So here I am with two lists in my hand:

1. the list of shoes I talked about most over the past 13 years of Instagram, which just looks and feels all types of wrong.

2. the list of shoes I posted pictures of time and time again over the past 13 years of Instagram and it just feels generic and boring.

Neither of them feel right and neither of them tell me anything interesting…except…maybe…I’m far less interesting that I think I am.

BUT. AI did tell me that I have an interesting way of talking about one shoe to illustrate a point for another. So I take it a step further. Maybe…just maybe…I can look a bit deeper into that idea…what ‘points’ exactly, am I trying to ‘illustrate’ or ‘say’ through sneakers?

And that’s when the concept of the Spotify ‘Wrapped’ hits me square in the head: this is deep. I know it is. It has to be because I have given 13 years of my life to it. And the amount of time and effort and vulnerability I put out there is not insignificant, nor should it be taken lightly. But how deep is it and how deep can I go programmatically?

I hit up AI: ‘neither of these lists are grabbing me. They’re stupid. Is there any way we can categorize my captions based more on thematic elements than actual, physical shoes?’

And after a lot of back and forth, we determined what that could look like. And I referenced ‘Wrapped’ several times. And then we wrote a pretty comprehensive script and ran it. Again, an overnight thing. Lots of bugs. Another day of vibe coding.

We had a few false starts and a few tests and a few teasers, and the data it had returned on each was getting richer and richer. Like…way deeper than I thought. And when we ran the script overnight on the second night and I took a look the next morning…I was kind of entranced. Mostly because it felt like I had just found the key that unlocked my social media subconscious (which, really, wasn’t all that different than my actual subconscious). And there it was. Clear and on screen - right in front of me.

Over my 13 years on Instagram, AI determined that the five most common themes I surfaced were as follows :

1. Wearability vs. collectibility. Should shoes be worn or worshipped? Your most persistent argument — a shoe is for feet and asphalt, not a glass case.

My first thought: yeah, I still don’t know how to determine what I should wear and shouldn’t. I have number-based guidelines (ie: if I can get $500 or more for a pair of shoes I will not wear it)…but they’re not rock solid (ie: if I’ve been trying to sell them for more than a year at that price, why not just wear them instead?). But I still cringe when I see others wearing things that should be in museums.

2. Authentication as the search for ground truth. You read shoes for what’s real — dates, digits, label placement. The guy who can tell when nobody else can.

Authenticating shoes used to legitimately scare me. I thought it was, like, this mystical thing that only guys like Fake Education and shop owners could do. I was wrong. Despite the fact that there was never anything really documented, I had been unwittingly looking at the things that actually matter for years before I knew they even mattered.

3. The market as a flawed, absurd arbiter of value. You’re fascinated and irritated by the idea that resale prices decide cultural worth — and that the number is almost always wrong.

As a dude with an economics degree - this one doesn’t surprise me much and I’m happy it showed up where it did. I’ve been looking at the ‘value’ proposition behind sneakers and collectibles for years, and often in skewed ways. I hate that I tend to have an idea in my head that I operate from for years and then new information can suddenly change my whole outlook.

4. Taste from the edge. Inside the culture but never of the hype. You position yourself as the outsider, always a little apart from what everyone’s chasing.

I think this has to do more with having fallen into the hype cycle early on and with little to show for it. The social marketing worked on me more than the brand marketing did early on - although they can probably be traced back to one and the same. I was that dude keeping up and lining up and camping out on NYC streets, and when I realized it didn’t make my life any better it more often than not left me feeling gross and cheated. I moved on and love telling people they can, too.

5. Memory and the passage of time. Sneakers as time capsules — the people, places, and eras attached to the pairs. The throughline beneath all the shoe talk.

This is really exactly what I thought my account was really about. And it hit number 5! As a reference - I originally wanted to call my substack ‘A life as lived through sneakers’, in which I would use shoes to share some of my most transformative memories as a human being alive before, during, and after the internet. Bobbito Garcia has always been one of my favorite figures in the space, and I unintentionally modeled a lot of my writing off of what I think he’d be stoked to read…so…there’s that.

But the number one thing that I find fascinating about this list of themes: I started my Instagram as a promotional outlet for The Sneaker Savant as a business: the first sneaker grading company on earth. And…for fuck’s sake…there isn’t a single mention of my business as a being a prominent theme across my whole multi-year archive. One thing is crystal clear: I am a shitty businessman on Instagram. And I definitely will not be earning that 'Greatest Salesman of All Time’ award at any time in the near future.

But maybe that just goes to show…business really isn’t all that humanizing.

Early on I simply refused to participate in social media. I just didn’t understand it. Like what makes anyone think that their voice would attract listeners? I remember the first time someone was talking to me about Twitter and my response - verbatim - was “why would anyone give a shit about what I have to say?” And then when pictures came - the same thought - who wants to see my shitty, out of focus pictures? But then somewhere along the way I realized…maybe this could act as an artifact of my personal history.

When I was a kid, I moved to Great Britain for a few months. I kept a diary and ended up putting candy wrappers and sports cards and stickers and newspaper clippings and random flattened out knickknacks that I found amusing from my time in the UK. And I still have that diary to this day. I’m even kinda proud of it. It brought me through a lonely, scary and introspective time - much of how social has done for me since having become a parent.

That’s what my time on Sneaker IG has taught me - I ain’t a businessman, I’m a business, man. I do what I do and I do it well, despite the fact that I don’t really actually need to talk about it. And, fuck, how uninteresting would my account be if all I did was post about the services I provide and the products I (try to) sell?

And that’s the question I have for you. If you took the time to convince AI to spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing your public persona, what do you hope it would find? What if it’s not there? What do you think it would find, instead? And what surprises are lurking beneath the surface?

It took me 13 years of posting and a global pandemic and a worldwide revolution in machine learning to read every word I’ve ever posted just to find out that I've been keeping the same diary I kept as a little kid in Great Britain - I just didn't know that that's what it was. Surely, this has got to be the longest possible way around to something I learned when I was 14 years old…

‘Laced’.

Feeling that familiar sense of dread about being erased from the internet, I asked AI - ‘given the fact that I secured all of my Instagram data from the past 13 years, is there any way we could analyze that data to determine more about my likes, my dislikes, and the way in which I’ve used Instagram as a platform?’

AI gave me all kinds of good ideas, but I ultimately landed on a thought of my own: ‘let’s dig out the top ten shoes I talked about, year over year and we will call that my sneaker canon’.

Boom. A task. A goal. An idea.

It took a while, but we ultimately came up with a list. A list, with which, didn’t make much sense to me. Like…I guess…I thought I knew something about myself and my tastes, but…Travis AJ1’s? Nah. That’s really not me. I couldn’t give much a shit about the Travis AJ1’s. Any of them. That’s not me at all. Right? I mean, that’s not me like ‘Drake’ isn’t me…or…so I thought.

Me, to AI: ‘This list doesn’t make much sense, can you show me a handful of my posts where I talk about the Travis AJ1?’

AI gave me a sample of listings where I mentioned the Travis AJ1, with nearly ZERO of those posts actually showing the Travis AJ1. Did we code this incorrectly or was something else going on? I looked at a couple of the posts that it gave me as examples and read through them:

• ‘while the world goes crazy for Travis AJ1’s, I’m over here lacing up my…’

• ‘even though Travis AJ1’s hit number one on the top 25, the real MVP of this week was the…’

• ‘I could buy exactly 42 pairs of the shoe above with the same money I could get from a single pair of Travis AJ1’s…’

So…I said to AI: ‘it looks like the shoes I talk about aren’t actually the shoes I show in the pictures. Is there a way we could scan the pictures?’

AI: ‘That is an important hallmark of the way you write. It appears as though you often write about one shoe in order to illustrate a point about another. This one will take much longer, but we can scan the image and the caption and see how many actually match, then we can analyze from there. It’s going to cost a bit in API tokens, though, are you willing to go there?’

Me: Yea. Let’s do this.

After several false starts and many functional bugs, we finally performed the scan, which ended up running overnight. The results came back towards something that ended up making more sense…

• AJ1 - the definitive shoe of the culture

• Travis AJ1 - a more hypified-version of the definitive shoe of the culture

• Air Max 90 ‘DQM’ - My favorite shoe of all time

• AJ4 ‘Craft’ - wut? ohhhh. I wrote a super long, fake story about how this one came to be. Kind of funny in retrospect but this shoe doesn’t even register on my top 500 shoes of all time

• Nike Dunk Low ‘Paris’ - one of my wildest thrift finds and the benchmark for absurd SB prices

• Dunk Low ‘Panda’ - the pandemic sneaker

Truth be told…this list made sense…but I still felt I was missing something. You can’t tell me that my hours and days and weeks and months of posting and commenting and engaging established my personal canon as a simple generic list of sneakers that get talked about by everyone, right? I mean, I guess if I considered myself like one of the regular major blogs (ie: Complex, NiceKicks, etc.), this would make sense. But if I prided myself on thinking differently and standing apart from the crowd - how in the world does this list make any sense? Surely there’s gotta be more to me than this list, right?

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion…here’s a bit more context to the data I pulled from my IG dump: ‘Canon.’

A few years ago, there was this thing called ‘top 9’ that would periodically go viral on Instagram. It was basically a 3 x 3 grid of your ‘top 9’ posts of a given time period: you’d give it your handle and within a few seconds, it’d generate your top 9 post images of the year, based on engagement. IIRC is was yearly, but I could be wrong. It was interesting because it (a) helped contextualize your own posting habits, (b) helped contextualize what people genuinely enjoyed seeing from you and (c) allowed you to see what other people’s posting habits were like. I was never really clear on the mechanics of everything, or even who offered the best ‘top 9’ service, but one thing was clear: people loved it.

And then…I dunno…it just kinda disappeared. I don’t know if people grew tired of it (how?) or if the IG algo deprioritized those types of posts, or if IG blocked their API access (as they’re know to do) or something else…and I didn’t bother to look it up. But I haven’t seen a Top 9 in years, kinda regrettably. On the surface I find it kind of odd…because…Instagram is really just like this wall that you write to and…given that it’s like a wall of data, why wouldn’t they let you at least try to understand your data or have fun with your data? ‘Insights’ tells you about your numbers, but it’s like super boring and technical. I don’t know why IG deprioritizes apps that give them more content, but they do. So. I don’t know. IG - if you’re listening - let’s bring back the Top 9!

Sneakerheads generally partake in Instagram a bit more than other social networks. And that’s largely because sneakers - being a functional and visual medium - thrive on networks that highlight the visuals. And so any little bit of validation for the visuals really keeps the momentum going. I can’t tell you how many people I know who’ve posted something that went semi-viral and consequently switched up their whole vibe after a taste of virality. I’ve done it myself - countless times - in hopes of learning more about the mechanics as a whole (and in hopes of figuring out how to go viral again and again and again).

But so when the top 9 died, I noticed something similar that took its place: Spotify’s ‘Wrapped’.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, Spotify is a music streaming platform - probably the most popular - and ‘Wrapped’ is more or less their way of giving you a visualization of the type of listener you actually are. When you click on your ‘wrapped’ at the end of the year, they essentially give you an interactive report about your listening habits: your top most-played songs of the year, your top artist(s) and albums of the year, how many hours you spent listening, etc. and then they cap it off with some kind of clever editorial notation about what they deem to be your personal taste. It’s cute, kitschy, and it’s fun…and for some reason…people absolutely LOVE to show others what their listening habits are because, I think, deep down, it’s a simple way to express who you are when nobody’s looking.

(Fun rumor: I heard that Spotify hired something like 9000 seasonal workers to launch ‘Wrapped’ this past year. Don’t fact check me on that.)

(And a personal anecdote about ‘Wrapped’: I make fun of Drake on social media every chance I get and I have done such for several years. Even to the detriment of my account - I’ve had dudes threaten me with violence over my disdain for Drake as a cultural figure. If someone asked me ‘do you like Drake’, I’d answer it with a very serious and non-committal ‘meh’ or a full-bellied ‘I mean…’. So imagine my surprise when I learned that my Top Artist of the Year in 2023 was Drake and I was in the top 2% of people worldwide (on Spotify) of Drake listeners. What? )

But…we’re sneakerheads - why are sneakerheads posting about their music listening preferences instead of…?

I think it’s because, as sneakerheads, we don’t really have an option to succinctly compartmentalize our sneakerhead preferences and predilections. There really is no way to even contextualize the sneakers that you’re into when nobody is looking. There really is no way to tell how many times you posted about the ‘Air Trainer 1 Lava’ or the ‘Travis AJ1 Mocha Low.’ And, if you’re like me, there’s really no way to tell what posting on IG makes you feel…right?

I mean. I guess. To us - a bug. To Instagram - a feature. Because if we knew what it was we were really into, would the marketing even work?

The other day I’m looking at my Instagram feed and I’m thinking…’damn, I’ve put something like 13 years into this product and although I’ve got a cool group of people following me, I really don’t even know what it is that I post about. I mean, obviously, I post sneakers. But I’m always saying that it’s more than that. But what is it? Wouldn’t it be a shame if IG just decided to delete my account (again) and I had no way to retrieve the countless hours I put into it?’ It happened to me twice in 2020 and 2021 and it was devastating, even though I eventually got my account back. But, again, to think of this thing I really poured my heart and sole into for a good chunk of my life and tomorrow it could just be gone. Like gone gone. With no one to even complain to. It just seems wrong. And brutal. Doesn’t it? Even beyond that, I can’t even search my own archive, I can’t filter or sort it: there really isn’t much I can do with it (other than just point to it as a relic of my existence). Insanely frustrating. Like many of you, I’ve put countless hours and days and weeks and months and years into building this…almost…static wall of my sneaker stream of consciousness…and I can’t even protect it!

For fear of being erased from the internet entirely, I decided I needed to figure out a solution for myself. I found a way to download my own personal IG archive. And it was pretty easy. But my archive was pretty substantial. About 20+ zip files at about 1 GB/each. It was a mess of images and json files and…all kinds of data. I had to use a bit of AI to help me unfurl the whole thing. And after much trial and error, I uploaded it to my own website and decided to put search and filter and sort capabilities on it. And it came out pretty damn good. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what I had before (which was essentially nothing). I started referring to it as my ‘archive.’

But then I thought…with all of this data that I created and managed to save for myself…could I learn something from it?

Take it from me - an ex-Wall Street analyst - there is always something hidden in the data.

What follows is a little week-long journey with myself, my Instagram, and an AI bot…more to come next week. If you need something to look at before then…feel free to look around:

‘Content.’

It’s the morning after the Knicks won the 2025-26 NBA Championship and I’m scrolling Instagram. I want to see what everyone is talking about. Sure enough, everyone is talking about the Knicks, and the sneaker accounts are talking about what the players were wearing. Fam and I are walking around 42nd and 34th and eventually 14th before we take a minute for a breather. I pull up IG again and I see my buddy Tom (@instyleshoes1999) posts a pic of a group of Nike Air Force 1’s with the NYC block logo that he just designed on Nike ID with the caption ‘NYC AF1 options just posted on NBY’. My comment: ‘Goddamit.’

One kid is in the bathroom, another is looking at books, my wife is checking Yelp to figure out where we are going for dinner. And I’m on my phone googling ‘NikeID’ ‘Nike By You’. Almost on instinct, I select the AF1 low, sketch up a quick Warriors-based colorway (blue/gold/white) and slap an NYC block logo on the heel and hit that ‘Buy Now’ button quicker than my kid’s bathroom break. I mostly regret Nike By You orders right after I place them, but these didn’t even merit a second thought: a logo of one place gracing the colors of another on the first shoe I bought in California and brought to New York nearly 25 years ago.

