The
femme bitched at me today in the big city, because I wouldn't buy anything for myself, for Christmas.
It's hard to buy something for oneself when one has all that one needs.
But after she took off, and I was getting ready to come back here, I noticed I was right next to the fanciest shoe-store in the big city, where the County Club set gets shod.
And then I remembered something.
On January 20, 1993, circa 11:00 a.m.--a most inauspicious hour of a most inauspicious day--I had slipped on ice while coming out of a coin-and-stamp store, and shattered to pieces my right elbow.
Something was put in there--at the time I enjoyed the finest of medical insurance, as I worked for an insurance company--but I was cautioned that if I ever broke it again, good-bye whole right arm.
And so I became terrified of ice; spine-tingling, blood-chilling, scared.
The deal is, with nothing that even remotely resembles inner ears, for me, "balance" and "equilibrium" are intellectually-thought-out, not automatic, relflexive, and instinctive. I have to
remember to balance myself.
It was pretty bad in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants, where snow-and-ice-removal was simply not done, slick shiny marble was the preferred pavement in front of prominent buildings, and socialist engineers and architects for three generations had disdained the principle of drainage as a decadent western capitalistic concept, and refused to apply it.
But it's bad here too. A tiny patch of ice somewhere over which I'm compelled to walk gives me the paralytic heebie-jeebies.
For years, I sought something similar with what I remember from advertisements in old magazines, some sort of toothed "grips" that one put on the bottom of the shoes so as to walk over ice with confidence. But I could never find anything like this, and when I described it to other people, I might as well have been describing miniature Japanese praying mantises.
But a few months ago, a Nebraska state patrolman grasped exactly what I was looking for, and showed me his pair. He said they were excellent for foot-pursuits over ice. He also told me the shoe-store where one could get them.
Well, this shoe-store's out of my way, and so I just filed away the information, doing nothing about it.
Until today, when I happened to be right next door to it.
Has anyone here had any experience with these?
https://www.yaktrax.com/product/walk