked at the shoe. I grabbed the shoe with my free hand and pulled it away from my other hand, ripping off about six thousand layers of skin in the process. Holy shit, that shit hurt, but at least I got the damn shoe off of my hand. The remains of the glue, however, were a completely different story. I had patches of glue stuck all over my hand for the next week, as I tried to scratch off the glue. The only bright spot to all of that was that it wasn't my monkey beater, which was still in pristine condition, which was totally lucky for me.

It will probably be a bit before I venture out in public again. I don't want to be recognized.

I wish I could say that I learned some sort of valuable lesson from the experience, other than learning that not all women own nail polish remover and that I should always keep a bottle handy, because I'm a fucking idiot and it's only a matter of time until I glue myself to something else.

Fuck it, at least I saved some money.

And they all lived happily after...

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