As they say - most great stories start in New York - and this one is no exception. I grew up in the mountains of Northern California, blah blah, but my parents are the ones that were actually from New York. They were the ones that told me the stories about New York that made my imagination run wild. They were the ones that let me watch the movies that took place in New York that gave me that basis with which the visualizations could occur. And we took several trips to New York when I was a kid.

Lots of pictures of me as a youngster, but fewer memories.

The first vivid memories I have about New York where when I was around 13 years old, when my mom and I took a trip to New York to visit her parents who had recently moved to a duplex in Staten Island. We did a bunch of New York things but mostly spent a lot of time in her old Brooklyn neighborhood. I distinctly remember buying a white MJ jersey with my own money (influenced by Spike Lee) and my mom bought me a $20 pair of FILA slides and a John Starks (Knicks) jersey as I loved watching his grittiness. I remember seeing full page ads - in every newspaper - for an album that dropped around the time we were in town - Nas’ Illmatic - and I swore up and down we drove by the street that was on the album cover (we didn’t). I remember going to Three Guys from Brooklyn and the Wiz and a pet shop on 86th and 5th where my mom used to work when she was a kid.

I took trips in High School, College, and after I graduated from UC Santa Cruz - I was frustrated working at some stupid hotel for $11 an hour and my (other) grandparents in Philadelphia suggested I come out for a week. After a couple of awkward corporate lunches, we took a day trip to visit my great grandma in Staten Island. I’ll never forget coming over a hill in my grandpas commuter car, seeing the New York City skyline, and in somewhat of a trance I said to him: “I’m going to move there.”

He chuckled. “Where?”

I nodded towards the city: “There.”

Three months later - August 15, 2003, the literal DAY of the NYC blackout - I boarded a redeye to New York with $2k in my pocket, a handful of CDs, my clothes and some crispy new white on white AF1’s in a canvas duffle bag. I remember sitting next to some cute chick about my age, telling her that I just packed my bags and left and she thought I was crazy. As soon as we got off the plane, she walked with me to the taxi stand, popped her head into the cab and told the cabbie: ‘he’s new here, take it easy on him.’ My first $30 gone.

At about 6:30 am, I arrived to my destination: my Great Aunt’s house in Bay Ridge - mind you, this was a place I had never been, and the lady that answered the door was a person I don’t remember ever meeting. She let me in, pointed out a couch, and told me to get some sleep. So that’s what I tried to do. But it was New York…in August…and it was already hot and humid as hell and I was wired. I couldn’t sleep for the life of me.

It took me about a week to get my bearings - R Train, Bay Ridge Avenue - and another week or two to understand what I was even doing there. My dad happened to be in town at the time, too, and he said to me ‘you came here for a reason, figure it out.’ Two weeks later I met the girl that would eventually become my wife and the mother of my children. And another two weeks after I met her, I found my first corporate job at the Associated Press at Rockefeller Center. And another two weeks after I found my first job, I found my first New York City apartment on 22nd and 8th for only $600 a month. About a month later, I found NikeTalk and started really getting into sneakers through a local community.

I planned on being there for 2 years, ended up staying 8. And then I moved back to California and I have trouble believing it’s been ~15 years since I left. Unbelievable how fast time flies.

A lot of y’all know, I worked for most of those 8 years on Wall Street at a brokerage house. And a lot of y’all know, Wall Street is a lot about ‘entertaining clients.’ The company I worked for had ~10 season tickets to any sports event in the city - Yankees, Mets, Jets, Giants, Knicks, and a multitude of the one-offs and major concerts and events. If you were a broker and you wanted to entertain your clients, you could buy your tickets directly from our HR department at season-ticket prices - just a really convenient thing. Things got less convenient when events were highly coveted because better brokers would outrank lesser brokers (and their subsequent clients).

The Knicks of 2003-2010 were abysmal. The Warriors were trash during that time period, too. So I was somewhat of a basketball fan without a team to cheer for. The Warriors were my squad, but I had little interest in watching them grovel their way through the season year after year. So I had to put my focus elsewhere if I wanted to watch good basketball (save for the ‘We Believe’ year - of which any REAL Warrior fan knew we didn’t have much a shot in hell of going far). I don’t think the Knicks made it to the Playoffs even once during that tenure (just looked it up - they went in 2004 and 2011 and lost all first round games), so there really weren’t any clients or brokers that cared to spend $1000+ for Knicks games. I submitted paperwork to the HR department to sponsor our corporate league basketball team, so the HR ladies knew that I loved basketball and started giving me the leftover tickets to Knicks games that were going to go to waste…During that time period, I saw pretty much every major NBA player roll through Madison Square Garden from the seats directly above the visitors tunnel AND from the floor seats. I sat across from all the celebrities and even sat about 3 seats away from Michael Jordan during one of the most electric games and endings of all time:

(There’s a shot of MJ and Ahmad Rashad…And the wife and I are sitting two seats to the right one row behind Ahmad Rashad.)

I kept all the ticket stubs and by my count - I saw roughly 25-30 Knicks games from either the front-row visitor tunnel or the floor seats during that time period. I remember finding spectacular significance in the fact that Stephon Marbury - one of my favorite players in the league at the time - joined the Knicks at the same time that I was going to games.

I remember reading this Bill Simmons column, one morning in 2007, in which he crowned the two best crowds in the NBA: the MSG (Knicks) crowd and the Oracle Arena (Warriors) crowd as I pined to see my Warriors at home: it wouldn’t happen for another few years. But, funny enough, the first time I ever got to see my beloved Warriors was at MSG, and the last game I saw at MSG before moving back to California was against the Warriors. And despite the fact that the Knicks were trash - these were some of the coolest spectator experiences I have ever had in my life.

A few years into it, when the economy was barely puttering along, the season tickets dried up and Wall Street was a mess. I was hating life. I needed to get back to sunshine, great weather and the outdoors, so California was all I could think of. I had to get back. I didn’t care how. But I had to.

Just before I left, I changed my eBay handle and my NikeTalk handle from JTPlatnum to ‘NewYorkKicks’ (I took the Knicks logo, removed the ‘N’) and headed back. In early 2010 the New York chapter of my life was closed and I had a California address once again.

Since 2010, I’ve been back a handful of times. I came back for a family reunion in 2012, the wife and I came back for a wedding in 2017, and I came back for a visit to StockX in 2025. Since 2010, I went to about 20 Warriors games at Oracle Arena (still haven’t been to a Chase game) and we won 4(!!!) NBA Championships after a drought that existed from well before I was born.

A few months ago the wife asked me if I wanted to go to New York in June and I said ‘sure’. Didn’t think much of it. We also had a trip planned to SouthEast Asia in April so that one definitely overshadowed whatever was set to happen in New York.

But then, something funny happened. We went to Asia and we slowly fell back into things before I started thinking about New York. And then as time got closer, I noticed the Knicks were on a run in the playoffs. And if…only if…the Knicks could pull off a pretty spectacular run - they might just make it to the Finals. They breezed through the Eastern Conference. Not even a hiccup. But everyone I talked to in California was busy arguing about who was actually going to be crowned champion again - nobody in the East had a shot in hell against either OKC or the Spurs, right? And…then…another something funny happened. The Knicks made the finals and I just so happened to have tickets booked for New York during games 4, 5, and 6. And, holy shit, that’s some incredible timing!

I don’t know exactly what possessed me but there was no chance in hell I wouldn’t be rooting for the Knicks during this series. Especially given my history. Especially given my love for New York. Especially given the fact that I’ve spent more time in MSG than I’ve spent in any other basketball stadium. Despite the fact that I’m a Warrior fan for life there was no reason I couldn’t root for New York - just this time - right? There was no reason I couldn’t root for good basketball, right? I packed my John Starks Knicks jersey, my John Starks WARRIORS jersey, a bunch of blank T’s and hopped on that plane to New York.

Another redeye. I was DEAD tired the day we arrived. It wasn’t just me getting off that plane, though, it was me with my family. And we were all cranky and tired and it was kinda hot and humid. But so the Knicks: NY had won the first two games at San Antonio, then lost the one that Trump was at in NY, and game 4 would be tonight..8:30PM. We arrived at the loft in Red Hook well after check in time after a long day in traffic. I said to my wife ‘I want to find a bar tonight to watch the game’ and she just kinda nodded. And then an hour later, I said it again, halfheartedly, and then I just fell asleep. And then I woke up 3 hours later to honking and screaming and cheering outside on 3rd Avenue. And WHAT THE FUCK DID I MISS?

The next morning I found out I missed a 29 (!!!!) point comeback by the Knicks in Game 4 of the NBA Finals and WHAT THE FUCK??? I WAS IN NEW YORK AND I WAS TOO TIRED TO WATCH IT? GROW UP!

I threw on my John Starks Knicks jersey as we headed up to the museum of Natural History, where busloads of kids were treating me like a celebrity, everyone asking the same thing: ‘Knicks in 5 bro?’

Me: ‘Definitely.’

I wore that 30+ year old Starks jersey the following two days after game 4 and told my wife ‘I AM NOT MISSING GAME 5 FOR ANYTHING!’ She already knew.

Game 5 and we are in Bay Ridge, a few blocks from where we used to live. My favorite sports bar is just a few blocks away…it’s late, we’re coming from a family function, and the kids are tired but I have my Starks jersey in my pocket (cargo shorts FTW) and I’m going to watch the Knicks one way or the other. I split from my family at 86th as they head to the train back to the loft and I head to my favorite sports bar from a lifetime ago: ‘The Kettle Black’. I arrive and it looks seedier than I remember, and there are literally 8 cops standing outside staring at the scene in front of them. 8! This place looks a lot rowdier than I remember. I look at my watch, it’s still only the first quarter…fuck this. I’m a family man. I want to watch the game, not listen to a bunch of drunk Brooklyn dudes screaming at one another. I decide I’m gonna try something more lowkey…I run to catch up with my family and catch the train back to Red Hook.

We get off the train and I split from my family again right outside the station…I find a comfortable looking restaurant with a small bar called Luo’s Burgers. There’s a handful of people inside and out with almost everyone glued to the television…a lot of bellyaching and moaning and ‘what the fuck(s)?!?’. I saddle up at the bar next to an older black man wearing a Latrell Sprewell jersey: the first Spree jersey I’ve seen since my arrival in New York. The funny thing about seeing that Sprewell jersey next to an open seat at the bar - John Starks was literally TRADED to the Warriors for Latrell Sprewell in 1999 (the last year that the Knicks made the finals). Both Warriors. Both Knicks. The man next to me has three empty Modelo’s in front of him and he keeps rubbing his head like he’s disappointed. I order a Corona, look up at the game and see that the Knicks are down by 15 and it’s the 3rd quarter. Every play evokes some sort of reaction from the group and the TVs keep glitching out. I’m tryna keep it cool.

Several of the folks in the bar have no clue what’s going on but desperately want to act like they do so they’re yelling some version of ‘what the fuck’ or ‘how is that a foul’ or ‘you’re 7’6” act like it’ after every play and it’s almost intolerable. But I’ve been there before. I’m focused on the basketball being played…because I still play and I can still see how many of the plays are transpiring. After each play, the older black guy is shaking his head in his hands…clearly shook…I want to say to him ‘don’t worry man, you got this’ but hold my tongue. After a few minutes we start talking about plays and are trying to decipher what’s going on amongst the volume of the crowd. I frequently had to correct myself…instead of saying ‘don’t worry we got this’ I kept saying ‘don’t worry they got this’ and it felt weird but I don’t know if he noticed. I wasn’t really worried that the Knicks were gonna lose at any given moment, despite the fact that everyone else in the bar was vocally losing it. I was watching this with veteran eyes…I was just focused on the momentum of the game.

With about 90 seconds left in the game, I confided in the old guy ‘I’ll be honest man, I’ve had this jersey since I was 14 years old but I’m a die hard Warrior fan - I’m out from Cali this week and just had to root for the Knicks. And I think y’all got this. And I’m really happy to see a Sprewell jersey in here.’ He said ‘Man I LOVE the Warriors but I think they made a mistake re-signing Kerr’. Despite our disagreement, he kept repeating what I used to say before we won our first championship: ‘I can never underestimate my teams ability to blow it.’

With about 10 seconds left in the game, the waves of relief were starting to transpire. The Spurs looked defeated, my friends were texting me and folks started celebrating. I sat there with a huge grin on my face while everyone in the bar was giving each other hugs and high fives. The bartender gave me a shot of vodka, which I promptly downed, finished my second beer, then stood outside for a minute, getting ready for my walk back to the loft.

The first car that drove by - with people hanging out of every orifice - was playing ‘New York Sh*t’ and…all of a sudden…I felt really out of place. Like strangely out of place. I didn’t want people talking to me, I didn’t want to scream or cheer and I damn sure didn’t want to run into a group of people screaming ‘KNNNNIIIIICKSSSSS!!!!’. I was stoked for the Knicks. And I appreciated how they managed to deliver for their fans. And I was happy for New York. And I was happy for that old guy I sat next to. But…funny enough…all I could think about was taking off my Starks jersey so I could get back to being a Warrior fan.

In 2003, I arrived with a pair of white on white AF1’s.

In 2026, I stamp my visit with a pair of Warriors-colored, NYC-logo’d AF1’s, the day after they win the NBA championship.

A few days later: the Knicks parade. My oldest son and I are walking around lower Manhattan just observing the scene. It’s not his first time in New York, but it will likely be the first that he remembers. Around us, Knicks fans are advertising their Knick fandom in all sorts of ways and it’s sincerely dope. But I’m not truly a fan, I’m back to being a spectator again: I’m wearing a black T and black shorts. Some AJ1’s on my feet.

The kid and I dip into the Nike store on Houston and they’re running some kind of ‘customization station’ thing for Knicks championship gear and we get ahold of one of the customization forms. We’re looking at it and there are something like 17 different custom New York/Nike/Knicks logos you can add to any Nike shirt you purchase. It’s like $15 extra or something.

The kid says to me: ‘I want one’

I say ‘Hm…which one do you want?’

Without hesitation, he points at the only NYC block logo on the page, and it coincidentally has a pair of AF1 low’s dangling from the swoosh. I don’t think he’s ever seen me wear an NYC block logo, so it throws me off a bit. Out of all the logos on this page, he picks the only one I would’ve picked. Why did he choose the same one?

I say to him ‘why do you like that one?’ and he says ‘I don’t know, I just kinda like it.’

Funny how a logo can just transport you somewhere…to some time…to some place. This is the first time I’ve had both kids with me in New York and I hope they remember it like I remember my trips with my mom…and maybe…just maybe…one of my kids will be looking for NYC block logos 30 years from now with their kids. Because 30 years of sitting with a logo really is the long way around.

After looking at the link from ‘Savant’s Pick #4’, I have a better idea of what I might be on the lookout for today.

I just took my last bite of bagel and pushed the cream cheese down with my hot cocoa and nescafe. I toss the paper cup, then crumple up the wax paper the bagel came in - I look up at the clock. It’s 8:59:57.…3…2…1… I mutter a quick ‘Kobe!’ drop back and toss the wax paper as it bangs off the edge and drops into my trash can. It’s exactly 9am and the opening bell clangs. The markets are open.

Well. Kind of.

9am is when the financial markets open. But the sneaker market never sleeps. It’s online at all hours of the day and all hours of the night. They’ve made finding shoes extremely easy for someone with money to blow. But looking for deals - that’s a different story. That’s what I’m good at and that’s what I like to focus on. A shoe purchased for retail is no good to me…but a shoe under $60 is my sweet spot. I will buy just about anything if it’s under $60 and that’s because I’ve learned - through years of trial and error - that you can eventually find almost anything for under $60. (either that, or, I adjust my tastes based on the price I’m willing to pay…).

