This page ©2001
Chip Brown.

Indiana Brown

I have a friend that is a real life archaeologist. He actually gets paid to go around digging up things. Man, I made a wrong turn career wise somewhere. The only time I get to do any digging is when my wife wants to plant another flower in the yard for me to mow around.

We were sitting there watching Indiana Jones on TV while he explained to me that this wasn't anything like real archaeology. Well, I suppose not because Indiana Jones is way cooler than he ever was. Blah blah blah he went on telling me how this was wrong and that was wrong.

Finally, I suggested to him if he wanted to dig up something old, go down in the basement and scoop my cat's litter box. I suggested to him that this was all archaeologists were good for. I guess I should have started this article with, I used to have a friend that is an archaeologist.

Sure, I guess his life is more exciting than mine. I considered this while I scooped my cat's litterbox. The most exciting thing I do in a year's time is possibly buy a new pair of sneakers.

I'm a Nike man. My wife tries to get me to buy other brands but I have bought Nike shoes since I was a kid and I'm not ready to grow up yet.

Buying shoes is sort of exciting when you think about it though. I was working on this lady's computer the other day and her kid had shoes that played music when he walked. Now, I'd love to have a pair of these! I want a pair that plays "Hail to the Chief." Everywhere I go, people would think the President was coming!

I went to the store to buy a new pair of Nikes. We have this rule in our house, when you can see my socks through my shoes we have to buy a new pair. Doesn't matter that my old ones feel good, my wife says it's time. I always resolve to keep the old pair, to wear around the house. Oddly, they always seem to disappear. I'm figuring one day I'll open a closet and all my old shoes will fall out.

The lady asks me what sort of shoe I wanted. I replied, "one for each foot please." After all, I wanted Nikes what choice is there? Red stripe, blue stripe?

You should never anger the shoe store lady. She has this metal thing not unlike tools they used in the Spanish Inquisition. She placed my foot in it and whammo. Now, I had always wondered what that thing was for. It has measurements on it so I assumed it was for measuring feet. Not so. It's so the shoe lady can break all five of your toes at once when you anger her.

As I sat there crying over my toes I began looking at all the other shoes. My wife paid for my new shoes as I limped around the store looking.

When I was a kid we either wore sneakers or we got beat up on the playground. That was just the way it was. You had to have sneakers and they had to be a certain brand or otherwise you would get pummeled. If you were pretty cool otherwise, you might get away with just being made fun of. But, either way, if you went to school wearing ugly shoes your quality of life wouldn't be that hot. Maybe this is why I resist my wife's attempts to change my shoe brand today.

But, as I looked at the other shoes in the store I realized how much things have changed. Where stores used to be full of tennis shoes, today there is one aisle of sneakers and thirty aisles of bizarre looking clod-hoppers.

Apparently, the hierarchy of school footwear has changed. Today it seems, the weirder your shoes are, the more popular the kid is. I was at the school the other day and walked around the halls. As classes changed, I noticed the kid's shoes. I remember thinking to myself, if I were back in school I wouldn't have enough time in a day to make fun of all these kids.

Remember those movies they used to show in classes about tribal cultures? The ones where the natives wore things to make their necks long and put plates in their lips. Remember how weird you thought they looked? One of these days there will be a documentary done about the bizarre Frankenstein boots little girls are wearing today.

When we were in school we would come home with broken arms because we slid into third base too hard. Today kids come home with broken arms because they fell off their shoes.

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