Ever since I worked as a daytime bartender in a Trendy Thunder Bay nightclub, I've taken to wearing polished leather shoes full time. And yes I understand that the words trendy and Thunder Bay sound funny together and that they should. But what I mean is trendy for northern Ontario standards, and even that makes me giggle. It's just that simply stating we served beer with a class and didn't have bear or moose on the menu just doesn't have the same ring to it.

I bought my first pair of fake doc martins when raking in minimum wage serving/spilling rye-and-cokes and never looked back. From that point on I came to judge many a stranger by his or her footwear. "Hmmm, 1970 era Nike�s eh?", I'd think to myself, wondering whether or not they were newly purchased and were going for the retro-look or they'd simply been wearing them since the Nixon administration. Intent is everything when talking about fashion.

In my first year of high school Country-Rock, to this day I still shudder when I hear these two words together, and cowboy boots were all the rave amongst the pick-up truck driving crowd that hung out in the automotive mechanics wing of my school. You would have thought this type of student, which compromised upwards to 75% of the student body, who kept pin-ups of Garth Brooks and Richard Petty in their lockers, and who frequently argued over in-depth topics such as "Ford vs Chevy" or "Arctic Cat vs. Polaris vs. Ski-doo" would have discovered the highly fashionable aspects of the cowboy boot long ago.

Wearing pointy snake skin footwear didn't automatically make you cool per say, case in point being my father. He rarely wore anything but denim and cowboy boots, a man who owned a closed full of boot-cut jeans well before the GAP made them an �essential�. I had a close friend fall victim to this trend, whose first act after pulling them on was to try and light a match off the sole like he presumably saw in some western. Sure I rant about fashion faux pas committed in the past but coming from a person who once wore scrubs from the local psychiatric hospital bought at the Salvation Army with suspenders and cut-off short with long underwear underneath finished with 18-hole combat boots should have no right to criticize.

Back then if someone were to judge me by my second hand combat boots they might come to the conclusion that I was tough, rugged, sensible, reliable and thought highly of punk band The Dead Kennedys due to the DK logo etched into the heel with white out. Yet if they were to look at my smurf blue hair and safety pin ear ring they probably would have rethought the sensible bit.

For some reason I can't stand running shoes. They just never look good on my feet even with shorts when I resort to Birkenstocks. It might have something to do with the shape of my legs, I can't explain it. I'd rather trek the back streets of Tokyo barefoot then wear shoes endorsed by a professional athlete. Now days I wear nothing but black polished doc martins and, possibly due to the way I walk, the toe of my left shoe is always scuffed up to the point where you can see the bare leather under the black. I haven't polished them in a while, going for that rugged, sensible look again sans smurf blue hair.

I once heard someone say you could use the same comparison on a persons watch instead of shoes. Nonsense I say. I wear an '83 model Casio G-Shock and I'm neither 20 BAR water resistant nor am I ever constantly five minutes late. Yes, and my watch being a 1983 model. I bought it three years ago and it's meant to be retro. It�s all about intent.

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