I love the hobby but I can be a real shark if the waters necessitate it. If I see something I can make a quick hundred on - I will do it. Without question. But if it’s something will require much time or effort, I’m out. My minimum flip amount used to be ‘double cost + $20’ to cover selling fees. But things have changed along with the market. I don’t mess with anything I can’t make $100 on - at this point - and that’s because there are so many goddam deals out there that I just don’t have enough time to focus on them.

Most dudes on Wall Street sit behind a super expensive vintage looking device called a ‘Bloomberg terminal’, which is named after Michael Bloomberg, who made his fortune hawking said terminals to every brokerage house in the world. They’re terribly primitive-looking - think a black MS-DOS screen with color-coded information - but what they do offer is the freshest data available to the market. I wasn’t any kind of big shot on Wall Street - I was middle office - so they definitely wouldn’t spring for a Bloomberg terminal for me (roughly ~$30k/year/person). I always wanted one, but I wasn’t important enough to get one. So I built my own.

My ‘Bloomberg’ terminal for the sneaker market is called ‘QuickStrike’ and it defaults to ‘eBayWatch’. It doesn’t give you all of the boring shit that is pushed by the majors. I’ve refined what surfaces based on 25+ years of loyalty to eBay and after looking at hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes - I’ve deprioritized the major movers and lifted up the things that people (not corporates) actually seem to care about. Maybe one day I’ll reveal my filtering mechanics. This is a raw look into ending auctions, new BINs, and the odds and ends that make the sneaker market much more interesting than your typical StockX top 25 list. This is me - digging deep (programmatically) and I’m digging deep because the market is oversaturated and I’m tired of seeing the same stuff over and over again. I built it because I need to see what’s ending soon, what’s just listed, and what is flying under the radar…at THIS EXACT MOMENT. And I need to act NOW to snag what I need to snag.

QuickStrike started with eBay, but the sneaker market's bigger than one site. So it grew. ‘ShopGoodwillHunting’ digs through Goodwill's auctions for the stuff people overlook, thrift-store prices on shoes that shouldn't be there. And ‘Trainerspotting’ scrapes the boutiques, the shops that actually mark things down, and pulls every steal into one feed. Three terminals, same eye. Same tired-of-seeing-the-same-thing instinct that built the first one.

One of the funny things about developing the concept for this tool…I’m on a screenshare call with my buddy showing him a demo of how I coded a particular section and I see a pair that’s about to end at a crazy low price. I say ‘hold on one second’, click on the link, snipe the auction and resume the demo. My buddy stops me - ‘hey, what did you just do?’ Me: ‘I just won that auction’. Him: ‘why?’ Me: ‘Cuz it was a steal.’ This legitimately happened 3 times in my first 2 weeks of building this website out. Steals are everywhere you look - even GOAT debuted their own ‘steals’ website - but what about those ‘steals’ that are almost impossible to find?

I’m sure you’ve heard of the ‘Jordon’ thing from old eBay heads - plenty of people would list their auctions as ‘Jordon’s’ instead of ‘Jordan’s’ and those auctions would end WAY lower than those that were correctly spelled…since building this tool, I found that LaBron’s are a thing and Yezzy’s are as well. ‘Nikee’ and ‘Addidas’ have way more listings than you’d think. And even ‘Jorden’s’ pop up from time to time. eBay got smart, though, and decided that people shouldn’t even be able to search for those titles - they now autocorrect the search. So you can’t even find items with those titles…unless…of course…you’re using QuickStrike. Because QuickStrike hits the eBay API directly, there’s no such thing as an autocorrect on a search term.

Being that auctions aren’t as plentiful as they once were, almost everything seems to fly under the radar. I don’t mess around with the financial markets much any more, but when I did, the ritual of preparing to click that ‘Buy’ or ‘Sell’ button at just the right time gave me the exact feeling that sniping an auction on eBay still does today (and has since the year 2000, when I first joined eBay). It always makes me think of that line ‘…palms are sweaty/knees weak/arms are heavy…’ I need a calm environment - my eyes lock in, I’m signed in at my computer of choice, my brain starts shutting out the noises around me, my heart starts pumpin’ heavy, and I feel those goosebumps on the back of my neck…13 - I type in my top bid, then wait - 12, 11, 10, 9, 8 - I Click ‘BID’ - Message: ‘YOU ARE CURRENTLY THE HIGH BIDDER’, 3, 2, 1…’DETERMINING THE WINNER’…’YOU HAVE WON THIS AUCTION PLEASE PAY NOW.’

It’s hard to explain what even looking at this website does for me, but it puts me right back into my desk with my slicked-back hair and my Alfani suit on the tenth floor of 55 Water. The excitement is palpable and noise is loud and the rush of finding something no one even knows to look for is thrilling. Again, I call it QuickStrike. But there's no quick way to learn what's worth striking (you see what I did there?). That's kinda why you gotta take the long way around.

It’s 8:45am and I just pulled up to my desk on the 10th floor of 55 Water Street with my slicked-back hair, my Alfani suit (yes, ALFANI), my $3.99 Ross Nautica Tie and my Marks & Spencer Hard bottoms. Yes, these are the ones I picked up on my last trip to London for £24.99 - and they already have my feet bumpin’. I gingerly place my coffee on the right side of my desk - about 16 inches away from my keyboard because I know - I KNOW - that if I put it any closer, I might just knock it over and my computer would be toast. I take off my Navy-issued pea coat (that I bought from the nearest Army/Navy Surplus), drape it over the back of my Herman Miller, and take my seat.

With my coffee (actually it’s just hot cocoa with a splash of nescafe) now acting as my comfort, I unfurl the newspaper on the left side of my desk: ‘Morning Call’ - shows me the most interesting items that closed in the market for yesterday. I see some interesting stuff - old faithfuls, new market makers, some incredible highs, some incredible lows, the items people fought for and plenty of randoms. As I’m scanning the report - I sometimes reflexively kick myself for missing something entirely relevant to my cache. Another item I missed out on.

But…regardless of what I participated or didn’t - I find it interesting to see what slipped through the cracks. This is my ‘good morning’ artifact. And I check it regularly. As soon as I’ve internalized the market movers and shakers and have mentally prepared myself for the day - the opening bell rings…

‘Morning Call’ isn’t a finance newspaper or an equities report, it’s what I built to decode the most interesting (public) sneaker market dynamics available to a regular joe like myself: eBay’s completed sales.

A lifetime ago, there were internet forums, and these forums were the only place most of us could find out information about sneakers (online) BEFORE Social Media arrived on the scene. The two biggest ones that I frequented - SoleCollector and NikeTalk - were my daily ‘go-to’s’ before my new go-to’s. And buried deep within NikeTalk was the most fascinating thread I could imagine…a crowdsourced version of what I tried to recreate with Morning Call - programmatically. It was usually titled some version of this: “eBAY auctions won...don’t post live links”. Which, for the uninitiated, means “these are the most interesting ebay auctions that I was paying attention to that ended and if you have any you’d like to share please do it here but also don’t share anything that isn’t yet ended because it might inadvertently raise the price by attracting more attention to something that might currently be flying under the radar” Or something like that.

I loved it. It was definitely one of my top 3 threads. So seeing a totally random sample of what people are into - on a semi-regular basis - showed me that the sneaker world was much bigger than what little we were exposed to.

Because - as any new ‘head might tell you - the first step is remembering the flagship J’s, and then…the field is pretty much widdddde open. But I loved it because sneaker catalogs are deep, and it takes a while to actually build a real taste palate for what it is you’re looking for, and sometimes you don’t even know what you’re looking for until you find it.

StockX’s top 25, or Complex’ top 10, or IG’s ‘sneaker of the year of the week’ is extremely reductive, and so, MorningCall is kinda like my own interest peaking through. Luckily, eBay still exists…and…well…eBay, for all its flaws, is still the purest sneaker marketplace that exists. So what better way to see what’s out and what’s moving and what’s flying under the radar than creating a daily snapshot of what’s going on?

I created MorningCall a couple of months ago, and in that time I’ve learned:

• There is a real (serious) collectors community out there for Vintage Reeboks

• ‘Samples’ only matter if the shoe is popular

• ‘Player Exclusives’ don’t seem as ‘exclusive’ as they once were

• There are more Jordan retro’s than I ever even once thought possible. And if you wait long enough almost every single one can be found for dumb cheap.

• Yeezys can be found for less than $10 if you are persistent enough

• Kobe’s are still on top when it comes to performance and LeBron’s are still having trouble finding their footing.

• There are new typos people are searching for (#IYKYK) to secure steals.

• And despite all of that dudes are STILL shilling their own auctions

All that to say…some sneaker truths are universal and some sneaker truths change with time.

I no longer work on Wall Street, but I do mostly work from home…and so after I drop the kids off, put on my house slippers, pull up my chair with my crappy little coffee and take a bite of my burnt toast and my runny eggs, my next favorite thing to do is to crack open a fresh browser to see what ended on eBay…it’s just one of the few things I do that brings me back to just enjoying the hobby for the sake of enjoying it. It allows me to participate in it without hitting that ‘buy’ button. Or even just looking and thinking…’man, I think I know who bought those’ brings me back to reality.

It’s the little things that make the long way around worth it. Give it a shot. Grab your coffee & a bowl of cereal or whatever it is you like to eat for breakfast and take a look with me: Morning Call .

In 2017, I was having a rough time.

I was two years removed from the birth of my first child, and my once-promising Silicon Valley career had just taken a serious hit. The third startup I had worked for in four years had just let me go. Truthfully, I expected it. I kind of wanted it to happen. I had even talked that morning, on my commute, with a close friend about what I’d do if it happened.

My wife knew it too. So when I called her immediately after getting laid off, she didn’t panic. She didn’t ask questions. She just said, “Well, head on home and let’s go get some ice cream.”

And just like that, I was unemployed. Again.

So what now?

We decided it might be a good idea for me to stay home with our kid for a while. A reset. A pause. Something different. And that’s what I did. About a year into it, a buddy of mine from Wall Street called me out of the blue and said, “Dude, what are you doing? Would you hurry up already and just become a teacher?”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you suggest?”

“JT, just call a few schools. You live in Oakland. Someone could probably use help.”

So I did. I found a posting for a paraeducator position at a middle school in East Oakland. A teacher’s aide. I talked to the principal briefly, and he said, “Why don’t you come in tomorrow and we’ll talk?”

The next day, I sat in his office for three hours. We talked about life, kids, education, burnout, expectations. At the end of it, he leaned back and said, “Well, we don’t actually have a paraeducator position open. But school starts in three days and I still don’t have a seventh-grade social studies teacher. Would you like your own classroom?”

My worst nightmare.

But I didn’t have many other options on the board.

“Um,” I said. “Sure. I guess?”

He handed me a battered social studies textbook and told me to write out my curriculum and lesson plans over the weekend. And just like that, I was dropped back into a world I hadn’t thought about in decades.

Being a white dude teaching in East Oakland, where roughly ninety percent of the student body was Hispanic and the rest largely Asian and Black, I quickly realized I had some learning to do myself. The book started with the Romans. I skipped ahead and chose to focus on the Aztecs instead.

And learning the story of the Aztecs at around forty years old in the context of present day America was…eye-opening.

Growing up in a predominantly white area, I don’t think I had ever really learned the story. Not fully. And I wish I had earlier, because it completely reframed things for me.

The abridged version goes something like this: in the 1300s, the Aztecs built an extraordinary civilization centered around the city of Tenochtitlan, located on an island in Lake Texcoco. Floating gardens. Causeways. Canals. Engineering that rivaled, and in some cases exceeded, what Europe was doing at the same time. By most accounts, it was one of the most advanced cities on Earth.

And then, about two hundred years later, a Spanish conqueror named Hernán Cortés arrived with roughly six hundred men. He allied himself with Indigenous groups on the outskirts of the city who resented Aztec rule. Montezuma welcomed Cortés, unaware that he was orchestrating a takeover. Within two years, Tenochtitlan was destroyed. Mexico City was built on its ruins. Smallpox wiped out much of the population, along with vast amounts of knowledge, culture, and tradition.

Which brings me, oddly enough, to sneakers.

In his memoir Shoe Dog, Phil Knight explains that in 1967, Onitsuka Tiger sent him and Bill Bowerman a prototype they were collaborating on and asked for suggestions on a name. With the 1968 Olympics scheduled for Mexico City, Bowerman suggested “The Aztec,” as a tribute to the civilization that once inhabited the region.

There was just one problem.

Adidas already had a track shoe called the Azteca Gold and threatened legal action. The name was off the table.

Knight recounts driving up to Bowerman’s house, frustrated, when Bowerman suddenly asked, “Who was that guy who kicked the shit out of the Aztecs?”

“Cortez,” Knight replied.

Bowerman nodded. “Okay. Let’s call it the Cortez.”

And that was that.

The shoe that began life as the Aztec became the Nike Cortez, named not after the civilization it honored, but the man who helped erase it.

What started as a running shoe eventually found its way onto the streets of New York as a breakdancing staple, and into Los Angeles as a deeply embedded cultural symbol tied to gang identity and Chicano heritage. Today, there are roughly seven hundred and fifty Cortez colorways floating around resale platforms. Not exactly rare. Not exactly hyped.

And yet, somehow, it’s always there.

I was once asked by Complex what the most underrated Nike shoe was, and without hesitation I said, “The Cortez.” Which, in hindsight, might have been a dumb answer. It’s been in production since 1972. It’s appeared in Forrest Gump, on George Costanza, on Eazy-E, and on Kendrick Lamar. It’s everywhere in pop culture.

And yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-Kenny or non-Lasered Cortez on a sneaker convention table. Ever.

I’ve owned several pairs over the years. Some I wore into the ground. Others never made it out of the closet because I couldn’t get past the loaf-of-bread shape or the narrowness of the more faithful retro versions. Right now, I have a handful of basic pairs I actually wear, plus a few oddities: a 1994 sample sitting in a Pou Chen factory box, and a sample from the 2004 Laser Pack with Tom Luedeke’s pattern etched into the upper (update: SOLD).

There are still pairs I’ve wanted but never found in my size. The Mister Cartoon Aztec Cortez, where the swoosh is replaced by an illustrated Aztec profile. Some of the J.Crew colorways from the early 2010s that softened the silhouette into something more wearable and less declarative.

At one point, I remember Sean Wotherspoon getting his hands on a massive run of OG Cortez Jewels and dipping them in red paint for an art installation at Round Two in Los Angeles. That memory might be imperfect, but the feeling sticks.

The Cortez has always existed just off to the side of the conversation.

It’s not trendy. It’s not rare. It’s not expensive. It doesn’t need explaining. Nike doesn’t have to sell it very hard. It just…exists. Which is kind of the point.

Nike wasn’t even Nike yet when the Cortez was born. They were still Blue Ribbon Sports, distributing Onitsuka shoes in the U.S. And yet they had the audacity to take a shoe, rename it after a conqueror, slap a swoosh on it, and make it bigger than its origin ever imagined.

That moment set the tone for everything that came after.

The Cortez has survived not because of marketing, but because of culture. Because someone claimed it. Because it meant something different in different places. Because it was accessible. Affordable. Familiar.

And maybe that’s why it never quite disappears.

When Mister Cartoon removed the swoosh from the Cortez and replaced it with the face of an Aztec warrior, he wasn’t erasing history. He was flipping it. Reclaiming it. Rewriting it.

He once said he wanted to put a Chicano on the shoe. Born in this land, influenced by another. That mix. That tension.

Which, to me, is what sneaker culture does at its best.

It takes things that weren’t meant for us and makes them ours. It reinterprets. It reframes. It carries contradictions forward instead of smoothing them over.

