So I bought a sword today.  And for no damned reason, I might add.

When Saira and I were moving into our house, I harped on her in my whimsical and hurtful way about the never-ending trail of shoe boxes that she was piling up in our closet.  I swear to bitty baby Jesus that it looked as if she were building a small elf fortress deep within the recesses of the bedroom closet floor.  Walls were built high and deep to keep out the Huns, or whatever the elf equivalent of Huns may be (snakes, I think), and proudly displayed on the castle walls were the names of the powerful lords held within The Mighty Empire of DSW Shoes: ‘Lord Adidas’,  ‘Baron Nine West’, and the dreaded and merciless warlord ‘Cole Haan of the Burning Heart’.

Between curses and punches Saira firmly assured me that every single pair in her sparse and absolutely undersized shoe inventory was necessary and special.  I countered with my opinion that since a human being carries the same two feet around from the cradle to the grave, the staggering volume of footwear that some women named Saira collect breaks the bounds of my understanding.  I happen to own a few pairs of shoes myself, I confess, but the contents of my small and lonely corner of the bedroom closet is populated more by the fact that I never throw old shoes away, rather than the addition of fresh and young footwear as is the case with some girls I know.  Some girls named Saira.  And… and our friend Andi.  More Andi.  She has a problem.  A shoe problem.

After completing the order of the afore mentioned feckless purchase, a realization settled on my muddy brain:  I have my own shoe problem, in a manner of speaking.  I love… LOVE… useless junk.  I can’t help it.  I have worn out a fake .45 caliber pistol I bought six months ago, I have a not small stack of deserted swords leaning against a forgotten corner of a rarely visited closet, and I have enough unwrapped but never used technology in my computer room to build a robot.  Not a flying killer sex robot, but a robot nonetheless.  I have posters that I have never hung up, software I have never installed, and books whose spines would this very day creak and crackle upon opening long years after they had been purchased and consigned to oblivion on my bookcase.  Maybe I should stop calling out the people around me in a false posture of superiority and instead simply shut my mouth and learn tolerance for my own flaws that I spy in other people.  That’s never going to fucking happen, you understand, but I SHOULD do that.  Instead, I think I’ll just fall back on the time honored tradition of denying the existence of my own imperfections and deflect any accusation back upon those that would test me with my mastery of biting sarcasm and rapier wit.

That sounds like something a politician would do.  Damn.  Now I hate myself.