It's just one shoe

I have a couple ongoing photography projects, nothing more than collecting images really. One "project" is about shoes: when I spot a shoe out and about in the world by its lonesome, I make a photo. People seem to lose one shoe with alarming frequency. I sometimes further entertain myself by making up a story to go with the shoe. Here's my most recent shoe find:

Now that, my friends, is a shoe. (And the shadow is pretty swell, too.)

Here are some facts and myths (stories) about shoes:

Fact: I have never lost a shoe.

Myth: Hemingway either did or did not write this six-word story, considered by many to be the perfect short story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Fact: the origin of the saying, "waiting for the other shoe to drop" is NYC tenement life in the late 19th /early 20th century. Apartment bedrooms stacked atop one another meant you could easily hear the neighbor above removing and then dropping to the floor first one shoe and then the other, and one would wait for that second shoe, thus concluding the noise (so sayest Wikipedia). "Waiting for the other shoe to drop" referred to waiting for what you knew was coming.

Myth: I used to live "waiting for the other shoe to drop," not something I knew would happen (like the tenement origin) so much as a general feeling or expectation I had about the inevitable bad thing--the realization of an anticipated or feared fate or repercussions for actions or just the idea that life couldn't be good, a classic pietistic punishment dialectic I was caught in. Something bad's about to happen, just you wait, Tayo.

Fact: We choose the stories we live by, and while they might be inherited or assimilated, we are never stuck with these stories. We can create and choose new stories to tell ourselves and live by.

Myth: I now know there is no second shoe. I have photographic evidence, literally hundreds of lone shoes on the lam. I've taken their photos and never once been clobbered by a second shoe falling from the sky. Fate? Purpose? Consequence? A vindictive, punitive being pulling strings? Nope. Most of my worries come to nothing. Lots of random stuff happens, quite apart from anything I set in motion or attempt. Bad sometimes follows good, good sometimes comes from bad. If I link things together causally, well, that's just me choosing to see a link and conveniently ignoring all the other times no second shoe dropped.

Fact and myth: It's just one shoe.