Plans for the Shoe

One day I'd like to live in a shoe. I have always dreamt of this. I'd live in a big brown shoe and fix people's watches and build cuckoo clocks and make toys for all the village children.

And I know what you're thinking- you're thinking that sounds like the beginning of a fairytale that ends in me eating the children after luring them inside with homemade rock candy- all because they didn't listen to their parents or eat their green vegetables or something. But see.

I wouldn't do that.

I'd wear a sleepy cap with a long tassel all day and whittle little flutes out of sticks and have curly-pointy-floppy shoes and sleep in a hammock above a bunch of gears that run my 19th century steam-powered-shoe-house. I'd have a complicated Rube Goldberg machine with all sorts of things that click and clack and go whizbang and whatnot just to make my morning coffee! And my shoe would be on wheels so I could move all over the world in my shoe and bring the magic of the shoe with me from town to town! And when they'd see the rainbow smoke billowing out of my shoe-house-carriage- thing everyone would shout "It's the man who lives in the shoe! Let's go bring him a pie!" (And even though I don't like pie, I'll be polite and take it). And they'd invite me to dinner and I would do tricks and spin tales of all my shoe-fairing adventures.

All my friends who I tell this to say the same thing- they say “Patrick that's creepy are you sure you aren't a 96 year old man trapped in the body of a scrawny teenager with a pituitary problem?” But why can't I just want to live in a shoe? Why is that such a strange thing to want? You know what I think? I think that people are just intimated by someone so at home in their sole.