My Nobel Prize for Literature Acceptance Speech

The announcement will happen any minute now and--while, no, I haven't gotten a phone call or anything yet--I am sure I will win this year. I mean, that's the next logical step after all the other awards I've won this year. So, here's the acceptance speech I plan to give:

Friends, honored guests, relatives of the dude on the medal--thank you.

This prize is, as you know, the highest honor a writer can achieve, with the possible exception of being a punchline in "Get Fuzzy." And authors traditionally use their acceptance speeches to advocate for some worthy cause, to make some larger ideological point. This speech will be no exception. I would like to speak to you about the growing epidemic of shoe porn.

Shoe porn? you ask. Yes, shoe porn. Let me explain.

I teach high school. This is no secret; I'm sure that the Nobel committee considered my writings on Milwaukee's voucher program and the finer points of apostrophe abuse--all borne from my experience in the Milwaukee Public Schools--in making this decision. As a high school teacher, I frequently come into contact with high school students. I notice that many of these high school students have a fetish for the shoe porn.

These students carry around shoe porn magazines. They spend all their free time on shoe porn websites. (How this shoe porn makes it past the school district's filtering software, I don't know.) This addiction--for you know that it is as easy to become addicted to pronography as it is to become addicted to gambling or crystal meth--afflicts students of all ages, races, and it affects boys and girls equally. There are a couple of months in the spring when girls look at prom dresses, too, of course, but the shoe porn is everywhere at school.

My students, besides just looking at the shoe porn, also know far more than children their age should know about shoes. They know and debate the finer differences between textures, styles, prices, release dates, and so on. It unnerves me to hear them talk about tongues, about slipping into and out of these shoes of theirs. Sometimes, in what may be the most disturming and reckless behavior I have ever seen among students, children will trade shoes, wearing each others shoes for minutes or even hours at a time.

I cringe in horror at the thought of what might be passed around among their feet.

I cannot offer a solution to the problem of shoe porn; I cannot even offer hope that a solution might be found. All I can do is draw attention to this debilitating epidemic, this growing planter's wart on the heel of society. Better minds than I will have to seek answers. In the meantime, I will continue to use my voice--my Nobel-prize winning voice!--to sound the alarm.

Thank you again for this honor.

There you go. Now, I just sit back and wait for the phone to ring . . .