Transcontinental Bliss---An Essay in Idleness With Pictures Soon to Follow
“Has your discerning mind just served to drive you mad?" ---Kamo no Chōmei Last week I received some long-awaited boots. I had no idea when they would arrive. My records show the pre-order was made in September 2021. That’s sixteen months ago. As Petty once put it, “The Waiting in the hardest part…” Truth is I’d neither forgotten them nor was I eagerly awaiting their arrival. Kenko in his Essays in Idleness reminds us, “If man were never to fade away... but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” I might emend to add a tincture of “scrupulous ambivalence” even as I await the next pre-order. The boots in question here are the collaboration from The Black Sign x Clinch via The Brass Boot Co. of Tokyo, to wit, the utterly unmistakable Transcontinentals. In case you missed them, this make up is currently for sale from Standard & Strange. (*Link with the footnotes.)