Bunions at 36

Bunions. You know they're something to do with feet, something in the general vicinity of corns or carbuncles or Morton's Toe, but could you diagnose them if you saw them, or describe the symptoms to a police artist? The word is evocative if vague, not as dire as scabies or shingles but unappealing in a distinctly ludicrous way; it's more like onion than bun, with none of the carefree lilt of Funyuns. "How are your bunions, old man?" one might query a chum for jocularity's sake.

For the record, a bunion — singular — is a red bump on the big toe joint that gradually pushes that toe inward toward the index toe. It's caused by the way you walk and the shoes you wear. When it hurts, it feels something like a mild sprain, though rest and elevation will do it no good; it can also lie quiescent, the redness almost gone, as if nothing at all were amiss. Women get bunions more often than men, a result of wearing fancy shoes a half-step from foot binding in orthopedic philosophy. The men's shoes of today have square, duckbill-like snouts with ample room for six or even seven toes each, though it wasn't always thus. Most people get bunions eventually, like varicose veins and liver spots. Eventually.

When you're 36 and male and your big toe knuckle is a little red and swollen, a bunion probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe the tight shoes your girlfriend made you wear last week, or a stub on a midnight trip to the bathroom, or some manly act of athleticism that has since slipped your mind.

Not that this isn't an age prone to hypochondria: arthritis that turns out to be tendonitis, moles that aren't going anywhere after all, suspected gout situated, ironically, in the same joint that would one day bear the bunion. Such alarmism comes naturally amid verified indignities of age like thinning on the crown when you thought you'd already dodged the male-pattern bullet, chronic back instability and other sundry complaints. You're well past the age Tom Green was when he got nut cancer.

Bunions? What does it mean? A trip to WebMD takes unexpected turns — "A bunionette, or tailor's bunion, develops from a similar process. When the long bone that connects to the toe (metatarsal) bends away from the foot, the little toe bends inward and the joint swells or enlarges." Yes, all very well and good, but what does one do for this latest affliction? Is there some miracle drug to dissolve the bony accretion, or a regimen of stretching and massage to adopt? Again to the online practitioner:

"Nonsurgical treatment includes taking medication to relieve toe pain, wearing shoes that do not hurt your feet (for example, avoiding high heels or narrow shoes), and sometimes using custom shoe inserts (orthotics)." Sensible shoes? Thanks a lot, Mom. And orthotics — Jesus, I still haven't recovered from the heel-seats prescribed to correct my pigeon toes. Oh, the locker room woe ….

You try to look on the positive side: once the big toe has completely crossed its neighbor, you will be entitled to lie at will — in fact, will be bound to do so, unless you negate the toe-cross with an offsetting finger-cross.

Still, thoughts come unbidden: You're well aware you've passed beyond the chosen demographic. Perhaps those AARP mailers are more than just database marketing gone awry. You notice things about yourself, like your belief that the youth of today are too promiscuous, your intolerance of horseplay, a generalized crankiness. You find contemporary humor baffling, and yearn secretly for jokes that aren't buried so deeply in cross-folds of irony, even if they're not all that funny either. You don't recognize any of the bands reviewed in a given issue of the Onion. (Maybe there should be a version of the site skewed to the older reader. It could be called … you guessed it).

But no — it's not time yet to lie down and die! Today's with-it youth culture is all about accepting and affirming individual expression. Why not embrace the bunion, celebrate it, take it in wild new postmodern directions? For starters, give it a new name — how about Toe Knuckle X-treme? Next, plant your disfigured foot squarely in the burgeoning cult of body manipulation: tattoo an anime cat's face on it, drill a hole through the bony knob for a stainless steel barbell and showcase your creation in flip-flops or man-slides.

If "Jackass" and the Jim Rose Circus can spawn a million imitators, why not you? Dare even to dream of immortality — that after your death, your hypertrophied digit might find its way into a glass bell jar in some college of medicine, a specimen of man's ambition to be admired through the ages.

— J. Daniel Janzen (dan at clownyard dot com)

— graphic by D.P. Barsam (barsam@hotpop.com)