I’d like to talk about desire.

It was Wednesday night, last March 19th, at around 7pm or later. I woman approached me; an exotic, gaunt and angular, almost Turkish looking, brunette wearing a lime-green sweater and a black skirt with red flowers. She also had on these big, bold, black boots that clomp against the concrete. They hypnotized me.

There was something on the boots that looked like dinosaur bumps, or perhaps horns, but as I got closer I realized that what I was seeing were 10 little buckled straps up the outside of each boot, hot bondage straps that give the boots additional strength and weight as they bound her leg. They made her look like Xena, warrior queen.

“Great boots,” I said as she approached me and meant it. She said “Thanks” as she rushed past.

It was love at first sight – for her and her boots. I desired her. I wanted to affirm her inclination to wear boots by praising her and them. I also wanted to talk to her, know her, kiss her, invite her into my life, investigate hers, kiss her, love her – all this inspired by the few seconds that I saw her, inspired by her exotic beauty and her exotic boots.

I feel this way several times a day. Yes, I’m a stalker; but a loving, eager and puppy dog-like stalker. I fall in love with the booted women I see walking the streets, entering the malls, going to movies, coming out of dance clubs, rock halls, and taverns at two in the morning. I treasure them in their infinite variety. I love them for being Boot Women, that core of females who like to put their feet into tight shiny leather.

I’m so easily satisfied, in a way. Put a pair of boots on a woman, and I will love her. And I mean really love her. But these women dangle just out of my reach.

I follow their boots with my eyes and don’t care who sees me reveling in the leather, the color, the sound. Yes, I know I am naughty, that I could be charged with reducing them to their footwear, that I am acting as if they are mere human boot racks geared to my taste, that some would accuse me of committing eye rape. But I’m not, really. Rather, I am an emotional wreck, wanting everyone and having none, usually too shy, too respectful to approach them with my eager love, my bizarre sexuality.

In my spare time I stand outside The Future, eyeing the delicious boots in the window. I yearn for the kind of women who would wear those white patent leathers, those stiletto thigh highs; women so open about their boot fetishism.

I am driven to follow booted women down the street, but my desire is not necessarily a happy thing. Rather, it is a searing emotion that tears at me, that compounds my sense of urban isolation, of sidewalk anomie. “Boots are the answer to everything,” says fashion designer Donna Karan. They are also the invitation to desire, a volcanic harvest that makes one feel alive and dead at the same time.