i am an inveterate people watcher i love walking these crowded city streets and marveling at the abundance and variety of our human being very little catches me off guard but when i saw a jogger sweep past me this evening wearing no shoes i did a double-take these city streets are filthy and the paths are fraught with all sorts of nasty things like bodily fluids and hypodermic syringes so i was wondering why a person would forgo shoes and choose to meet the road with bare skin if i can speculate maybe running with no shoes is a back-to-the-land gesture sort of like the agrarian movements of the previous century where adherents eschew forms of technology to get back to nature but in this case get back to the foot and grip the asphalt and concrete of a contemporary city so the bare foot is more than a gesture of sincerity but a technique to put ones feet on solid ground but really i don't know why he was running sans zapatos perhaps he thought it just looked cool