Flat on the canvas
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 126
DISPOSSESSIONS DEP'T.
Dispossessions: Two Pairs of White Converse Jack Purcells
I HAD A system, long ago, and I thought my system was always going to work for me: for sneakers, I would have one pair of fairly new white Jack Purcells, one pair of old and grubby white Jack Purcells, and one pair of truly busted formerly white Jack Purcells. The new ones would be halfway presentable—this was so long ago that I would wear shoes other than sneakers if I needed to be more than halfway presentable—and the older ones would be fine for maybe getting rained on or doing things that might be a little messy, and the oldest ones, with the canvas ripped and the rubber toe cap coming away from the vamp, were for mowing the lawn—this was so long ago I had a lawn to mow—or, when total destruction was nigh, maybe even wading sockless into the surf. Then a new pair would take the top spot, and the other pairs would move down a notch, and the bottom pair would go into the trash.
Then Converse, or maybe by then it was Nike owning Converse, started screwing around with the Jack Purcells and I started buying various kinds of low Chuck Taylors in various colors instead, and there were other reasons to wear some particular pair of sneakers on some particular day. Sometimes my cleanest, front-line sneakers weren't white at all. This was OK and in some ways it was better, but it made it much harder to decide when an older pair was truly finished off, especially since I wasn't mowing lawns anymore, nor showing up at the beach without a pair of flip-flops. Instead of properly destroying a pair and starting over, I would just wear it less and less, while other shoes crowded it further and further back.
But I just bought a new pair of white sneakers, a pair of variant Chuck Taylors with gum-colored soles, because I acknowledged that my everyday off-white Chuck Taylors had gotten beat up, and the gum-soled ones were on sale for cheap. The older off-white shoes had once represented newness and possibility, or to be more precise, they had replaced an identical pair that had represented newness and possibility but had been prematurely ruined. Now they were being demoted.
Except there were weeks of travel coming up—travel that would possibly put too much of a beating on the nice new shoes. So for the moment, I went to put them in the shoe cabinet by the door for safekeeping. When I opened the door, a grubby old Jack Purcell fell out.
It hit the floor with the dead-weight thwack of a shoe that's been mashed flat by the weight of other shoes for a long time, without the intervention of a foot to restore it. I couldn't remember when I'd last worn it, or even thought about wearing it. I had just been keeping a pair of Jack Purcells around through inertia—no.
I'd been keeping two pairs of Jack Purcells around through inertia. I couldn't even remember which pair I'd gotten first. One was the closest approximation Converse makes to the real original sneaker: medium-white canvas now pulling away from heavy rubber. Thirty years ago they would have had grass stains on them too.
The other, just about as flat, was a fancy version from a nice department store. They had originally been bright optic white, in a fabric with vertical textured lines woven in. The shoelaces were grosgrain or something similar, without the springiness of ordinary laces. The footbed was cork, with tennis-green trim, its luxurious look somewhat diminished by the fact that the adhesive on the back of the department store's inventory sticker had formed an indestructible bond with the cork.
The fancy ones were still in better repair than the others. But their fanciness meant they looked just as cruddy. One wrong step in a flooded curb cut had left a permanent brown water stain on the bright white of the right shoe. The textured fabric was frayed and tufted at the top of the heel cup. The features that evoked a genteel summer lawn party had never been meant for city pavement; now there was no occasion left to save them for.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
Zach Rabiroff
FOR FLAMING HYDRA, Joe produced today's Flaming Hydra Roundtable Podcast, a freewheeling and vigorous discussion of the new SUPERMAN movie.
Joe, for Flaming Hydra
All right, everybody, okay, so yeah, here we are.
Josephine Riesman
we're already recording. great.
Flaming Hydra
And most of us have seen the Superman movie or all of us have seen the Superman movie.
S.I. Rosenbaum
Okay, all of us have seen at least some of the Superman movie, and all of us have probably seen most of the Superman movie, but I have not seen all of the Superman movie because at a certain point, I left.
Flaming Hydra
You walked out. Okay.
Sam Thielman
You hated it that much.
S.I. Rosenbaum
I was just done. I was done. I've seen enough.
WEATHER REVIEWS
Bethany Beach, Delaware, July 13, 2025
★★★ The sky away from the sun was clear deep blue, while sunward and seaward was pure glare, and the humidity hung like a heavy curtain. The farmer's market and the supermarket were equally heat-blasted in turn. The black interior of the car was an oven; the condensation on the heavy jugs of milk chewed away at the paper grocery bags. Dark shapes of little birds flitted antically in the pines by the driveway and sang antic songs. Out back, foam stomp rockets flew high enough that the eye couldn't bear to follow them to the top. In the ocean, the three older cousins joined the line of people marking the innermost point before the swells started to break, while the youngest one wallowed in the booming sandy surf of the exfoliation zone. The horizon was sharp-drawn despite the humidity, with lines of cumulus tinted lilac stretching along it, never impinging on the clear dome overhead. Laughing gulls swarmed above the close-packed yellow rental umbrellas. In the dusk, at the mosquito hour, a wolf spider stood on the patio, all but indifferent to human activity.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
THE INDIGNITY MORNING Podcast is on vacation! Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Encyclopedia of Cookery; 1001 Recipes, Menus & Rules for Modern, Scientific and Economic Cookery (Vol. 4), by Eugene Christian and Molly Griswold Christian, published by the Corrective Eating Society in 1920, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
HONEY-NUT SANDWICHES
Slice and butter whole wheat bread, then spread on this a layer of strained honey, then a layer of chopped nuts. Place over this the second piece of bread and press firmly together.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
