Socks

I bought some socks. In an act of faith and despair, with all my old socks getting single over time, I ordered seven pairs of socks of different colours. I’m wearing them now and even though they are 100% cotton and antibacterial and whatever, they do not feel comfortable. I’m taking them for a walk to a coronavirus-infested convenience store hoping that I will get used to them. I have to get used to them because they are top-quality cotton socks that I can’t be bothered to return.

But no. This may seem like a fun rant to write, and it is, but the socks feel unnatural although, allegedly, they are completely natural plus a special antibacterial and antiallergic finish. Basically, they are supernatural. They could well be the best value-for-money half-heartedly-googled socks in the multiverse but my feet feel wrapped in synthetic, unbreathable fabric, that is to say, the socks feel strange. There’s suddenly a lot of feeling in my feet, that’s all feet can do — feel — but if your feet feel anything or, conversely, if you feel your feet, you likely have a problem.

As far as I’m concerned, this feet-and-sock standoff could be likened, like anything else, to the writing process: your feet may be wrong. It seems foolish to rely on my gut feeling that has descended to the bottommost prominences of my ethereal corpus when the colossus of natural science is on my side and this post-purchase cognitive-dissonance defence mechanism designed by evolution to convince me that everything is fine is pushing my feet feeling into oblivion.

Then I rubbed my eye with a chilli finger and the sock shock whooshed into the past. Indeed, as I’m writing this line, my feet are almost happy and so am I, shedding tears like peas.

I bought good socks.

I wasted my best writing on socks. But there would be no best writing without the unnerving socks that I’m wearing now, still unsure whether they will do. Maybe my feet got so used to my old socks that the new socks feel weird like a miracle from heaven feels weird when experienced for the first time. I could go on. Washing and stuff. But the only thing that will go on are the socks on my feet. They must do.

I like writing like this. It doesn’t sound like me but it sounds good. For a while. After a while, it’s too polished and I’m too cool to be polished, and to rebel against being cool by not being polished, I return to polishing, but only in theory, because I’m typing as usual, too cool to be cool. It’s all about mood. But I don’t believe myself for a while.

Just as I was about to finish this book, I heard my own irresistible voice. I was writing to listen to words like artifice pouring from my preposterous pores and I couldn’t imagine anything that I couldn’t imagine, swirling in a vortex of a tense dance of redundance. I was full of myself in all sorts of inconvenient ways but this inconvenience was just a five-syllable word I needed to arrive at the grand scheme of things and leave it at that (barren or fallow). I am very good at cocooning things into spiral fractals. The more I consider myself one with nature, the more I believe in some crazy underlying supersymmetry.

But you are probably more curious about the socks. They are getting better.