Look down at your feet. 

If you are a dude, and you are wearing sandals, you are hopeless.  Pack up your shit, and move to UNBadassville.  It’s somewhere in the Midwest.  Use Google Maps, you sandal-wearing pussy.

Okay, are all the sandal-wearing nutsacks gone?  Sweet.

Now, if you are looking down at your feet and you are wearing high-tops, you are wearing BADASS SHOES.

And let me be perfectly clear.  I’m not talking about kind-of-high-tops (aka: half-ass-tops).  I am talking about the high-tops that come right up to your shins.

High-tops speak volumes about your badassery.  Badasses who wear high-tops know that at any point during the day, they may be ankle-deep in asses/ass-kicking.  Badasses know that they will need to throw down at any point during the day, whether it’s in a random cage match, a swap meet or a PTA conference.  When a badass swiftly enforces badass justice on some douchebag’s face/colon, how does he keep his ankles from getting covered in blood/feces/lameness?  I’ll tell you how.  HIGH-TOPS*.

High-tops are the only shoe this badass wears.  Walking the dog?  I’m picking up poop and properly disposing of it while wearing my high-tops.  Running a marathon? Rocking the high-tops as I cross the finish line.  Saving cancer-curing kittens from a burning house?  My high-tops give me the ankle support I need to leap that extra 10 feet, and the kittens can proudly hang from my super-thick high-tops shoelaces.

I have high-tops for every occasion.  I even have a pair of “dress high-tops” for when I wear a suit.

When I met my wife, Meggie, she was talking to some idiot who wears sandals.  We were at a bar.  I was smoking a cigarette, donning a sports coat and proudly sporting my high-tops.  As he was telling her something not badass, like “I really like Hoobastank” or “I’m really interested in saving the rain forest,” I stepped in.  Literally.  I actually stepped into his face with my high-tops and then drop-kicked him across the room and into a big pile of AIDS.  It ruled.  Meggie immediately begged me to marry her.  You think that was just me?  Well, it probably was.  But the high-tops helped a lot.

High-tops are for badasses.  Accept no substitutes.

* The high-tops that whiny crotch-face Kanye West wears don’t count.