I Found the Freakiest Socks on the Internet
Plus secondhand summer sandals under $50 & kitschy '80s bags that need to be resurrected
There’s a plastic garbage bag stuck in the tree outside my window. It flew by and tangled in the branches a few months ago, but it feels like I’ve never known a time when it wasn’t staring right at me.
I thought the city might fish it out. I thought it might blow loose one day in a storm. I thought surely by now my street’s Liz Lemon would appear and take matters into her own hands.
But then the April leaves grew in, and they thickened when summer arrived, and now the bag must be melting in this heat, chemically fusing to the tree’s helpless trunk.
Of course, it could fall tomorrow. Maybe a new branch will sprout and grow tiny little dime bags next spring. Or perhaps it will stay there forever as we die around it, outlasting me and you and telling its grandchildren of the woman in the apartment across the way who prayed for its demise.
In the meantime, I’m writing to you from a chair across the room so I face the other window.
Today’s letter:
Freaky socks that out-freak all other freaky socks (that could also revolutionize ballet flat-wearing…)
The random ass brand behind a friend’s perfect summer sandals (all under $50 secondhand !!)
Kitschy ‘80s bags in need of a resurrection (& all the ones on my watchlist)
vintage treasures and juicy chatter for paid subs below
Like all insane things in 2026, these were first introduced to me via Instagram ad.
I’m not sure how they landed in my story feed — parked in that liminal ad space between a pregnancy announcement and sixteen videos of a concert you don’t care about — but I have to give props to the algorithm for targeting me specifically. It’s not every day you come across socks so strange you at first wonder if they’re AI. That’s something special!
I swiped up, obviously, needing answers to the million questions tornado-ing around my brain: Wouldn’t this detail be too bulky to fit in a shoe? What was the point of such a silhouette? Who would wear these? And why?