For a long time, the Cortez was just another Nike sneaker to me. But once I understood what the name really meant, it stopped being just a shoe. It became a story. A takeover. A reclamation. History doesn’t go away. It just gets worn differently. Just like the Cortez. And telling the story can sometimes feel like the Long Way Around.

Depending on how long you’ve been following me, you might have seen something similar to this one a few years back…the original (with pictures) can be found here.

“Whoever wears Adidas, any woman will give it to him.”

For a long time, I’ve looked at sneaker social media and thought:
Why does all of this look the same?

Same shoes.
Same opinions.
Same “grails.”
Same takes, recycled every six months.

I think this is just a side effect of living in America. We’re so used to being at the center of the conversation that we rarely stop to ask what sneaker culture looks like anywhere else. It’s not malicious - it’s just lazy. The assumption is that the American sneaker experience is the sneaker experience.

But over the years, something interesting kept happening.

International collectors kept ending up in my DMs.

People from places I don’t hear talked about much in sneaker conversations. Russia. Nigeria. Eastern Europe. South America. Places where sneaker culture exists not as an extension of marketing cycles, but as something stitched into daily life, weather, economics, and history.

So I started asking questions.

Not “what’s hot?”
Not “what’s reselling?”
But: What does sneaker culture look like where you’re from?

This is one of those stories.

I was introduced to Nikolay Volkov, a 37-year-old sneaker retailer and lifelong hip-hop fan from Samara, Russia. He grew up the way a lot of sneakerheads did - falling into the culture through music first, then clothes, then shoes.

Wide pants. Hoodies. Sneakers.
Still dresses the same today.

In the early 2000s, he and a friend were bootlegging rap CDs just to keep the music circulating. By 2008, they opened a hip-hop store. Sneakers had become a real market by then, even in Russia. Big brands started opening offices in Moscow. Things were growing. Moving. Opening up.

Then…everything changed.

One thing you have to understand about sneaker culture in Russia is the weather.

Winter isn’t a season - it’s half the year.

Cold dictates everything. What you can wear. How long you can wear it. Whether you even bother trying to keep something clean. That alone shapes taste in ways people in warmer climates rarely think about.

Another thing that shapes it now? Absence.

In the last few years, most major global brands pulled out. What rushed in to fill the gap wasn’t creativity - it was counterfeits. The fake market exploded. Prices skyrocketed. The ruble collapsed against the dollar. A pair of real sneakers became unobtainable for most working people.

And when someone looks at a $300 pair of shoes versus a near-identical fake for a fraction of the price, the question becomes unavoidable:
Why overpay if it looks the same?

That’s not a sneaker question. That’s an economic one.

Brand-wise, Nikolay says Russia isn’t all that different from anywhere else.

Nike and Jordan dominate.
Adidas and Puma feel tired.

Jordan 4s replaced Jordan 1s. Sambas and Mostros had their moment. Trends arrive slightly delayed, filtered through language, culture, and access.

Instagram still sets the tone - just with lag.

Before everything shut down, sneaker gatherings happened mostly in Moscow, at festivals like Faces & Laces. Now the culture lives online: Instagram, Telegram, VK. Communication is digital. Physical community is harder.

But collectors still exist.

There’s a guy with the world’s largest Saucony collection. Someone else owns Wu-Tang Dunks. Others specialize in SBs, Air Max, City Series Adidas. The passion didn’t disappear - it just got quieter.

More underground.

Then there’s language. And this is where things get good.

There’s a Russian slang term for fake sneakers: “pal’.”
Before proper sneaker shops existed, people called the Nike Swoosh “snot.”

And there’s an old phrase older Russians still say:

“Whoever wears Adidas, any woman will give it to him.”

Adidas wasn’t just a shoe. It was a signal. A tough-guy uniform in the ’80s. Status, masculinity, danger - wrapped up in three stripes.

Sneakers weren’t fashion. They were identity.

There are cultural rituals too.

Wearing skinny pants with elastic cuffs and low sneakers in winter - leaving a strip of frozen burgundy skin exposed between sock and ankle.

Grandmothers buying sneakers three sizes too big “to grow into,” lacing them tight until they look like bowling pins.

Seeing a loud, colorful pair and immediately asking, “Do you have these in black?”

I laughed out loud reading that. And then I realized: I felt it. Every culture has these micro-truths. They just don’t survive the internet very well.

When I asked about innovation and technology, Nikolay shrugged.

Most people he knows still wear shoes from the ’80s and ’90s. Flyknit mattered. Boost mattered. Beyond that? Not much.

Sneaker culture there isn’t driven by tech promises. It’s driven by availability, memory, and durability.

And when I asked about social media, his answer stuck with me.

He said he’s tired of scrolling past the same news reposted by giant accounts over and over. That he prefers following people who talk about sneakers from the underground - people who think instead of broadcast.

He told me that’s why he follows me.

I sat with that for a while.

What I love about stories like this isn’t that they prove anything. It’s that they complicate everything.

Sneaker culture isn’t one thing.
It never was.

It’s climate.
It’s money.
It’s politics.
It’s nostalgia.
It’s jokes that don’t translate.
It’s scarcity.
It’s pride.
It’s making do.

Instagram flattens all of that into a feed. But culture doesn’t actually live there. It lives in places like Samara. And Lagos. And São Paulo. And wherever people are still wearing sneakers because they mean something, not because they sell well.

And that’s the part I’m interested in preserving: the part where you travel halfway around the world to discover that we all just end up taking the long way around.

For the purposes of this post, I need to start with something I experienced at ComplexCon Las Vegas this past November. It was probably the most memorable interaction of the entire weekend (for me). Not because anything big happened, but because nothing did.

There are really only four characters in this story, with me as the observer. I won’t name any of them, because the names might expose people that don’t want to be exposed. But it’s also not super important. So.

• Person 1 is one of my best friends. He’s an actual tastemaker in sneakers. Not loud, not chasing attention, not particularly out there. If you know him, you know him. If you don’t, you probably still wear (or want to wear) shoes that he’s designed without actually realizing it.

• Person 2 is a B-list real-world celebrity who has somehow become an A-list sneakerlebrity. You’ve seen him. You’ve seen people orbiting him. He knows exactly what kind of attention he gets in sneaker spaces.

• Person 3 is also a B-list or even C-list celebrity. I had never heard of him before this moment.

Person 1 and I are walking together through the convention center, just hanging out and taking it all in. About forty feet ahead of us, I notice Person 2. He’s surrounded by people, absolutely basking in it. Glowing. Thriving. I clock it, think nothing of it, and keep walking.

A moment later, Person 3 approaches us. Apparently he and Person 1 go way back. They fall right into conversation, the kind that doesn’t need warming up. Straight to the point. I’m standing a few feet off, mostly observing.

That’s when I notice that Person 2 notices this interaction.

He looks up, sees Person 3, and immediately feels the need to insert himself. He walks over with a few stragglers in tow and interrupts mid-conversation. With exaggerated politeness and obvious false humility, he says to Person 3: “Hey man, I’m really sorry to do this, but I need you for a minute.”

Person 3 looks him dead in the eyes, says nothing, and turns right back to his conversation with Person 1.

They finish talking. Calmly. Fully. Until the conversation reaches a natural stopping point. Person 2 just stands there, awkwardly, waiting. I could tell how uncomfortable it was for him in that moment and the groupies that were standing around him pretending not to notice. And judging by how often I’ve seen him chasing the same kind of attention on social media since, whatever lesson was there didn’t stick.

I doubt anyone but me even remembers this interaction. As a matter of fact - I brought it up to Person 1 the other day and he had no recollection of it. But I remembered it. I will always remember it. And one day, on my death bed, I may just reveal who Persons 1, 2, and 3 actually are (or if you really want to know, just DM me on IG and I’ll probably tell you assuming you’re not the opps).

Rewind about eight years.

I’m at a local consignment store to talk with the owner about fifty-plus pairs of shoes I have on consignment. I hate coming into this store because it almost always feels like a waste of time. The owner is easily distracted. He loves conversation. He loves stories. He thinks I’m there for the relationship. I’m there for my money.

We get partway into the process when a customer walks in. And I put “customer” in quotes because, over time, I’ve learned that customers at this shop aren’t really people who buy things. They’re people the owner distracts himself with. People who want to be seen talking.

In my experience, this is quite common in consignment shops.

Within seconds, the conversation veers completely off course.

One guy starts a story that ends with, “Yeah, you know that dude, his handle is @xyz, he’s got like 50k followers.” Before that sentence can even settle, another guy jumps in: “Nah, but do you know this other dude, his handle is @abc, he’s got like 53k followers.”

And that’s it. That’s the rhythm. Handle. Follower count. One up. Handle. Follower count. One up…Mr. Me Too in the flesh. And EVERYONE is Mr. Me Too.

This goes on for a good thirty minutes. No shoes are discussed. Only handles and follower counts. No money changes hands. Everyone is just trading proximity points, one-upping each other with increasingly meaningless credentials. I’m standing there quietly losing my mind, watching a room full of grown men participate in a silent agreement that this is how value somehow gets established.

Everyone knows the guy isn’t going to buy anything. Nobody notices I’m even in the store because I have no interest in this type of conversation. And nobody breaks the rhythm until another “customer” walks in. Shoot me.

Fast forward.

The other day I’m scrolling social media and I see a clip of a famous rapper at a sneaker event. He’s somehow convinced a guy to sell him a pair of shoes for an embarrassingly low price. The rapper starts with a lowball at about a third of market, then asks the seller to knock another hundred off the top.

In exchange, he offers “a million dollars worth of promo.”

The seller looks almost embarrassed (or is it prideful?) into the camera and agrees.

The seller looks to be about my age.

I cringe. Not because it’s surprising, but because it’s so clean. So efficient. Celebrity proximity converting directly into real money leaving someone else’s pocket. And the craziest part is that it’s framed as generosity. As opportunity.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen it, and it won’t be the last.

Then there’s another clip. An internet famous jeweler. At a sneaker event. Being interviewed. Explaining, once again, how he personally started yet another trend through his proximity to yet another celebrity. Same cadence. Same confidence. Same assumption that everyone watching is nodding along.

I hate it. I genuinely hate it here.

But that’s when it finally hit me: I don’t think this kind of half-rate sneakerlebrity adulation exists in any other hobby…so what is it about sneaker culture, specifically, that makes people fall over themselves to prove their worth through their proximity to sneakerlebrities?

When did we stop caring about the people that did the thing for the person wearing the thing? Or even the person designing the thing?

I don’t actually think this is about the sneakers. This is about the commerce wrapped up in it. SneakerCon isn’t paying these dudes to talk about sneakers - they’re paying these dudes to give the impression they’re conducting commerce. But it’s all a sham. We all know these sneakerlebrities that show up at sneaker conventions are being paid to be there, and they’re likely given a budget, because the chance that someone can actually be in proximity of these sneakerlebrities will bring more customers through the door.

If it weren’t, the videos would be about the shoes. About design. About history. About why something mattered, or how it worked, or where it came from. Fandom has curiosity baked into it. It asks questions. It slows down.

But what we keep seeing is different. It’s not fandom. It’s…the power of celebrity.

It feels like insecurity dressed up as enthusiasm. Or money dressed up as credibility.

Because…I don’t know. Maybe…when you don’t trust your own taste, you borrow someone else’s. When you don’t know how to explain why you like something, a sneakerlebrity can validate it for you. And when you’re not sure where you stand in a culture, you look for shortcuts that make your position reliant on others.

Celebrity does all of that work for you.

It removes the burden of being an actual fan. You don’t need to understand the shoe if someone ‘important’ wore it…or…someone ‘important’ wants it. You don’t need to have a point of view if you can point to your proximity. You don’t need confidence if you can borrow validation.

That’s why the conversations I keep overhearing don’t sound like curiosity. They sound like a pissing contest: Handles. Followers. Sightings. DMs. “I met.” “I know.” “I was there.”

It’s not about the object. It’s about the record that “I was there.”

And once you see it that way, a lot of the cringe starts to make sense. The lowball offers framed as opportunities. The grown men lingering at booths hoping to be noticed. I’ve been there. The crowds and camera crews following every other person. BUT WHICH ONE IS THE ACTUAL CELEBRITY? The endless name-dropping in stores where nobody is actually buying anything.

What of this is about the love of sneakers? It feels like it’s more about proximity.

Sneaker culture didn’t create this impulse, but it turned out to be a perfect mirror for it. Because sneakers sit at the intersection of money, status, nostalgia, and visibility. They’re expensive enough to signal access, common enough to be relatable, and public enough to be seen.

Which makes them an ideal stand-in for identity when someone doesn’t quite know how to articulate their own. You can’t do that with other collectibles (this is where you prove me wrong with a picture of Logan Paul wearing a million-dollar Pokemon card around his neck)

I don’t think most people are trying to be impressive. I think they’re trying to be safe. Trying to belong. Trying not to be dismissed. Trying not to feel like the odd one out in a room that keeps changing the rules.

But insecurity is loud. And fandom, real fandom, is enthusiastic, but also quiet.

It doesn’t need witnesses. That’s why some of the most respected collectors in the space don’t even participate in social media.

I keep thinking of Bobbito Garcia looking for someone to tell him what was cool. I keep thinking of myself thinking that I need some sort of outside validation for what it is that I personally am attracted to. It’s wild. As personal as sneakers are - to me - it makes me wonder…where would sneakers be without social media?

Maybe we’ll tackle that topic another week…or…maybe we’ll take the long way around.

A lot of people outside of California don’t understand the magnitude of the regional distinctions within California. For it’s size and the residents within - California - could be pretty neatly split in two and act as two different states: Northern and Southern. This probably wouldn’t change much politically or economically, but it might in the minds of those that find these types of distinctions important. Northern California is mostly trees and forests and mountains. Southern California is mostly sunshine and beaches. With a few massive cities through in.

In the early 2000’s, there was no better time to be a fan of the sport of Basketball if you were in California: the Lakers and the Kings has an epic rivalry. It puts to shame the ‘rivalry’ of the Clippers and the Warriors of the mid 2010’s, as both the Lakers and Kings would find themselves in the conference semi-finals yearly for several years in a row.

The Lakers had Shaq & Kobe, and a pretty serious supporting cast. The Kings has Webber and Bibby, and an equally serious supporting cast. Anyone - a Laker or Kings fan - would admit that the Kings had a better team, but the Lakers had better superstars, and as history has shown: the Lakers always ended up winning down the stretch.

I played a ton of basketball at the time, and being that I was into sneakers, I was one of a few heads that owned multiple pairs of sneakers and wore them on a rotation. To be clear: there were dudes that showed up in the same shoes every day, and dudes that showed up in a rotation. This is still true to this day. For the heads and I, we’d talk shoes: comment, argue, covet, and sometimes discuss performance. These were real conversations that didn’t go much further than the basketball court. Basketball courts - in the late 90’s/early 2000’s - are where sneaker culture was incubated, for me.

In Northern California - Chris Webber was kind of a big deal - the kind of player that transcended basketball, locally, and became somewhat of a NorCal legend. Although not singlehandedly - he brought some ‘glory years’ to Sacramento Kings basketball. And people loved him for it. At the time, some would argue he was one of the top 5 players in the league, and they wouldn’t be wrong. He was big nationally and because of that, he carried a lot of clout regionally. Besides being the most recognizable face in the NCAA for the ‘Fab Five’ a few years prior, the NBA Rookie of the Year, and a 5-time All-Star, he was a formidable star for the Kings; And he dated Tyra Banks and had a bonafied rap album (remember this? I sure do.) He was seemingly everywhere for us Northern Californians.

