Fecal Feet and the Flip Flop Scourge

Image of the flip flop scourge by Flickr user Sun Dazed and used under a Creative Commons license.

Pop quiz. What substance covers every square foot of city sidewalks? Correct. Fecal matter. If you don't believe me, try walking a dog for a week. It poops as it pleases. And dog poop is only the dash of bitters on the fecal matter cocktail that covers the streets of Boston. Bird poop. Cat poop. Rat poop. People poop. It's all there, mixing together in rainwater that can only be described as relatively pristine. And it gets on the feet of everybody who walks the streets in flip flops. Those people have fecal feet, and fecal feet are bad for you.

We have shoes to keep our feet from fecal matter. Many of us also wear socks, which add another layer of protection. If you took a sample of Grandpa Bostonist's feet, you would not find any fecal matter at all. That's because Grandpa Bostonist wears shoes, one of the many gifts of evolution offered to him by millennia of predecessors.

More specifically, Grandpa Bostonist wears shoes with arch supports. Do you know what doesn't have arch supports? Flip flops. The people who wear flip flops have fecal feet that are prone to collapse at any time. It's a public health crisis in the looming, comparable only to the smoking epidemic. If one thing makes us glad about our advanced age, it is that we will probably be a distant memory when flip-flop-related disability claims start driving up insurance premiums.

Here's another thing about flip flops. You have to be stupid to wear footwear that has a nontrivial chance of falling apart without warning. Especially in the feces strewn streets of Boston. Last week, Grandpa Bostonist saw a young lady's flip flop fall to pieces. She was surprised, but she shouldn't have been. She was stupid enough to wear footwear with a nontrivial chance of falling apart without warning. And where was she? Downtown Crossing station, the only place in Boston where human urine outranks fecal matter in the hierarchy of pollutants.

Flip flops are prone to breaking and thus to being thrown away. That's another problem right there. Where do you think they go when you toss them out? Nowhere. They are made of plastic and will be with human beings forever and into eternity. That's why it's such a shame when hippies wear flip flops. They aren't being very good hippies.

The last thing about flip flops is that they are psychological pollution. Flip flops are like wearing a sign on your chest that says "I have so little respect for the sartorial social compact that I only barely managed to get dressed today." This effect intensifies when the flip flops are paired with sweatpants. Or with jeans with frayed cuffs.

While we're working on the legislation to ban fixies, maybe we should work on a law that restricts flip flops to the beach and the shower, where they belong.