No-Shoes Rules

I'm going to talk to you about my feet. If you do not have a strong stomach, close your web browser. If children are present, send them out of the room.

My feet produce an astounding amount of heat. They radiate heat. In most shoes, they begin to swelter after just a few minutes. I try to wear shoes with little metal eyelets, to facilitate a nice cool breeze. Even then, they get sweaty. Wet and sweaty. Real wet and sweaty, like the clammy, sticky hands of a small child. When wearing shoes my feet are always just a tad bit moist. At the end of a long day, my socks are wet. When doing laundry, socks that I've worn throughout the week are stiff — stiff like cardboard.

So you can imagine that my feet don't smell no like rose garden. I'm generally a smell-free guy. Nine years ago, Annna complimented me on never having an offensive odor. I don't wear deodorant; my underarms have the fragrance of a spring morning. But my feet are a whole 'nother story. All the odors a normal human body produces are, for me, concentrated in my feet. And then some.

My feet started smelling when I moved to Germany. My first week in Germany, I was living out of a suitcase, and unable to do my laundry. The company had a washing machine in the basement, which you could reserve, but mankind's civility and decency disappears around free washing machines, apparently, since it was always full and in the middle of a wash cycle whenever I went down to use it during my scheduled time. I wound up having to recycle socks. Yes, aforementioned stiff-as-cardboard socks. I was just as horrified doing it as you are reading it. My stench in the workplace was powerful. Sticking my feet as far under my desk as possible did not help.

You can imagine, then, my terror whenever I heard: "Would you mind taking your shoes off? We don't wear shoes in the house."

People who don't allow shoes in their house are also the ones who clean so often that they need such a rule the least. If plastic on furniture hadn't become synonymous in the collective vocabulary with "anal-retentive" you'd be sliding right off their sofa, too.

Here I am, dressed like a slob in jeans and a t-shirt — people with a no-shoe rule are never dressed in jeans and a t-shirt -- and I hear it, the no-shoes rule. Panic. How late in the day is it? Have I been doing a lot of walking? Which shoes? Have I washed the shoes recently? Oh fuck, oh Jesus. I nervously slip out of my shoes. If I'm lucky, they're not bad, and nobody will bend down to pick something up off the floor near me. If it's bad, well, then there's no point in being polite to anyone, 'cause I'll never be back; they're going to check the walls for boogers after I leave. You can imagine what a nerve-fest Japan was. Fucking clean-freaks.

There is a certain type of person who, despite the fact that you've just walked under a tree which is dumping pollen all over the ground, will see flecks on your shoulders and shout "Oh my God, you've got dandruff!" People who are unable to describe a zit as being anything other than "big and yellow." People who can only describe any physical ickiness in the most extreme of terms. Of course, with my feet, it was always "Oh my God, fungus!" The fact that sweaty things stink doesn't matter. To some, any kind of foot ailment always equals fungus. These people bug the piss out of me. But It's hard to get too defensive when windows need to be opened in your presence. It's like fat people having to listen to nutrition and exercise advice from someone who has to eat to keep his weight on, or having to listen to money-management advice from someone who won the lottery. The ends wins them the argument, despite the means being bullshit. I'll bet these people have no-shoes rules.

Epilog: The solution came from a quick search on Google: Anti-bacterial soap. "Wait," you ask, "isn't all soap anti-bacterial these days?" Well, in the U.S., yes, it pretty much is. In Germany, no, not at all. I searched high and low and eventually found Palm Olive Anti-Bacterial Hand Soap, available only in some stores of one particular drug store chain. Now I use it, daily, on my feet, and my only regret is that you can't fire it out of its nozzle hard enough to hit the twerps who diagnosed it as fungus right in the eyes.