My friend Shaina lives in New York. Shaina is cool. She makes furniture and sends me screenshots of gross guys who message her on Tinder. We have a good ol time ripping those cheese-eating scumbags to shreds.

Shaina works in some sort of warehouse where she builds things. She wears her Doc Martens to work, and I reckon they get awfully beat up throughout the day. A few weeks ago she sent me a picture of whatever the hell she was working on, some big metal hooks (???), and in the background I saw her derelict Docs! I said, girl, you got to take care of those things! Leather gets dry after a while, but if you keep it clean and supple, and so on, it will last you a very long time. I told Shaina I polished my boots with wonder balsam every two weeks or so. And see, I like doing it. I’ll just be watching a movie or whatever, and I’ll polish the hell out of my boots with that stuff. Afterwards they’re shiny as hell. It’s great.

So with Shaina being a working girl and all that, who doesn’t have much time to think about such things, I went ahead and sent her some wonder balsam. I think maybe she wasn’t fully sold on how well it would work. Though it seems that as of yesterday THE TIDE HAS TURNED:

Dang!! Lookit them things! And look at this:

Yeah b*tch!!! If your friend doesn’t care about the health and beauty of your boots, they’re not your real friend! I’m a big huge honkin idiot jerk loser, though I definitely don’t want my friends walking around with cracking dry-ass boots. You got to keep that shit good and soft.

As it happens, I also received a package in the mail from Shaina yesterday. In the envelope was a green star and a little glass tube with a very long scroll inside of it:

PREVIOUSLY she had sent me a little snake charmer’s basket full of little green stars and a scroll UPON WHICH she had written me a letter. It was cool.

Anyway, YEAH, this is my ode to Shaina. Shaina rules. Take care of your boots, y’all.