So when Chris Webber showed up to the 2002 NBA All-Star game wearing a pair of shiny - almost glowing - silver sneakers, a lot of Northern (and Southern) Californian’s took notice. The word quickly spread: ‘Chrome CDubbz’ by ‘Dada Supreme’ - his sneaker sponsor - had now hit the mainstream. The shoe was like a figurative and literal magnet: people could not stop talking about it. It was all over ESPN and even casual fans would talk about those ‘silver sneakers’. At the time, sneakerhead or not, the term ‘CDubbz’ became commonplace. Dudes would show up to courts rockin ‘CDubbz’ and folks would just start talking about them. Asking how they held up, what comfort was like, jokes about how the sun shining against them could render defenders useless. It was legitimately fascinating to watch. My cousin had a pair and he swore by them.

Not for me, though, too loud.

But they had an absolute cultural moment. I’d like to argue that the moment was bigger than ‘Northern California’, but if I did I’d be lying - because there’s no way I could know. I know what the region I lived in was talking about because I lived in it.

For the uninitiated, NikeTalk was a very influential internet forum created by and for sneakerheads - it was an early form of ‘social media’, compared to the tools and platforms we have today. Essentially, upon completion of a painfully long account creation process (30+ days), one would create a ‘thread’ on the board in hopes that it would start a discussion about said topic. Around the time I was active on NikeTalk, I remember being fascinated that there were something like 400,000 different screen names/members in the NikeTalk directory - meaning there were way more ‘sneakerheads’ that I ever thought even existed. I often used this number as a reference point when meeting regular people that would tell me they’d never heard of sneakerheads.

Pointlessness aside, this is how a lot of us got our sneaker news: through NikeTalk threads. There were threads of different types of shoes - ‘retros’, ‘jordans’, ‘air maxes’, ‘other brands’, etc., plus threads on other things we were interested in: hip hop, clothing, semi-half-naked women.

The first time I discovered NikeTalk, in 2004, I utilized it to meet up with actual sneakerheads. In New York City. To help me orient myself around the place I now lived. It became an invaluable resource for myself because it helped me navigate a lot of things I wasn’t yet aware of…shop locations, releases, sizing info, etc. An absolute goldmine of information at the time.

I’d frequently look at the NYC board and the San Francisco boards, as I felt uniquely tied to both. While I was in NYC, I could keep up with sneaker culture in SF, and when I was back home in NorCal, I could keep up with sneaker culture in NYC. One thing I noticed - sneakers were regional.

While everyone - nationwide - was looking for SBs, I noticed that dudes in NYC favored Jordans and Foams, while SF had more of a predilection towards Air Maxes and Trainers.

Later on I found out why. It should always have been a given that styles someone was rockin’ in Philly didn’t exactly translate to styles someone was rockin’ in San Diego. And, although a lot of it had to do with basketball, a lot of it also had to do with regional dynamics: things like the climate, weather, infrastructure. Back then - this was accepted and pretty well known. I distinctly remember dudes like Wale talking about what Foams meant to the DC, Maryland & Virginia area. And dudes like Killer Mike talking about what AF1’s meant to Atlanta. And Mr. Cartoon talking about what Cortez’ meant to Los Angeles. The list goes on and on. Style has mostly always been regional.

But, then, the internet. When I left New York to come back to California, I felt like I was the only person on the West Coast that had on Foams…and I wore them ONLY because I was living in a snow-heavy area. I literally never saw a pair of Foams in San Francisco or Santa Cruz…definitely not on courts and not even in stores.

Until…the Galaxy Foams release…February 2012. Because…for some reason…this shoe was everywhere. And everyone everywhere had to have some Foams. For a good 3 years. I remember friends (non-sneakerheads) in New York calling me trying to secure Galaxy foams for me - and I DIDN’T EVEN ASK FOR THEM.

There were pictures of lines and memes and craiglist ads of people from all corners of the country trying to secure a pair of Foamposites.

Why?

Arguably, for me, the original galaxy Foamposite release could be referenced as the point that regional sneaker styles transitioned to a global monoculture…instead of everyone acting according to their region, they began acting towards the internet as the region. This is the point at which what we saw in person in the streets or on the court became less important than what we saw online.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because that’s just how the world works.

A little while ago ago, a very popular and important sneaker account (important in the sense that it is MASSIVE) based in Atlanta told the internet that the Dada CDubbz was ‘never it.’ And I had to comment: ‘just because it wasn’t big in Atlanta doesn’t mean it wasn’t big elsewhere.’ We went back and forth for a bit, before a few others chimed in, defending my position. But the damage was already done - social media has been re-writing regional history for years.

I’m not mad. I’m amused. Because I like pointing out the nuances of things, this feels like a good place to land: the internet doesn’t remember the small details that I do, but it does remember the general arc of something.

So to claim that CDubbz were “never it,” the overall arc is mostly true. The only guy in the NBA - or pop culture, for that matter - who really pulled off CDubbz was C-Dubb himself. My cousin might’ve pulled them off for a season or two, but overall, they were a blip on the larger sneaker stage the internet now recognizes as the history of “sneaker culture.”

The thing is, before the internet - and social media specifically - started dictating our wants and desires, sneaker culture didn’t require consensus. It only required participation, in whatever form that took. My cousin wasn’t a sneakerhead by any means. But when he rocked those CDubbz, you better believe he felt like he was a part of it. And I celebrated with him for that. But he didn’t have to pass any tests to feel that way. Because that’s just the way it was.

If anything, that’s what I miss most about the pre-social media sneaker days: when you were into sneakers simply because you decided to be.

And that’s the long way around.

When Instagram first started making waves, I was simply against it. I already had a Myspace, Twitter and Facebook hangover and simply didn’t understand how yet another social media platform could or would enhance my life in any way.

I worked for a now-defunct social media platform at the time as a web developer, and a lot of my work depended on working cohesively with other social media platforms, so I had to test my code against other platforms often. I was so annoyed with the idea of having to create another social media presence that I initially refused to. I used my bosses Instagram account as my test account instead creating my own. It was kind of funny, really, because creating another account should be such an innocuous thing, but these were my early days of fighting against internet ‘progress.’ I still remember my bosses account (and I still, actually, follow it). I saw pictures of her on vacation, with her boyfriend, with her dog. Just a random chronicling of her life of random things within her instagram that look nothing like they do now.

When I told my buddy about this great idea I had about starting a sneaker grading company, my business plan specified only ONE form of marketing: eBay. Although he agreed, he told me that I needed to create an Instagram account. I told him I had no interest. He told me it was a sure thing. I told him ‘meh’. And like a good friend - he went ahead and created an account for me anyway. And labored, day and night, to build me a following. Keep in mind, this dude wasn’t a sneakerhead, but he started posting like he was. He was mining me for information and posting accordingly. And within a few months, he had a couple thousand followers. I never really understood how he did it - but, man, what a base to start with: I started paying attention to Instagram at that point.

At first, I tried to match my branding. Judicious. Serious. Serious about sneakers.

And that worked, I suppose, for a while.

But after a while, I realized that I was putting on a front. I was posting things that didn’t really interest me in the interest of maintaining an image.

And, I suppose, it was good, as it got the name and goal out there. But at some point I realized that my branding didn’t exactly match my personality. What I thought was meant to become a company was really starting to turn more into ‘me’. And so I started posting more personality-based things. Personal preferences with sneakers, personal stories with sneakers, personal struggles with sneakers. And to my surprise, it blossomed into a pretty cool follower base.

The pandemic accelerated things, with me becoming especially vulnerable online through my Instagram account and a lot of people finding comfort or interest in it: this resulted in some explosive growth for me: approximately 17,500 followers.

To a lot of people, this might sound like nothing. But to me, this number is enormous. I remember going to Warriors games at Oracle Arena and them saying that there were roughly 19,500 seats. And to think…there are almost that many people that follow me on Instagram…all because I like to talk about sneakers. It’s insane.

Along the way, I’ve gone through many personas and dug into many different aspects of myself to discuss sneakers. Some of it - a bit personal, some of it - intentionally misleading, some of it - just messing around. All of it has it’s place, but it makes me wonder what I’ve lost (or gained) in the instagramification of an interest.

Before instagram, my goal with sneakers was to present myself as such: someone that cared about what went on my feet. As a matter of principal, it was never about ‘keeping up with the culture’, it was about me finding something I liked and making it mine. A lot like what Bobbito described in ‘Where’d You Get Those?’

But when IG came along, a lot of it felt like I had to somehow manage to fit in to stay in the conversation. There are a lot of sneaker tropes that have taken root on IG, so much so that I have found it altering my personal taste. This isn’t strictly a problem with IG, but social media in general.

• Before IG: my sneaker taste was largely private, personal, and attuned to my feelings.

• After IG: my sneaker tastes became largely open, public, and measured by the community.

Even as a 45-year-old male, I sometimes find myself thinking, would my IG people find a picture of these shoes interesting and worthy of engagement?

It’s a strange feeling…going from I should post what I like to I should post what the algorithm will like, and it brings up all kinds of feelings of shame and embarrassment for someone that should know better. But when you have an Oracle-Arena-sized following, you start to ask yourself…how do I appease these people? …and you forget to ask yourself…how do I appease myself?

And now that I’m 45 going on 46, where does that position me for ‘old age’? Where do I go from here? Am I still going to be posting about how sneakers make me ‘feel’ at 50? Am I still going to be posting about the memories they create at 50? Or am I striving for something more?

To think about where I’ll be with this in 5 years, I also have to think about where Instagram will be in 5 years. And if the past 10 years on IG is any indication, I will have my work cut out for me.

Instagram and social media tends to reward the lowest common denominator. Instagram tends to reward those insights that are at or just below the surface. So the deep, deep work needs to exist elsewhere. The major stories are saved, shared, and passed around…but the little ones just seem to fade away. Instagram favors speed over context. Spectacle over meaning. General consensus under regionality. And visibility over participation. Sneaker culture will survive on social media, but on the parts that perform well on a screen will be remembered. The actual lived experiences? Those will exist in blogs like Nick Engvalls…and…mine (in no way am I comparing our output beyond the ‘love’ of it).

Although it’s small, there does exist a cadre of sneakerheads that actively seek to keep these stories alive, despite the compression of the culture that has come to define sneaker IG. The stories on Niketalk, (the ‘Smushcalade,’ and the Harlem Shake, and #NTDenim, and…) will continue to fade away if folks like us don’t seek to save it. I consider myself lucky, proud, and validated to be a part of @itsthestoriesthatmatter : a group of collectors that are more interested in remembering than they are of winning.

And maybe that’s what I’m here to protect. My personal, stated goal has always been to preserve the sneaker realities that are at risk of being lost, and I’ve been able to articulate that more clearly with Substack than I ever could with Instagram.

I’ve asked myself more times than I can count: how can I participate in this culture without consuming so much? that I didn’t even realize that Instagram isn’t actually the culture that I fell in love with; but Instagram is the culture that put a lot of these sneaker opportunities in my path. Opportunities that I don’t think I could have gotten without Instagram. For all its flaws, it’s helped countless people build countless relationships with countless others (and companies). It’s fascinating to think about the scope of its impact…whatever it is, it’s not small.

So maybe that’s the price of mainstream acceptance of a culture. The nuances hide away while the narrative keeps the money coming.

Let me be clear: I’m not burnt out on sneakers. But I AM burned out on performing my relationship with sneakers on Instagram. After it’s all said and done…it seems my goal was to prove my worth. And when I accepted, at whichever point it was, that I was done trying to prove my worth, I decided that my goal would be to own it. Own who I am. Own what I want. And when it comes to sneakers, I want to be the guy that does his best to keep it above (or below) the consumerism aspect. I feel a responsibility…a stewardship…to help future ‘heads understand what things were like for us, which is not what the popular places on the internet would leave you to believe it actually was. The internet remembers arcs. I want us to remember details.

At a certain point, I had to stop thinking of what I was doing as ‘content’ and more as something of importance; hence, the reason for a substack. I wanted off the ever-changing treadmill of IG. I had to think of my memories and my documentation and my stories as a historical record instead of something in need for the algorithm.

I’m not great at predicting the future when it comes to sneakers, so I have no idea where Instagram will be in 5 years, but I hope that I have established myself as someone that can exist outside of a community based on shock value and and engagement. I seek to be the guy that writes things down before they are lost to the sands of the internet.

If this is what aging in sneakers looks like, I’m ok with taking the long way around.

If this project has ever made you rethink something you thought you already understood, that’s what you’re supporting. If it hasn’t, that’s okay too. Everything here will remain intentional, slow, and human either way.

Thank you for reading Volume 1. This essay closes it out.

Options paralysis.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying…it’s become pretty popular over the past few years. It basically means that sometimes, when there are too many options, you find yourself unable to make a decision. This happens to me nearly every time I decide to look at my sneaker racks in hopes of wearing something fresh.

It’s crazy, looking at a wall full of shoes that I personally desired, sought out, and purchased, and then making the mental leap - somehow - to ‘I’ve got nothing to wear.’ It’s absurd. It’s embarrassing. It’s insulting to all that is holy.

I’m currently 45 years old…and I started ‘collecting’ sneakers around the age of 16. Over the years, I’ve owned tens of thousands of shoes…and I’m currently sitting at around 300 pairs. The average American male lives to the ripe old age of 76, and in just one more year it appears I will be 30 years from 16 and another 30 from 76. Wild.

30 years x 365 days = 10,950 days left on this earth.

If, today, I decided that I were never to buy another pair of shoes for the rest of my 10950 days, and rotated my shoes on a daily basis without repeating any and starting over, I’d theoretically only wear what I currently own around 36 times each. Those Tailwind 5’s I purchased in London? 36 more times. The Jordans VI’s I bought in Singapore? 36 more times. Those Saucony’s I got from the man himself? 36 times. Those Vachetta Jordan 1’s look better after each and every wear? It doesn’t matter - I’m ONLY GOING TO WEAR THEM 36 MORE TIMES. WUT?

For the past few years, when I see a pair of shoes I like, there’s this nagging thought at the back of my head: ‘Dog, I know you like these shoes, but you like all kinds of shoes. Be honest: you ain’t EVER going to wear these shits. There ain’t enough time in the world. Just leave them be.’

More than once, I’ve passed on deals, steals, and things I would have otherwise lost my mind for…all because, somewhere deep in my brain, I know. I know there just ain’t enough time in the world.

That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped buying. It means I’ve started reframing my thoughts. And my subconscious impulse to just ‘buy’ because I can has been changing slightly.

I’ve sold tens of thousands of shoes over the years, and I hate it. I hate the process and I hate the market and I hate the effort. But lately, pushing shoes out the door is one of the only sneaker-related things that gives me some semblance of peace. Everything else gives me anxiety.

Most sneakerhead stories start around the time you first start noticing the shoes you either can’t access or can’t afford, and little beats the feeling you get when you finally acquire or reacquire the shoes you couldn’t afford. Part of my ‘goal’ as an early sneakerhead (early-mid 20’s) was to reacquire the handful of shoes I wore as a kid (OG Air Raids, Infrared 6’s, Penny 2’s) and a handful I couldn’t find or afford as an even younger kid (Jordan 4’s, Black and White Air Force 1’s). And, you probably know how the rest of this story goes: my goalposts moved. Because when I finally got through my list, my list just magically grew. And grew. And grew. Until…’what list?’

I got through ‘my original list’ so many times, that I bought, sold, re-bought, re-sold, and finally decided that I could love and appreciate these shoes without needing to own them again. Funny how that works, huh? Not a single one of my original ‘grails’ is still in my collection. And truthfully I don’t miss them.

As a ‘mature’ sneakerhead, my collection is less about ‘aspiration’ than it is about ‘wearability’. And this has a lot to do with COVID, when I spent the majority of my days out on hikes and tromping through mud and enjoying nature with my kids. And ‘comfort’, as a half-baked concept, stopped registering 15+ years ago when I realized that I could find comfort in nearly 99% of the shoes I bought.

