You're gonna need a quality shoe...

Saturday I got out of the house and on the road, I drove up to help out at the tournament at Solon, near Cleveland. (My thanks to them for inviting me, and getting to meet all the teams I hadn't before.) On the way back, I decided to stop off at the Grove City Outlet Mall, because I have a wedding to attend in a couple weeks, and I was down to my last pair of shoes. Keep in mind, this is where my amazing levels of cheapness come in. I'm only going there because one time, seven years ago, my father managed to stumble across $15 dress shoes at a similar outlet mall, and has since seen that as his gold standard for frugality. (Incidentally my dad would kick major butt on the Price is Right playing "Now or Then", if he doesn't involuntarily jerk, it's "Then." Some people in my family have "fraught sense", my dad has "December 1972 Consumer Price Index sense." It's a superpower, but the Hall of Justice won't return your calls.) So I'm following this near genetic drive, like a salmon going upstream to spawn, and I go forth into outlet mall. I'm already slightly unbalanced at this point, this IS foreign territory for me, after all; but we're also getting occasional rain bursts and cold fronts attacking at my sinuses, so I'm more off than usual. I really don't want to be there, but I need to be there. I duck into the first store showing men's shoes, and go directly to the two racks of clearance. Find eights, bang! One pair. They fit, look decent, no tassels, no ornamentation. 89 dollars, marked down to 49, then they've got everything here marked off another 40%. $29.

AND STILL, I double clutch. Worse than that, I find myself putting them down, walking out, and taking a walk. I already know I'm not going to top that for cheapness, but I start doing Monk things. You know the "ehhhh, but maybe..." I end up at the kitchenware store ransacking their free samples of Wasabi and Chipotle and Ted and Alice dip. I'm not a well man. One part of my brain is screaming "you idiot, your prayers to St. Hubbins have been answered, and here you are acting like Mario Cuomo. Snap out of it."

So eventually, I do snap out of it. Takes me one minute thirty seconds to find the shoes, and forty more to convince myself to go for it. I am Mackey Sasser with a Visa card. And then comes the punchline to this tale. As I go to pick up the shoes, I notice that two boxes over are the same shoes, different color, same deal.

Pretty much any joke about Buridan's Ass should go here.