we will kick you in the guts

These are my boots.

There are not many like them, but this pair is mine.

Without my boots, my feet will get cold.

Without my feet, my boots are another thing to trip over in kitchen late at night.

I started wearing boots years before I became a punk rocker. When I was in ninth grade, my father gave me a pair of combat boots he had left over from his stint in the National Guard. They were supposed to be a cold weather alternative to the hightop sneakers I was fond of at the time, but as spring came around and my calluses hardened, I had grown too used to the weight and feel of boots to switch back to my old kicks.

Over the past two decades, I've gone though many different pairs of boots -- from steel-shanked jungle boots to eyecatching yet impractical "Judge Dredds" with metal greaves to knee-high laced lineman's boots (made of oh-so-fragrant oiled leather). In the end, I always end up returning to my old standard, "German" tanker boots with wraparound straps and buckles. (The German style, which seems to have become the standard model, features traction rubber soles instead of the American version's flat leather ones that made walking on icy or slick surfaces a positive delight.) They're different, but not to the point of absurdity.

That's my present pair of tanker boots in the picture above. I bought them seven or eight years ago, and wore them hard. The leather around the toes has cracked and split, and the loops holding the straps have long since given up the ghost, but I still keep them to wear around the house and backyard. I do have a brand spanking new pair, which I bought for my wedding and only wore once, in my closet, but I'm too lazy to make the effort to break them in properly. In the meantime, I've been getting by with alternating between my disintegrating casual pair and a pair of black jungle boots my brother passed onto me.

Somewhere around the house are some black Chuck Taylor hightop sneakers I bought on a whim a while back, but they don't get a lot of use. Boots are in the same category as buzzcuts where I'm concerned -- affectations that become comfortable habits.

Slaughter and The Dogs - Where Have All the Bootboys Gone? (from Do It Dog Style, 1978) - Despite its reputation for being a genre rooted in aggression and noise, it's astonishing how many of the early punk bands showed a level of insight and savviness (if not necessarily erudition). X-Ray Spex, Wire, The Buzzcocks, The Clash, even the non-filler Sex Pistols material -- there's a sense of ideals and sophisticated concepts at play in their work that goes against the popular image of punk as music for glue sniffing thugs. You won't find any of that in this track, though, unless you choose to interpret it as a mediation on the "lost" final chapter of A Clockwork Orange. Fun fact: Morrissey was briefly a member of Slaughter and The Dogs while the band was between vocalists.

Alexei Sayle and Radical Posture - Dr. Martens Boots (from the "Oil" episode of The Young Ones, 1982) - I've never owned a pair of Docs. They were too pricey and too typical a part of the punk uniform for me to indulge in. Also, I wasn't really fond their appearance. Maura has a pair of vegan DM's which she can't locate at the moment and complains frequently about their disappearing act.

Government Issue - These Boots Are Made For Walkin' (from Complete History, Vol. 1, 2000) - An inescapable choice of song selection, given the topic of today's post. The only question was which version to post, and where GI's maelstrom of descending riffs is concerned, it was an easily enough answered one.