My ‘Daves Quality Meats’ Air Max 90’s were one of my favorite sneaker stories to tell - I bought Daves last pair from Dave himself at Daves shop that was being honored by Nike and I cherished the pair for years. And by ‘cherished them’, I mean… just stashed them in a closet and looked at them once every few months and dreamt of the time I might actually wear them. I never did.

So the first time I saw the possibilities of ‘stashing shoes in a dark place’ in a series of pics on Niketalk - the pics that collectors from Southeastern Asia and Florida had posted showing their Jordans and Air Maxes crumbling from humidity and basic storage - my brain overloaded with dread. It was the first time I registered with the reality that sneakers ARE actually perishable, unlike all of the things I collected before sneakers. And those pictures began to shape my philosophy. Once I realized what could and would likely happen with shoes I had spent years curating, the choice was being made for me, whether I liked it or not. My DQM 90’s weren’t going to make it.

After dragging those unworn DQM 90’s with me through several different apartments (and their attached closets) through the years, I remember thinking: ‘Am I going to be the last asshole on earth with a deadstock, crumbling pair of DQM 90’s?’ And that’s when I decided to part ways with them. It hurt, but…what was the alternative?

A few years later, I found a slightly used pair for cheap that was already starting to crumble - I purchased those just to watch them grow old in one of my preservation cases - and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. They serve as a reminder: all of this stuff is passing.

When you’re young, the concept of mortality is so far beyond comprehension that the world truly feels like it’s yours for the taking. There’s always going to be another “perfect” time to wear whatever you’re saving.

But as you watch yourself get older, the math stops mathing. There simply isn’t enough time to experience even a fraction of what you want to experience.

And as silly as that sounds, that includes shoes. Even if I were fortunate enough to have the money to buy and own every pair I ever wanted, I wouldn’t have enough feet, or enough days, to actually wear them all over the course of my life.

That realization hits, especially as I’ve started telling myself, more and more often, “this pair is for my kids.” This is where I get to watch the shoes I’ve collected actually get used. Watching them stomp through mud or drag their heels as bike brakes makes each pair feel a little less wasteful. Maybe it even helps them develop an eye for the things that make their dad tick. Letting a pair get naturally worn down stops feeling like a loss. And choosing to put real limits on my collection has made it feel more practical.

Over the next 30 years, or however long I end up living, I’m reasonably sure I’m still going to love sneakers. But now, instead of loving them from the confines of my closet, I want to love them either on my feet, in my memory, or through my kids. Not owning less for the sake of being “minimal,” but choosing to participate where it actually matters.

And yea, that’s the long way around.

As with most things related to Nike, the marketing wormed its way into my head far before the shoes ever graced my feet. The first time I saw them, I thought they were a solid “meh,” but the commercial was catchy.

I have a very specific memory of my friend Isaac and I, on a nice spring day in or around the year 2000, at UCSC, walking to Accounting class via Oakes Path, when we spotted a dude walking about 25 feet ahead of us. He had some bounce to his step, so much so that we both zeroed in on the unmistakable heel shot almost immediately. We started mimicking the commercial without question. Isaac started it off with almost a whisper: “boing,” and then I whispered just a little bit louder: “boing.” We alternated as the volume grew and grew until we were nearly yelling at each other, when the guy eventually turned around and we broke out into laughter.

It was stupid and childish, sure, but another testament to the reality of Nike’s marketing at the time: sometimes serious, sometimes stupid, but always memorable.

The shoe I’m referring to is the Nike Shox BB4. The first Nike basketball shoe worn and affectionately known by purists as “Vince Carter’s first Nike,” and also the first basketball shoe to feature Nike’s Shox technology.

I can’t remember which pair I bought first. The black and red, or the white and black patent. Maybe it was the white and red. Nah, I know I picked those up later. Whichever pair was the first, I don’t think it really matters because I rocked the hell out of them all. The early pairs bring back memories of me as a youngster spending the vast majority of my free time on basketball courts throughout my college years. Both pairs are featured in several of my “young guy MySpace basketball pics,” and both pairs saw several courts in both California and New York.

When I’ve taken a break from the sport due to sickness or injury, I always return triumphantly with my BB4s. Or when I want to try something else, I always end up switching back to them, usually about halfway through the session. There’s something about the neoprene toebox, the low profile, and the heel cup that complements my style of play precisely. And there’s a reason I keep coming back.

The thing is, for me, the Shox BB4 is the perfect basketball shoe. And if you know me, you know that I love playing basketball.

Maybe it was a need to stand out. Or a need to fit in. Or a feeling that once I found “the one,” something out there might just be a smidge better. For whatever reason, I tried my hand, er, feet, in hundreds of other pairs over the years. And nothing measured up. The grass certainly wasn’t any greener.

I’d say if I didn’t try out other shoes, despite knowing BB4s were my favorite, the sneaker gods would have done a pretty poor job at marketing. Because yeah, maybe the marketing wasn’t as direct, but the sentiment that shoe technology does nothing but improve over time convinced me that the BB4 wasn’t enough.

So maybe that’s why marketing exists in the first place. Lord knows we’ve watched corporations and multinationals accept the fact that second-rate and inferior products do little but result in more sales.

And maybe that’s the real point of marketing. I’m not saying that new shoes are bad, or that innovation isn’t real, but that marketing does a great job of convincing us that staying put is a failure of the imagination. If we’re not upgrading, we’re somehow old or falling behind. Loyalty as stagnation. Comfort as complacency.

Through hundreds of experiments, I realized that none of the shoes I tried were solving the problem I had. They were solving a problem Nike needed me to believe I had. Lighter. Faster. More explosive. More responsive. They marketed it all magnificently, but none of that shit matters to me when I’m trying to bust some dude’s ass without thinking about how bad my feet actually hurt.

BB4s gave me that freedom. BB4s continue to give me that freedom. The BB4 never asked me to adjust anything. It just showed up and did its job. And every time I left chasing something newer, I came back not because of nostalgia or a throwback to the past, but because it worked.

I always swore I’d grow up to be a man who tries and experiences new things, and I’ve kept that at the forefront of my mind for years. But when it comes to actual basketball shoes, time has turned me. I’ve found what works, and improvement for the sake of improvement has proven to be little more than disruption. I ain’t movin’ on from the BB4 for nothing.

The BB4 didn’t age with me. I aged into it. And I’d say I made that decision probably 15 years ago, the year I won my first back-to-back intramural league championship trophies. Seriously. There’s comfort in that decision, but not the kind people mean when they say “comfortable.” It’s trust. And trust doesn’t need anything more.

That’s probably why I made the card.

Not as a flex. Not as nostalgia. But as a physical acknowledgment that sometimes the thing that lasts isn’t the thing that changed the most, but the thing that stayed useful while everything else kept nudging me elsewhere. The card isn’t about the BB4 being perfect. It’s about recognizing the moment you stop believing that perfect is out there somewhere, just waiting for you to buy it.

Marketing needs motion. It needs dissatisfaction. It needs you to believe that staying still is a missed opportunity. But life doesn’t really work that way. At some point, you find something that fits, something that works, something that doesn’t ask you to be anyone other than who you already are. That’s when you learn to stop paying attention to the gimmicks. And if you’re lucky, you recognize it before you spend another twenty years looking past it.

I’ve played in a lot of shoes. I’ve chased better. I’ve chased newer. I’ve chased the promise that this next pair would unlock something I was missing. And every time, I came back to the same place. Same model. Same feel. Same certainty.

That’s not failure.
That’s arrival.

The long way around.

One last thing before I let this one sit.

If you want to pay a subscription fee - pay it. For the first 25 people that sign up to a paid subscription (it’s like $30/year or something) - I’ll send you a BB4 tribute card—made from an actual pair of Nike Shox BB4s that I cut up myself. Not a replica. Not a reprint. A physical fragment of the exact shoe this essay is about.

It’s not a flex. It’s not merch. It’s a small artifact meant to live somewhere real, the same way the shoe did for me.

If this writing has ever made you feel seen, or helped you reframe something you thought you already understood, that’s what you’d be supporting.

For years, every time someone talked about the Jordan 1, my mind always shot back to something Bobbito Garcia wrote about it. I didn’t remember it word for word, but the general sentiment about the AJ1 was that it was corny. And I more or less subscribed to that idea for the first 35 years of my life. I decided to ask ChatGPT about the quote, and GPT came back with some quote about how, when the Air Jordan 1 dropped, it was like you could buy cool for $65. The only catch was that if you didn’t have game, the shoes couldn’t help you.

It sounded exactly like Bobbito. His voice, his rhythm, his particular mix of love and irritation for sneaker culture. The kind of thing you hear once and carry around for years because it feels true, even if you can’t remember where you heard it.

Then I asked GPT for the source.

And ChatGPT did that thing it does where it keeps talking confidently while basically admitting it has nothing to stand on. “Yea, you’re right to question it.” It couldn’t verify where the quote came from. It couldn’t point me to a page, an interview, a transcript, or anything of substance. It just kept insisting. Which was its own kind of lesson.

So I went digging for real. I searched old interviews. I looked for my copy of Bobbito’s book, Where’d You Get Those?, and when I couldn’t find my physical copy, I found a digital version online. I started reading, expecting to finally land on the quote that had been living in my head: Bobbito didn’t say the Air Jordan 1 was corny, nor did he say it was a shortcut to cool. The actual quote reads as follows:

The first Air Jordan, in any true connoisseur’s view, looked garbage. The only person who looked jazzy in them was Jordan himself, yet everyone had them and swore they were the shit. Air Jordans represented the antitheses of what sneaker culture in New York was all about. It was the first sneaker in New York history that gained popularity on the street that it didn’t deserve. It was the beginning of a homogenous style for youth and brand loyalty, two phenomena that could never have existed in the independent, free styling era of sneaker culture from 1970-87.

Damn.

Not only was the quote in my head severely dumbed down, the quote from GPT completely false, but the real one was layered.

Before the Jordan 1, the way sneaker culture gets described, especially in New York, is that it was less about buying a cool shoe, but was more about buying a random shoe and making cool for yourself. You started with general release shoes and…You chose the lace color or maybe flattened them with an iron. You cleaned them obsessively after each wear - likely with a toothbrush. You customized them with markers. You mostly figured out how to stand out in a city where everybody was trying to be unique, just like everyone else.

With the Jordan 1 - you didn’t have to do any of that. You simply had to buy it. And it arrived already famous. You just bought it and inherited the cool.

As a kid in the 90s, that was basically how it felt. The first people I knew who had Jordan 1s were the ones with money. I don’t even remember ever seeing a pair of Jordan 1’s on a kid until I was in my early 30’s. I vaguely remember a college friend rockin’ a pair. But after that, it was like…it was just the rich, corny kids. Kids who could skip the effort and barrel straight toward cool. Whether that was fair or not, that was my early impression of the shoe. That it was a try-hard sneaker for people who didn’t have to try.

Which makes it even stranger that, nearly thirty years later, I came around.

Not because I suddenly started caring about 1985. Not because I learned the origin story and got emotional about it. But moreso because the Jordan 1 kept popping up on my thrift runs and showing up in places I just didn’t expect to see it.

Rap videos. In skate videos. On punks. On metal dudes. On the kind of people who weren’t chasing Jordan’s aura at all.

If you’ve ever watched The Search for Animal Chin, you can spot Lance Mountain skating in mismatched pairs. When I was a kid, I noticed the mismatch but I didn’t understand what I was looking at - I just thought he was being a clown. Years later, I rewatched it and realized he was wearing Jordan 1s. Which immediately raised the question I probably should have asked sooner.

Why were Jordan 1’s so prevalent in early skateboard culture?

The story I heard, and it makes sense even if some of it has turned into legend, is that Nike overproduced early. Demand was weird. They tried to catch up, they made too many, and pairs ended up on sales racks. And after the sales racks failed, they started giving them away to anyone that would take ‘em: most skate crews were running on minimal budgets, so they ended up in shops and given out for free.

That version of the Jordan 1 - the skateboarders Air Jordan 1 - is the one that softened me on it.

I couldn’t give a damn about MJ’s rookie year. I wasn’t sold on MJ until the Infrared 6. And I damn sure couldn’t give a damn about how the AJ1 ‘saved’ Nike. I only cared that my favorite skaters co-signed it (and they only co-signed it because they got it for free).

As you might know, when Nike and Jordan Brand eventually began releasing the Jordan 1 under their SB (skateboard) line amongst a flood of other releases under every customer segment - I started finding them at thrift stores. Thrift store shoes made way for collaborations, customs, fakes and endless iterations on the swoosh. And somewhere along the way, the Jordan 1 became the default sneaker for people entering the culture. The baseline. The entry point.

Which should have proved Bobbito right. The uniform sneaker. The beginning of homogeneity.

Except it ended up doing the opposite. The shoe became so dominant that it actually became the opposite of what Bobbito was claiming.

Because when a shoe becomes that common, it stops functioning as a shortcut and starts functioning as a canvas. People repaint it. distress it. rebuild it. bootleg it. replace the swoosh with something stupid…I’m talking butterflies and penis swooshes. People made it personal in every way imaginable.

A shoe that once symbolized the loss of individuality became the one that everyone chose to personalize.

I don’t know if Bobbito has changed his stance. Lord knows I’ve changed my stance on many things over the years, but maybe he hasn’t. It’s obvious that as the godfather of the culture we now know and love - he was writing from a moment he wanted to protect. And I respect that. And I agreed with it for a long time. But for me, the Jordan 1 has become something I don’t need to defend or dismiss. It’s not my favorite shoe. It’s not the best shoe. It doesn’t even make sense as a basketball shoe (anymore).

But it is the shoe that absorbed every version of the culture and stayed legible anyway.

Maybe it didn’t deserve the hype in 1985. Maybe it did.

But nearly forty years later, it feels like it earned something else by taking the long way around.

In 2019, a man I didn’t know reached out to me from overseas and asked if I could authenticate a pair of shoes he had just bought. His English was limited. The message was short. Polite.

At first glance, I assumed I knew exactly what this was.

At the time, replica manufacturers were getting smarter. Some were sending out feelers. Testing the edges of authentication. Seeing what could slip through. The shoes he sent me pictures of were very rare and very expensive. The kind of pair that doesn’t usually land in the hands of someone asking questions after the fact.

I was wrong.

Or at least, there was evidence of truth that I wasn’t expecting.

He sent documentation. A StockX receipt. Emails. Dates. Numbers. Everything lined up. Even the import fees checked out. And thanks to a data breach a few months earlier, I could verify that the email address existed in StockX’s system. Someone really had paid over twenty thousand dollars for this particular pair - and the email addresses matched. Wow.

Hmm.

Maybe there was something to this. Not because the shoes were suddenly real. But because the assumptions I brought with me were suddenly irrelevant.

I don’t know if what I had in front of me was a fake manufacturer testing the system, or if it was an actual customer who spent a great deal of money on a rare collectible. But, given the evidence, it seemed like it was a customer caught between belief and doubt, holding an object whose value depended entirely on whether enough strangers agreed on it’s authenticity.

The shoes were Derek Jeter Air Jordan 11 highs. A sample run. Mythologized. Every major sneaker outlet repeated the same line: five pairs released. Scratch-off lottery. Bronx pop-up. End of story.

Except stories like that are never the end.

Because the deeper I looked, the less stable that number became. I could easily account for more than five pairs. Some in shops. Some cross-listed. One in Chris Paul’s closet. One in my customer’s hands. One on the shelves behind PJ Tucker. Another owned by a friend. Either several were fake, or the story everyone kept repeating was a lie.

That happens a lot with sneakers. Numbers become facts because they’re easy to remember, not because they’re true.

