Saturday, August 29, 2015

NOVA this week (August 29, 2015)



Observations from my weekly wanderings, usually in Northern Virginia (NOVA).

During one of the traffic jams, that are just an accepted part of my daily commute, traffic was crawling along slow enough that I had time to contemplate the various items of human neglect littering the side of the road. There was nothing terribly exciting, but one item at least sparked my curiosity.

A shoe.

Not a pair of shoes, but a single, good condition, late model shoe, and I wondered: how does this happen?

How does someone just lose a shoe? How – head in the clouds – must a person be, not to notice that? On a few occasions I’ve lost a shoe while running, but I noticed immediately. Never have I lost a shoe just strolling along, and if I had, I am certain I would have noticed at once and retrieved my shoe.

How far down the road did this one-shoed wonder travel before the noticed: "Hey, I'm missing a shoe!"?

I try very hard not to judge, since I seldom have all the facts, but in this case I cannot help but presume this one-shoed wanderer is either a complete simpleton or a sagacious thinker. I think the simpleton hypothesis is self-explanatory. As for the thinker: I believe it might be possible for a person to be so completely engrossed in thought of matters so profound as to render all other stimuli ineffectual.

If that’s the case, I’d like to know what they were thinking. Undoubtedly something more ponderous than the duality of causative exigencies and resultant fractional exuviation of lower extremity aegis.

Anyone missing a shoe?

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Critique is welcome.

You might have noticed a difference in the focus and format of NOVA this week. I started NOVA a few weeks/months ago. I could look up precisely when, but it isn’t important. What is important, is that I had strayed a little from my original intention of writing something original and a bit more unified than the memeish items I’d been putting in NOVA.

2 comments:

  1. Haha. I'm not missing a shoe but maybe the person who abandoned that one found it too uncomfortable to carry on with it and so orphaned it at the side of the road, separated from its twin.

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  2. I imagine that there was a heated argument going on inside a car, and in a moment of pure spite fueled by the need to retaliate, someone grabbed someone else's shoe and hurled it from the window.

    OR

    Someone has been kidnapped and began chucking parts of their wardrobe out of the kidnapping vehicle in an attempt to create a trail for the police or their devoted family to follow.

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