I hate artificial uselessness.

Yesterday, I was walking down the street and I passed by this shoe:

I would not normally take a picture of a shoe. Smaller objects, I will often pick up and hold onto for a while. I have no idea why. But shoes are too big, too personal. So normally, I note them and move on. Yesterday, however, several paces past the athletic shoe, I came upon a thong:[1]

I present these lonely shoes to you because they really bug me. I have no problem with junk: half a remote control, a cracked PEZ dispenser, a crushed Hot Wheel. Certainly, I wonder how these things ended up on the road.[2] These are trash. But what of the lonely shoes? Look at the athletic shoe in the picture above. It is in fine shape. But it is useless. I can’t help but imagine that somewhere else there is a matching perfectly good shoe. Also now useless.

I hate waste like this. We are none of us useless just because we no longer have a match.

[1] Just watch. Now I will get all kinds of porn spam on this page.

[2] This is why the opening of Breaking Bad is so great. How does a pair of pants end up on a country road? We’d all like to think that the random objects we see each have such interesting stories.