And it came to pass, in the waning hours of my 57th year, that I became one of those curatorial devotees who gives a Saturday afternoon to brightening the soles, midsoles and outsoles of his sneakers. I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives; now it’s happening in mine. No longer will I allow the white bits of my sneakers to take on patchy shades of charcoal, nor worry at that that ground-in ground with a Magic Eraser (though that does work; many thanks to Krystal Ramirez for the tip), or simply throw them in the wash and hope for the best: No, going forward, I will not do any of that.

From this day on, I’ll use a sneaker cleaning solution (I tried Pink Miracle; not bad!), a scrub brush and a soft drying cloth to … well, I can’t fully restore my sneakers to a pristine state, because I wear them for long walks and brisk runs, not photo shoots with Timmeh Chalamet. I mean, the dirt really gets in there. But they’ll look good to anyone who takes more than a cursory glance at my feet, adequate to the freaks and fetishists who gonna stare and just don’t care, and they’ll look immaculate and prideworthy to me. I’ll feel like Michael Jackson in medias res, lighting up the sidewalk underneath my steps.

I began with my “dress sneakers”—the Adidas Grand Court 2.0s, pictured above. They came out looking really, really good, so I went to work on my Johnston & Murphy Activates (formerly a daily pair, very light and comfy; I now use them just for treadmill runs) and my Sorel ONATM 718s (one of my current daily pairs; they look weird but feel great). Then, in a fugue state that Fredrick Exley described as “loony with industry,” I fished out and scrubbed down nearly every rubber-soled shoe I own. After I set them out to dry I briefly considered getting all scrubby with Laura’s kicks, but that felt like crossing a line.

(And she probably took her sneakers to LA with her, anyway. No matter. They won’t escape me. I will clean those shoes. All sneakers must and shall be cleaned in the Great Brushing.)

And that’s it; that’s a Substack post about sneaker cleaning. They can’t all be winners. You’re lucky that I didn’t take the weekend classes that The Field House used to offer . Long defunct, the Field House was a country store-inspired boutique in my onetime Seattle neighborhood of Ballard that sold work boots, garden implements and penny candy (seriously, how much more northwest of a business plan can you possibly imagine), but its classes were free. It was a kind of skill-sharing co-op, with dressmakers cheerfully explaining how to darn socks and retired Marines demonstrating proper bootblacking technique.

I could be gabbing at you now about stain wax and leather gloss and all that, but to my regret I never took a Field House course. Now, if I want to learn any little thing, I do as you do: I look for a TikTok, YouTube or Instagram tutorial. Rarely do I feel more defeated than when I’m watching a video and trying to mimic its actions. I’m gonna keep coming back to this: Social media has irrevocably broken or deformed many of our motivating desires. Real-time, in-person social interaction is the biggest and scariest of the things we’ve lost, but relatedly, I’m afraid that we’ve lost our desire to learn things properly.

Many web tutorials are super-useful. Most of them, probably. They can walk you through fixing a car or doing this that or the other in Photoshop. And you might’ve been bored enough during lockdown to pick up a few dance steps, but those videos probably didn’t make you a dancer, just as Duolingo probably didn’t teach you Spanish. Web learning is monkey see, monkey do. You may learn a skill, but you learn nothing around it; you learn technique, but it’s someone else’s technique, and will never be anything but. It’s learning without context, without nuance or compromise.

Web learning can present a demoralizing end to the act of invention. Once you realize you’ve fucked up that Banoffee Pie you’re unlikely to look for another recipe on TikTok. If you do, there’s a non-zero chance they learned the recipe from the same fuckup video you watched to begin with. The links in the skill-share chain are shrinking, and less likely to hold weight. And you can probably just guess how many TikTok reels I consulted, or how many sneakerhead influencers I liked and subscribed, before I took my kicks to the sink, drizzled Pink Miracle onto the brush and went to work.

Perhaps this year should also be about learning things from each other. In person, up close, through speaking, asking questions and trying, trying, trying until we get it. We may need to build up our home skills and invest ourselves in new hobbies, faced with the financial and emotional avalanche that’s soon to tumble down from Mount Idiot. I want to put my mind and my hands to a positive, spiritually fortifying use. I want to be in the room with the sock-darner so I can darn a sock in front of them and have them say, “Your technique is exemplary. You’re darning the living shit outta that sock. Pass on what you’ve learned.”