I started reaching out. Shops didn’t respond. Sellers disappeared. Platforms wouldn’t provide images. Everyone had a stake, and no one wanted to be the one to say something definitive. But they definitely wanted their commission.

Eventually, I found one of the actual scratch-off winners. And…what are the chances…she lived in my city - Oakland, California. She wasn’t a sneakerhead - just a lucky tourist that happened to be in the Bronx at the time the scratch-off contest commenced. She had won the shoes, consigned them, and moved on. She had photos. Emails. Documentation. A handwritten letter from Jordan Brand. She had the kind of proof only a real winner would have. She was bonafide.

But even then, it wasn’t a closed case. Because she consigned them at a popular shop that wasn’t exactly known for being helpful. Evidence it came slowly.

In my process - evidence comes in millimeters, spacing, kerning and fonts. And in stitching and in details so small they felt absurd compared to the amount of money involved.

The differences weren’t dramatic. No cartoon flaws. No obvious shortcuts. Just tiny deviations. The kind you only notice after hours of looking. The kind that don’t matter if you’re wearing the shoe, but matter deeply if you’re trying to decide what reality is supposed to be. I had the help of a couple of well-known and well-respected sneakerheads in the space.

And eventually, we landed on an answer. Not a satisfying one. Just the most honest one we could reach. I found something blatantly obvious that the others overlooked, but IMO, it was the smoking gun.

Once the information was presented to them - we all agreed - we believed the pair was fake.

The buyer didn’t agree with me.

And when I posted the full story on Instagram, people reacted the way people always do when certainty is threatened. Some thanked me. Others accused me of not knowing what I was talking about. A few treated it like a courtroom drama, as if the goal was to win rather than understand.

Everyone and their mother seemed to have an opinion but no one brought receipts. Some folks claimed there were 40+ pairs in existence, others claimed the published ‘5’ was the real number. Some people called me an idiot, others said I was brilliant. Again, no one brought receipts.

Later, someone at Jordan Brand saw the evidence. Then the actual designer of the shoe did too. Both agreed with the assessment. And that should have been the end.

But it wasn’t. Because I continued to receive ‘expert assessments’ for several years after the fact.

What stuck with me wasn’t the vindication from the people that were actually in the room. It was the realization that the entire exercise had less to do with shoes than we’d like to believe.

These objects we covet so dearly and occupy our time with sit in a strange space. They’re treated like enviable artifacts but made like commodities. We ask them to carry meaning, history, and value far beyond what they were designed to hold. And then we’re surprised if and when they crack under the pressure.

Since then, I’ve authenticated more than 100,000 pairs of shoes. And I’m better now than I was then. But if that same pair crossed my desk today, I probably approach it the same way: Cynically, then carefully, then skeptically. And willing to say “I don’t know” longer than people are comfortable with.

Because some shoes don’t want to be known with certainty.

And maybe that’s the point.

The line between sneakers as collectibles and sneakers as tools is thinner than we like to admit. One day you’re preserving history. The next you’re just trying to decide what’s worth wearing. I move back and forth across that line all the time.

The longer I do this, the less interested I am in being right, and the more interested I am in being thorough.

And that kinda feels like the long way around.

A couple of years ago, mid-pandemic, I had an interview with a popular up-and-coming sneaker authentication company. I made it through rounds 1 and 2 with your typical corporate folk, but when they told me I was to meet with their resident sneaker expert I figured I had it in the bag. After all, I had been obsessed with sneakers for the past 30 years, and had been authenticating 10,000+ pairs a year for the past 5. But when I clicked on the ‘join zoom meeting’ link on my computer and saw the dude that was interviewing me, my brain kinda broke.

He took one look at me and made his mind up before a word even came out my mouth. He looked to be about 20 years younger than me, dressed like all the dudes you see at the sneakercon events and carried a vocabulary that matched those you see in sneakercon tiktoks. Based on his general demeanor, his speed of dictation, and how fast he registered my answers between long pauses and his one word responses - I could pretty much smell the vape smoke coming through the screen.

He asked me a few questions - with which I stacked layer upon layer of reference and sneaker knowledge, then hit me with a brief authentication test. It was a painful conversation because I felt the dude was high as hell and I was firing on all cylinders. Not a good match.

The whole ‘conversation’ and ‘test’ lasted about 15 minutes. Significantly less time than I spent with HR and the CTO of the company, and that was that. I was cooked.

It was the first time I ever felt old in sneakers. Not just ‘old’ like that ‘cool old guy’ - which I often felt when I was a middle/high school teacher a few years prior. But this was a new feeling. This was over-the-hill old. What I thought was an undeniable strength, someone on the other end decided it was very deniable.

I never got a response from that dude or that company. And I know it comes down to how that dude perceived me.

On top of that - to this day - I know I could have helped that company enter into markets that dude couldn’t even touch. But who am I going to sing those praises to now?

When I first started collecting sneakers as a teenager, I didn’t know of anyone that was ‘older’ that was really doing this. It wasn’t really documented and the internet didn’t really exist and all you really knew was what you saw through various piecemeal media - sometimes it was music videos or record covers or magazines or movies. It was word of mouth. Sneakers felt new and it felt fresh and it felt like, despite my geographical limitations, I was on the edge of something that had yet to be named. Similar to rap music. My naiveté reminds me of that saying: ‘every generation thinks they invented sex, and every generation is wrong.’

If you’re old - like me - you understand that young people shape their identity by pushing back of the norms of previous generations. So, yeah, in a way, caring about my footwear was a way of pushing back against the generations before me that didn’t. This was my desire to create something new and distinct (as I mentally prepare myself for the time when my kids start pushing back against MY love for sneakers by wearing ‘Hey Dudes’ and ‘Crocs).

If I had to call it, I would have thought ‘the end’ of sneakers as we now know it would have happened around 2015. Even back then, the market felt oversaturated. But ten years later and sneakers are still here. They’re still shaping identities and they’re still setting cultural norms. But what’s crazy is that even the shoes never changed, their meaning did.

So what happens when young people and old people use the same base objects for norms as a basis for identity? Exactly what happened to me in that interview.

I should have seen this coming, though, as I had a similar interview with Greg Schwartz of StockX a few years prior. I remember I mentioned something like ‘when are you going to bulk up your catalog so I can buy all of the shoes I’ve always been looking for’ and he kinda scoffed: ‘we’re not looking to catalog everything, only popular shoes.’ Wut?

Initially the hard part was realizing I wasn’t right for the job. It wasn’t because I didn’t know enough. It was because I knew too much.

And I’ve come to accept that as just a part of life. I no longer need anyone to validate my sneaker knowledge anymore. The experience is mine, whether it’s recognized or not. I don’t need permission to be a Savant, and a fancy job title wouldn’t have changed that anyway. Sneakers never stopped mattering to me. They just stopped needing to explain me.

The long way around.

Sneakers take on a different life from the shelf to the street, and there’s no better analogy than this:

From the shelf, kids see a shoe they like and rock the hell out of it until it’s in tatters. Teens see a shoe they like and wear it selectively — with the right outfits, in the right places — hoping it helps secure attention from the opposite sex. Adults see a shoe they like and let it sit in their closet for several years before eventually giving it away.

On feet, it’s simpler.
Kids don’t care. They’ll rock anything.
Teens realize, after a couple of wears, that there’s always something shinier.
Adults realize that if it’s not practical, what’s the point?

Somewhere between the late teen years and early adulthood, a realization kicks in: not every shoe that looks good on the shelf is meant for daily wear. Some shoes demand an occasion.

Every time I see an announcement that some version of this particular shoe is returning, the question that always pops into my head is why?

I’d like to believe I’m clever for thinking that, but the market tells me otherwise. Because regardless — without fail — this shoe sells out every single time it’s released.

And yet, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this shoe on someone’s foot in real life.

I see them online. I see them in advertisements. I see them in consignment shops. I’ve seen them on basketball cards, in “rate my fit” posts, all over blogs and Instagram. But I literally never see them on feet. Ever.

The shoe I’m talking about is the Jordan XI ‘Legend Blue’ (f.k.a. ‘Columbia Blue’).

When I think of Mike and the shoes he wore, I tend to split them into eras. The early championships fall squarely into that young-gun killer period. The later championships feel more like I’m going to kill you with a suit on. Everything else feels like noise.

In both eras, there were OG colorways that never really made sense as everyday mainstays — True Blue 3s, Military Blue 4s, Aqua and Grape 5s, Maroon 6s. I don’t picture those on MJ. I picture them on kids from my school. From my neighborhood.

The Columbia XI is different.

I can only picture it with that All-Star Game outfit in San Antonio — the shiny white uniform with the Chili Pepper on the chest. It was cool. Period-appropriate. But not something I could ever imagine wearing unironically.

Shiny white shoes in the snowy, muddy mountains of Northern California? Even for MJ, this felt like a once-a-year shoe.

In 1999, I was heading into my second year at UCSC and just starting to blossom sneaker-wise. I finally had a very limited budget and a clear goal: Playoff XII’s. They were impossible to find, so I sat on the money and waited.

When my mom asked me to take a trip back to New York with her, I was convinced I’d find them. Country-bumpkin logic.

We spent a full day shopping along Broadway — Canal up to Union Square — popping into shop after shop before finally landing in one of the greatest sneaker stores to ever exist: Transit.

In the premium section, far from the entrance, two shoes pulled me in opposite directions: the OG Columbia XI — three years old and on sale — and a pair of Yankees-colored leather Air Max BW’s at retail.

The decision didn’t take long.

Even knowing the Columbias’ status, I needed a daily wear. No matter how hard I tried to imagine it, the Columbia XI could never be that for me.

The funny thing about this shoe is that it is actually a mainstay. It’s just as important to vintage and OG collectors as the Breds, the Space Jams, and the Concords — it’s just not nearly as visible. And, like that All-Star Game, it appears to be the go-to for special occasions: church, Easter Sunday, Mother’s Day brunch.

The problem is, it’s always felt a little masturbatory to me — a shoe designed to be admired more than lived in.

And I’ve never really known what to do with shoes like that. I still don’t like the shoe. But, as an adult, I understand it now — and understanding, for me, usually comes from the long way around.

Even on a 9-inch television, at the ripe old age of 10, I could tell that the ‘red’ didn’t match the red from the jersey. It was slightly off…pink, even. Almost medium rare. I had no idea what the shoe looked like in real life, but the man wearing it was executing and doing it with such style and grace that those black and pink shoes were burned into my mind for all of eternity. Probably about a centimeter on a 9-inch television.

Right around that same time, I was flooded with this image of The Terminator. There used to be this theater close to my childhood home, and every time we’d drive by, I’d look at the ‘Now Playing’ and ‘Coming Soon’ posters - and I can still see ‘The Terminator 2’ poster staring back at me. I’m sure I saw a trailer for the movie during the same NBA Finals above, but the color in the trailer and on the poster was the same. Or maybe it was from the music video. I don’t totally remember, but the same pink-ish red was there. It was like a new color had hit the mainstream, and because mainstream was everywhere, I saw it everywhere. It was impossible to avoid.

As a kid, I thought this was almost like a new discovery. A new color. A new color that the world suddenly agreed on. It wasn’t pink and it wasn’t red and it wasn’t anything in my school textbooks. But it was associated with two of the coolest people in the world: Michael Jordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The timing was so perfect, I thought it was intentional. Michael Jordan was a killer. Arnold wasn’t human, though, he was a cyborg. MJ WAS the goddam Terminator.

The color, itself, I wasn’t much a fan of. It felt off. Almost unintentional. Too pink. And pink was never high on my list. I was a fan of Reds and Blues and Purples. It definitely wasn’t Chicago Bulls-red. Pink was a bridge too far. That being said, I didn’t really think about it much, but it was separate from every other color I knew. It was kind of an entity unto itself. But that didn’t make MJ, Arnold, or the shoes any less cool. If anything, it made them more cool. I had a decision coming up:

• NBA Finals: Bulls vs. Lakers: May/June 1991.

• The Terminator 2: July 3, 1991.

• My Birthday: Mid-July.

What did I ask for for my birthday? The shoes, of course.

The first time I wore them was to my cousins house. Another summer day where we’d eat cheese-block quesadillas on wheat tortillas with a splash of soy sauce for extra flavor. But today, instead of fighting over baseball cards, we’d take a dip in the river. Me (11) and my cousins (12 & 8) walked down the treacherous hill and found our spot. A cool little beach where the river wasn’t going too crazy. I was always afraid of the water, so I was a bit more reserved and kept towards the shoreline, while my cousins - much stronger swimmers - waded out a bit further. We spent a couple of hours there before deciding it was time to head back and, as soon as I finished lacing up up my Jordans…a ‘big kid’ pulled up to the beach on a quad. My cousins and I stood there and just kind of watched him doing donuts on the beach. It was cringe-fully obvious the kid was trying to show off…because before anyone had any idea what was going on, the wheels tossed dirt as he hurtled himself full speed at the river. About 4 feet in, his engine coughed, sputtered and died and the current started to take him away. Alarmed, he screamed for help. My cousins and I ran over and I distinctly remember grabbing the handlebar of this dudes quad, pulling with all my might, and seeing my brand new Jordans submerged in mud. (Yes, there are some slight embellishments to this story in my comic book origin story, but this one is the actual story).

While I was focused on MJ, I’m sure, somewhere else in the world…around the same time…there were countless other 11 year old kids watching Andre Agassi at the French Open debuting his Tech Challenge 2’s. Or…someones fancy jogging parents were lacing up (or buying - at the mall) a pair of Air Max 90’s. I never really put it together, but all of these shoes came out around the same time, and they all shared a similar shade of pinkish-red.

• That shade of pinkish-red that Jordan wore was labeled ‘Infrared’.

• The shade of pinkish-red that Agassi wore was labeled ‘Hot Lava’.

• The shade of pinkish-red that was on the Air Max 90 was called ‘Radiant Red’.

The first two became the shoes nicknames. After several years, the 90 finally got rebranded as ‘Infrared’. And although the actual hex codes aren’t precise, they are damn close. And from that perspective…these color names made perfect sense:

• Infrared/MJ: Cold. Calculating. A stone-cold Killer.

• Hot Lava/Agassi: Volatile. Rebellious. Emotional.

• Radiant Red/Joggers: Technical. Visible. Futuristic.

Instead of chalking it up to just design…it appears someone at Nike was working overtime on marketing through naming colors.

A year or so ago, I was talking with a Nike color designer, and he brought up a connection that I hadn’t previous considered:

“You know, a lot of those colors from the 90’s were from same batch of paint. Nike was just trying to save money on materials. They reused and repackaged the colors and gave them different names: Infrared and Hot Lava were the same. Lime and Volt were the same. They just changed the names for the athlete.”

Mind. Blown.

Whether or not the story is true (I have no idea, but I DO believe it), it gave me some new insight into something I hadn’t thought about previously: the importance of color.

The first time I remember the Jordan 6 retro as being accessible, I was living in Brooklyn. A Black and Red 6 were finally set to drop after a 20-year hiatus. Instead of the pink-ish red, they went with a more…Chicago Bull-sy rich red. I was stoked. But a lot of my sneakerhead friends weren’t.

Me: ‘Dude, we haven’t seen this shoe in 20 years, who gives a shit that it’s ‘Red Red’ and not ‘Pink-ish Red’?

Them: ‘Jay, WE care. If they gonna re-do a Jordan why don’t they do it the way it originally was?’

I ignored their POV and copped my pair anyway. I liked them. I thought they looked cool and neat and I was happy to have them.

BUT.

Gods honest truth: they just didn’t feel the same. I definitely didn’t feel like a stone cold killer. I felt more like an High School student trying to play up my accolades. Is that because the name, on the label, was ‘Varsity Red’?

