Foot Notes (Or: The Agony of the Feet)
An upcoming medical procedure has gotten me thinking a lot — maybe too much —about a certain body part. Plus a new Inconspicuous News Roundup!
Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul
Bodies are strange to begin with, but feet have always struck me as particularly weird appendages. Hands are these intricate, sophisticated tools, but feet seem more primitive, more animalistic, like vestiges from an earlier evolutionary stage. Is the pinkie toe good for anything except stubbing? Do we even need individual toes anymore? Plus feet get afflicted with all sorts of odd ailments: corns, athlete’s foot, plantar warts, plantar fasciitis, neuroma, hammer toes, claw toes, ingrown nails, fungus, toe jam, heel spurs, flat feet, foot odor, the gout.
Happily, my feet (shown above) don’t have any of those problems. But about a dozen years ago they began to develop bunions, meaning that the top joints of my big toes started getting enlarged and knobby, and my big toes started pointing inward. In other words, my weird body parts were getting even weirder. I had become Paul Bunion.
For the first few years, the only consequences of this were that I kept getting holes in the bunion area of my socks, instead of in the heel or toe like everyone else. But by 2021 the bunions had grown so large that I could no longer go ice skating, because skates wide enough to accommodate the front of my feet were too big for the rest of my feet. (Fortunately, my everyday sneakers have been more forgiving.)
About a year after that, the left bunion joint became painful — like, really painful — so I started getting cortisone shots in that joint every four or five months. The shots aren’t exactly pleasant (the first time my podiatrist pointed the syringe at my foot, he said, “Don’t worry, it’s a soundproof room”), but they’ve alleviated the pain. The bunion, however, has kept growing, and I don’t want to keep putting cortisone in my body forever, so tomorrow I’m having surgery to correct the left foot. In medicalspeak, the procedure is called “bone excision and joint alignment, first digit foot.” In layman’s terms, this means my podiatrist will break my foot, remove the knobby outgrowth, reset the bones in a straighter alignment, and secure things with either a screw or a wire (depending, I’m told, on the “quality of the bone”). I’ll be sent home in a protective boot, which I’ll have to wear for at least four weeks.
Surgery is never any fun, but I’ve been finding the prospect of bunion surgery to be a particularly odd mix of harrowing and mortifying. On the one hand, the procedure is somewhat scary (did I mention that they’re going to break my fucking foot?). On the other hand, there’s something about bunions, and even the word “bunions,” that seems inherently farcical, like the punchline to a joke. In fact, before I developed bunions myself, the main thing I knew about bunions was that Bullwinkle had one. The whole situation seems so absurdist that I’ve found myself telling friends, “I’m having bunion surgery — don’t laugh.”
The joint on my right foot doesn’t currently have any pain or discomfort, so there are no immediate plans for surgery on that one. That means my feet will no longer be a matched set, which seems, well, wrong. Feet may be weird, but at least they usually maintain a rough sense of symmetry. If my feet no longer mirror each other, will I lose my balance? Will I fall over? Will my gait become lopsided? I realize none of these things will actually happen (probably), but the idea of mismatched feet still seems like a flaw in the cosmic order, sort of like misaligned manhole cover stripes.
Also: By now I’ve gotten used to having bunions, so how it will feel to suddenly have a normal-looking foot? By conventional aesthetic standards, it’ll be an improvement, but I’m wondering if my post-surgical foot will suddenly look unfamiliar, like it’s someone else’s foot. This got me thinking about a potential body horror movie called Evil’s Afoot, about a guy who has bunion surgery. At first he’s happy that his foot finally fits in a Brannock Device again (product placement!), but then he increasingly feels alienated from his newly de-bunioned foot, and then he hears voices and realizes it’s his surgically repaired foot, which has been traumatized by the surgery and is telling him to seek revenge by murdering his podiatrist, but while committing the murder he accidentally stubs his big toe, breaking it so badly that it looks even worse than it did before the surgery, and then the surprise twist at the end is that the voices were actually coming from his other foot, setting up a sequel.
I realize none of that will actually happen to me (probably). But anyway, these are the sorts of things that have been on my mind lately as I prepare for tomorrow’s surgery. I already have a couple of new IC posts in the hopper for next week and have laid the groundwork for a couple more, so I’m hoping this episode won’t have much of an impact on my publishing schedule. But if things do slow down a bit, well, blame it on the bunion.
Inconspicuous News Roundup
Old cigarette vending machines are increasingly being repurposed to sell art (as shown above). The excellently named trade magazine Vending Times has the details, and you can do a deeper dive at ArtOmat.org.
Being a lieutenant governor is very inconspicuous gig, and yet they seem to have more than their share of scandals.
Here’s a super-specific online shop that sells vintage Japanese rock and roll ads. (From fellow Substacker Audrey Kalman)
Really good article about a particular kind of hair tie being used by college volleyball players. (From Mike Engle)
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Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.
Evil's Afoot -- that title!! ROFLMAO
On a more serious note, best wishes for the procedure!
Good luck on the excision--hope you have good health insurance. I recently had a more minor excision myself (no bones were broken), and was then happy to add "excision" to my vocabulary. And now your own procedure has given me yet another chance use it. Thanks!