Shoe-Tube

I know a lot of us go down YouTube rabbit holes from time to time, but it feels kind of embarrassing, as a 40-something person, to be so captivated by an archive of other people’s (and animals’) lives so that I don’t have to think about my own. I can see the value of being a young human learning about the humdrum horrors of humanity through such a catalog, but I already know everything I want to know–too much, really–about how absurd and violent and boring the world is, so I’m not sure what kind of excuse I could muster for my fascination. I SHOULD BE READING BOOKS INSTEAD. But no, I am preoccupied with the professional escapades of Trenton & Heath, the Fraternal Cobblers of Nashville, who cut shoes open and glue them back together again, over and over, and never seem to get tired of it.

My journey to Trenton & Heath was somewhat convoluted, but for simplicity’s sake let’s say I’ve been coveting a pair of Red Wing boots for about a decade, and such a purchase requires extensive research. I mean, right? You can’t just buy a pair of $300 boots without understanding the subcultural ecosystems in which such footwear circulates. Because, let’s face it: these boots are designed for me to wear in a sushi restaurant, not a barn. What kind of bourgeois nitwit-hood will I embody when I wear these boots in gentrified urban settings? How practical will they actually be? Will they, like the last pair of too-expensive shoes I purchased, be doomed to the darkest corners of my closet, lest I be reminded how much of my hard-earned cash I spent on uncomfortable footwear? Or will I love them so much that I wonder why it took me ten years of buying mostly cheap, crappy shoes (certainly, over a decade, amounting to much more than $300) to finally pull the trigger on something everlasting, something I could send to Nashville to get repaired for all of YouTube to see???

Trenton & Heath, along with the rest of Heritage Shoe-Tube (see Rose Anvil and Stridewise, and please put more in the comments because I WILL watch them), have a lot to say about rugged boots that help a body cut a dashing figure at the farmers market. And I am here to learn! The danger, of course, is that I’m that much closer to starting a heritage boot collection rather than just making a single, probably ill-advised quarantine purchase (because let’s face it, there are no sushi restaurants or farmers markets in my near future). Shoe-Tube also has many branches: Streetwear Shoe-Tube, Sneakerhead Shoe-Tube, Designer Shoe-Tube, Sustainable Shoe-Tube, Clean Shoe-Tube, and beyond. I’m no expert because expertise in these genres would require PhD-level research and scholarship. So formidable is this ever-expanding archive that I’m afraid of buying sneakers because there’s just so much I don’t know. Heritage boots, on the other hand, are such a subgenre of subgenres that I feel pretty comfortable having an opinion, and my opinion is that I still want the same moc-toe Red Wings that I wanted in 2011:

I do wish they made the 8-inch moc-toes in black, but alas. One could do worse than these beauties. And beyond their price, which is not alarmingly steep for a shoe designed to last for years but are nevertheless beyond what I can pull off these days, there’s also the issue of the Heritage Shoe Gateway, which Shoe-Tube has shown me is much like the Tattoo Gateway: It’s nearly impossible to have only one.