When the temperature gets high enough, standards of personal attire are abandoned. An older man in what is basically a pair of hot pants, children running around in a feral state. Everyone is dressed like they're just dashing out to the laundromat, wearing the only threadbare wifebeater that isn't filthy, some glorified underwear that passes for outerwear only because it's in mango or forest green, and flip flops. How I loathe flip flops. The impudent sound they make, the glorification of the dreadful human foot, that nasty bacteria magnet the toe separator. I abhor the human foot and would be happy never to see the feet of strangers. To be in public means to expose yourself to the possibility of glimpsing that which repulses you. I am minding my own business, trying to maintain my poise while at the bank or the bookstore, and every direction I might look contains the potential for sudden visual offense. One minute I'm thinking of something pleasant (pie, even middling personal success, swift elimination of anyone who ever looked at me crosseyed) and the next I am perceiving with horror the long pinkish prehensile-looking toes of a melanin-free caucasian foot curled over the front edge of a flip flop. Do you know the sight, when the horrible horrible toes curl over the edge? Recoiling as the bile lurches in my throat, I scan the room for something else to look at, anything, that perspiring wall-eyed woman in the halter top who looks like she just fell off her boyfriend's shoulders at a Kid Rock concert, that Travis Bickle manque whose clear aspirations to powderkeg urban rage (those "intense" losers practicing martial arts moves at the bus stop) couldn't get beyond a look of sour defeat. I've asked to switch seats with friends at restaurants so I won't have to look at the sandaled feet of other patrons when I'm trying to eat. Restaurants don't have the long tablecloths anymore. You can't surreptitiously spit something foul into your napkin and hide it in your lap under the tablecloth, you can't nurse a random erection, and you aren't shielded from the repellent sight of human feet. This is not progress.