That retro 6 I bought back in Brooklyn wasn’t a brick.

It just taught me something I hadn’t learned yet: sneakers don’t just carry materials and tech and marketing and history. They carry the moment you first noticed them. Infrared wasn’t powerful because it was rare or original or correct.

It was powerful because it arrived at the exact moment when Jordan and Schwarzenegger and a kid’s imagination all decided on what that color meant. And once that moment passes, you don’t get it back. You only get to remember it.

Which is kind of the point in taking the long way around…

In the mid to late 90s, in the mountains of Northern California, ‘style’ was little more than a word. Most of my peers were trying to fit in while being unique enough to stand out, while having very limited options with which to do so. The nearest “fashionable” clothing store was something like Champs Sports, about thirty miles away in Reno, Nevada. Most kids had exposure to TV. I had exposure to SLAM Magazine and The Source, so I took most of my fashion cues from there.

If someone showed up to school one day wearing something wild, we all tried to get our hands on something similar but definitely not the same. That meant - if someone had a dope Zephyr Hoyas hat, you had to get a Zephyr hat - it just couldn’t be for the Hoyas. That was the key. Similar, not identical. But it was tough. You had to know someone going thirty miles away, and you had to have the money to actually buy something. And the product actually had to exist.

What ended up happening a lot was the borrowing and trading of clothes. I used to borrow or trade with dudes I wouldn’t be caught dead actually hanging out with. Style and music were the overlap. Everything else was negotiable.

When those Nike College Basketball shooting shirts dropped, I think they were around sixty bucks, which was an enormous amount of money in the late 90s. The first one I remember seeing was the Georgetown one, possibly worn by my best friend Tom Cruz. My god, it was striking. When I asked him about it, he told me there were only a few teams available…I remember Georgetown, UNC, Cincinnati, and maybe Michigan.

I immediately started scheming. Baby blue never looked good on me, but it was a fresh color that had connotations - I wanted the UNC shirt for myself. My grandparents lived in North Carolina, and of course there was MJ. I had to have that one.

Unfortunately, before I saved up enough money, the star running back at our school owned it. He was kind of an asshole but I knew him from the time we were kids kids…we didn’t really associate much, but we were cool. We shared a similar sense of style and taste in music. So we traded a lot. But when I approached him about the UNC shirt and asked what it would take, he was open to it. We worked out a deal. I gave him a handful of CDs. X-Raided (semi local legend), JT tha Bigga Figga, Puff, Mase, The Lox. Something like that. And the shirt was mine. Even though it was a size XL and I was a solid schmedium, I rocked it as often as I could. A few months later, people started asking me if I’d trade it.

My buddy across the street, Mike, was always eyeing my clothes. His shoes were often heat, but we couldn’t trade shoes because I was a size 9 and he was a size 15. He was a bit bigger, so the oversized clothing thing worked in my favor. He also loved that UNC shirt and I was already on to the next…One day I decided to lend it to him with no leverage, no trade, no conditions.

Within a week, he left a hot iron on it and burned the hell out of it Dead center in the chest. I was livid. I decided to charge him sixty dollars, knowing full well he didn’t have the money. It caused a weird tension between us because every time I saw him I was mad and every time he saw me he probably felt like a schmuck. I thought it was intentional - I was sixteen and an idiot.

One day, my dad noticed the tension and and asked what was going on. I told him and he shut it down immediately. He told me I couldn’t charge Mike and I needed to live with my decision because the potential for damage was the cost of letting people borrow things. He said I’d know better next time.

I don’t remember how cleanly I let it go, but I did and I eventually just let Mike keep the shirt. I wasn’t gonna wear it. I got new shirts. Life moved on. Mike and I are still distant friends, nearly thirty years later.

At the time, that felt like the end of the story. And it probably would have been another lost to the sands of time…if…it wasn’t.

Almost thirty years later, I found myself in Portland, standing at the rooftop bar of Hotel Eastlund, talking to another guy named Mike Cartell, who I just met. At some point, I noticed he had changed his outfit…or…at least I thought he had. He was suddenly wearing the full Georgetown kit. Shorts and all. Fire. Why, though? Kind of a strange thing to do in the middle of rooftop bar drinking.

I asked him if he had changed his clothes and he leaned in close: “Do you see that guy over there? That’s Ken Black. He designed all the Nike Team Sports stuff in the 90s. I own ALL of it.”

I had never heard of Ken Black. Furthermore, I had never once considered the idea that there were actual (designers) people behind the clothes we obsessed over. But the words “Team Sports” hit immediately. My brain went straight to that unmistakeable tag, then that burned UNC shirt.

I took note and kept it moving. I didn’t think much of it beyond that as I was also in the same room as the guys that worked with the basketball gods from my youth - one more designer in that list was another example of how ignorant I’ve been throughout the whole adulation of the final product.

The following night, at the Academy of Arts event, I ran into Ken Black in one of the offices. I introduced myself and handed him one of those MJ Blazers cards I created. He smirked and said it crushed his heart because he was a lifelong Blazers fan. We laughed. We didn’t really talk about Nike Team Sports at all, we talked a bit about art and design and…mostly about fatherhood. The conversation was short, but it went deeper than most. Again, this conversation took place because of sneakers.

We stayed in touch.

A few weeks later, a package showed up at my door including a T-shirt and a note with news that he was starting a podcast called ‘The Designasty’ and he’d like my opinion if I had a few minutes. I hit play on my commute home and within minutes learned that another person I had been in the same room with on that same night - Drake Ramberg - had designed another article of clothing that I sought out.

In 1994 - I started out my freshman year of high school in the UK. While there, I learned that, although the details were slightly different, the framing for the youth was pretty much the same: something sports-related almost always helped you fit in. And in the UK, the sport was Soccer. And who had the licensing for the jerseys? Nike.

Even though Manchester United was THE team and Ryan Giggs was THE guy, there happened to be another star player on another team in the league that had the same last name as me. David Platt from Arsenal. And what better way to fit while still remain original than with an Arsenal Jersey that had MY name printed across the back?

I didn’t actually secure that David Platt jersey until much, much later in life - I’m talking 15 years later - but when I did eventually get it, the memories came rushing back. And my desire to just have it never waned. I STILL look for different versions of that jersey to this day.

And, shit, Drake Ramberg - the guy talking with the guy that designed my UNC shirt - DESIGNED the Arsenal jersey!

Looking back, what messes with me is how none of this was intentional. This was just the universe circling back. And really, you’d be surprised at how often that actually happens when you spend so much of your life focusing on the things you like to focus on.

I didn’t set out to understand design. I didn’t plan on meeting the people behind the things I loved. I didn’t know where lending a shirt, trading CDs, or saying yes to conversations would lead. I always wanted to feel like I looked fresh. And because of that, I just stayed open. Open to new experiences. Open to the unknown. Open to the possibility that things are…just…connected. And somehow, those small, unremarkable decisions ended up tying together loose threads across decades, places, memories, and most importantly - people.

At sixteen, all I knew was that I wanted to wear something that made me feel like I belonged. At forty-five, I’m realizing that the things I cared about most were always quietly pointing me toward people, not objects.

Closing the circle after thirty years on the path is truly finding the long way around.

Besides thousands upon thousands of words for content, one of the byproducts of hanging out with the owner of Urban Necessities for a few days back in 2016 resulted in one of the most interesting experiences of my (sneaker) life. At the time, we were trying to work on a deal that eventually fell through, but that didn’t derail the events I’m about to tell you about. It started a few weeks after my visit to Las Vegas, when I told him my next stop was Hawaii, where he gave the name of a couple sneaker shops he thought would be interested in my sneaker grading software. One of those on the list was ‘The BVNK’.

So we went to Hawaii and did all of the Hawaii things…beaches, shaved ice, short ribs, hikes, etc. Midway through the trip, I dragged a buddy with me to The BVNK and when we pulled up to an empty parking lot, a dead silent interior, and a handful of dudes just talking like I was trespassing, I felt like I was back in one of those snooty shops in New York. Whatever. No mind.

Eventually, one of the guys came over and I name-dropped Jayssee. He was all smiles for a few minutes, but when I showed him the software he kinda drifted off again. He thanked me for my time, gave me a couple shirts and hats, and went back to his conversation with the other dudes inside. My buddy and I drifted back toward the wall, talking about a few pairs, half-awkward, fully-ready to leave.

Then a guy walked in.

He looked like he had just come from a job site. Dirty white shirt. Cargo shorts. Work boots. Dad hat. He was carrying a white plastic grocery bag. There’s no nice way to say it other than he looked completely out of place.

The guy ambled around for a minute, then walked to the counter and asked a question that had me leaning in: “Do you know anything about old sneakers? I found a storage unit full of shoes and I don’t know what to do with them.”

He pulled a very old pair of ACG Baltoros out of the bag and put them on the counter.

The guy behind the counter barely looked at them. He said something to the effect of “nah, we don’t mess with stuff like that.” The construction dude said ‘thanks’, picked the shoes back up and started walking toward the door.

I followed him outside without thinking, it just felt wrong to let him walk back to a U-Haul with a grocery bag full of shoes nobody even bothered to look at. So when he slid open the rear door of the U-Haul and I spotted a handful of old sneaker boxes, I blurted out something dumb, like “hey man, I couldn’t help overhearing,” which is always how conversations start when you absolutely helped overhear. I told him I collected sneakers and I might be able to help him sort through the unit. He lit up immediately. We exchanged numbers and agreed to meet the following day.

After breakfast, I told the wife I was going to help this dude out, hopped in the rental and within a few minutes I was back on the north side of the island, pulling into a small, beat-up business park on the side of a hill. Auto repair on one side. Plumbing shop on the other. His unit sat in the middle, door open, chaos spilling out. There was junk everywhere. Darrin greeted me as I hopped out the car and within seconds my eyes had already zeroed in on the bounty of sneaker boxes along the wall…but these weren’t just boxes. These were old boxes. Jordan boxes. Nike boxes. Adidas boxes. Reebok boxes. Hell - is that a “Nike Walking” box? Mizuno boxes and New Balance boxes. Coke boxes. Hundreds of them. Soft, warped, misshapen from humidity. But boxes, nonetheless. Almost every single pair was in a size 12 or higher, so, you know, nothing I could wear. I secretly thanked god for that (because how in the hell am I NOT going to try to buy this guys whole stash?).

The first box I picked up felt…wrong. The cardboard had that sheen you only see when moisture has been doing its thing for a long time. When I shook it, something inside shifted. Not solid. Not liquid. Something in between.

I opened it.

It was a pair of original Air Max 180 Barkleys. The uppers were near immaculate. But…the midsoles were gone. Not cracked. But Gone. The rubber outsole flopped loose, still attached to the air unit. Inside the box was what used to be polyurethane. Not dust. Wet. Gooey. Humid. It felt like one of those Keebler graham cracker crusts that my aunt makes my favorite chocolate pudding pies with.

It was the first time I’d ever seen a sneaker in that shape. I mean, sure, I had seen pictures. But the pictures made it seem that it was dust, dust. Not like gooey, sticky dust.

As I’m trying to wrap my mind around what I’m looking at - Darrin asked me what they were worth.

I stumbled a bit. I told him what the shoe was, I attempted to explain who Charles Barkley was and why the shoe mattered. And then I had to tell him the part that kinda hurt to verbalize: this pair, in this condition, wasn’t really worth much…because…fixing them would probably cost more than they’d ever be worth.

He looked deflated. I told him it was just the first box. That there might be gems. And we should keep going. He obliged.

We went through box after box. Cool shoes. Familiar shoes. Shoes I had only seen online. Stuff any sneakerhead would recognize. And a buttload of sneakers I never knew existed. A lot of it was damage from time, not use. He asked me to make two piles. One pile for those worth saving. And one pile for those with no hope.

And as much as it hurt me - The Sneaker Savant - to admit: the no-hope pile grew fast.

At some point he handed me an ice-cold Coke and we took a break. I was filthy. My hands were black and sticky with old glue and rubber and my shorts were caked in it. Dude didn’t even have a sink. This was before COVID, so ‘masks’ weren’t much of a thing, but thinking back now I was a complete idiot for not asking him for a mask.

After we got through the first batch of unknowns (I was saving the boxes I knew for last), the better stuff started to trickle through.

Bo Jacksons. Huaraches. Adidas from the 70s. Pippens. OG Jordan 4s, 5s, 6s. Nike Air Max Walkers! All decaying in their own ways. He asked about resoles and donors and costs. I gave him rough numbers and told him I knew a guy, but he’d probably cost a fortune.

There was a pair of Puma RS-100s with a floppy disk and an instruction manual. Falling apart. Rusted. Completely fascinating. Probably the first time a computer was ever part of a shoe’s story.

My favorite pair was the OG Air Max 1 - even though the midsoles were gone.

Towards very end of our run - he pulled out a paper bag. And inside was a pair of brand new 1985 Jordan 1s. Neutral grey. Hangtag still attached. Size 14. They looked like they hadn’t aged a day.

He asked me what they were worth.

At the time, ones weren’t really what they are now. I gave him a number that feels laughable in hindsight. He nodded. I could tell he was doing math.

He asked what he should sell the whole lot for. I told him I probably wouldn’t take less than five grand for the whole lot of pairs worth keeping, but also told him he was going to have a tough time trying to find a single buyer because what he had was more akin to a cleaning and construction project more than a sneaker collection. He laughed but I could tell he wanted something else from me: he asked what I would pay. I panicked a bit. I panicked because, yeah, I knew what I was looking at. But, yeah, also, I knew that I was the proper steward for the restoration of 75+ pairs of vintage sneakers. I told him I wouldn’t make an offer. I didn’t have the time. Or the resources. Or the skills. Or the stomach for it.

He thanked me for my time and, as I was about to leave, he asked if I wanted to pick a pair as thanks. Anything but the Jordan 1 or the Puma Computer shoe. I was kind of hoping he’d ask me and I knew exactly which pair I wanted: the OG Air Max 1s.

That day burned something into my brain, and it wasn’t just the chemical residue I inhaled digging through all of that sneaker decay…it was the realization that seeing one dead pair is sad. But seeing dozens is clarifying: Sneakers are perishable. And these things aren’t meant to last. They are dead much faster than almost any collectible we pretend they’re comparable to. Leather. Rubber. Glue. And none of it wants to live forever…especially in hot and humid weather.

I’ve spent years talking about preservation. Designing cases. Thinking about slowing time. That warehouse forced me to confront the part nobody likes to talk about. Caring about history eventually means deciding what responsibility you’re actually willing to carry…and I realized, several times over, that I’m not willing to carry almost any of it.

When I shared the guys of this story online - folks ran with it. A ton of people thought I was crazy for walking away and a bunch more thought the story was something I just made up. A guy I didn’t really know at the time - but has since become a friend (sneakerpreservationsociety) - actually did do the work of verifying the story a few months later, when he spotted some ebay activity matching my story. But overall a lot of folks online were just incredulous. “How could you just walk away?”

It’s easy to say what you’d do when the shoes aren’t in front of you, dissolving in your hands or when the opportunity isn’t slapping you in the face. But when you’re there, digging through it, experiencing it, compounding the work in your brain, you might understand the ask. I was faced with the gargantuan task of trying to rescue something I saw historical value in - I ultimately stepped away. Not because I didn’t think it was worthwhile, but because I didn’t think I’d be a very good steward. Better men that me might be up to it, but I sure wasn’t. Being open led me to that warehouse. Staying open forced me to see something most collectors never have to face. Instead of existing primarily in the ever-present FOMO of modern collecting, I had a chance to see what one of these collections might look like 30+ years down the road.

And even though I took a shortcut, I’d still say somebody had to take the long way around.