I recently purchased Crocs, which are the shoes that look like what wooden shoes would look like if wooden shoes were made out of Legos.  In the last six years Crocs became very popular among the soccer mom/lacrosse kid set, and as I learned during a recent visit, are also the national shoe of Israel worn by everyone including men who carry automatic weapons and formalwear.  For the last three years I’ve owned fake Crocs which I purchased under duress in a CVS as a result of slipping in a homeless man’s vomit while entering the store to buy Swedish Fish.  Were it not for that experience I would never have owned rubber shoes of any kind, unless, as was recently the case, I found them for $5, which is the magic number at which I can convince myself that an item is something I’ve always wanted. 

I got my Crocs about a month ago at Ocean State Job Lot, which is a confusingly named store which has nothing to do with employment or Rhode Island.  What it mostly has to do with are expired batteries, Christmas lights, pool toys, and other items the store buys for pennies and sells for nickels, including Crocs.  One of the reasons for the cheap price is probably that Crocs are sinking in popularity as people realize they are awful, but the other reason is that even by Crocs standards, these shoes were a hideous assortment of bright red, electric green, and extremely yellow.  I thought for approximately three minutes about the implications of each, and decided on yellow for the reason that I would be mostly wearing them to pick up dog poop.

I have thus far limited their use to fishing and dog walking but even their restricted exposure has prompted an important sociological discovery.   This discovery is that for some reason, the act of wearing bright yellow Crocs suddenly compels poorly-dressed middle aged dog park regulars to comment on their ugliness.  I expected some kind of reaction from people who care about style or appearance, but have been floored by the fact that every single person I encounter makes a comment, including a man who wears tall socks and dress shoes with shorts, and often wears a reddish belt with black shoes.

Some people, older women mostly, react to the shoes with concern, much the same way they’d talk to their friends about an irregular mammogram.  Last week, a woman who I see almost daily waited until our other friends had left so she could ask me about them in hushed tone.  I found her approach so humorous that I played along and answered her questions in kind ensuring that most people at the park now think I have some terminal illness or financial difficulty. 

People who fancy themselves comedians are an obvious choice to make a crack.  One in particular is guy I have walked 15 minutes out of my way to avoid and who I have pretended not to hear on more than one occasion, even when he was standing close enough to touch me.  I assumed that his approach would be to wait for me to be in the company of others before he made him move which I suspected would be referencing a 1970’s rock star that once wore yellow shoes that nobody would know.  Much to my dismay, he only followed script for 95% of the production but went way off the reservation by making a somewhat topical reference to the Dutch World Cup team, which only flopped because nobody cares about soccer.

The most predictable response, came from a loud drunk at my marina who subjects everyone several hundred feet around him to listen to and sing along with Sinatra because he is of a certain vintage of single men who have no interest in music but who pretend to be obsessed with Frank Sinatra because it buys them “not gay” street cred with other single men of a certain vintage with whom they spend most of their time who are also constantly looking for ways to confirm their straightness.  He interrupted the concert he was putting on to “help” me with my lines.  No sooner had my feet hit the dock than he made a crack about my shoes being “gay”, and mumbling something else I couldn’t make out before awkwardly walking back to his eventual hangover.

The problem I have now is that I find the Crocs more comfortable and convenient than I’d ever imagined but have also begun altering my life to avoid being the center of attention.  One way to fix it would be stop wearing them all together, but the other solution would be to move to Israel, where if the sheer volume of Crocs didn’t make mine unremarkable, at least I’d be holding a gun.