Wednesday 12 October 2016

Which Toe Are You?

Have you ever thought about which toe you would be? I mean if you were a toe.

I'd hate to be the baby toe, although I feel like one sometimes.

What a miserable existence the baby toe has.

Look at the thing. It's as if the foot had five kids and the fifth one suffered some kind of genetic mutation.

Big Toe: "Him? Oh, he's not our brother. He's a half cousin, born in the washroom of a nuclear power plant. Good banjo player."

If I were the baby toe I would never go outside. It looks like the crusty end of a loaf of bread. The slice we always throw out.

It's the circus freak. The humpback toe. Quasimotoe.

Exactly what is its function? It's always the toe I stub on the couch foot. Six months of the year it looks like a walking blood sausage. Or an obese mosquitoe that sucked up an entire grape slurpee. I wish it would just die and fall off.

We treat the baby toe horribly. It's an afterthought. An undertoe.

Think about when you're trying on new shoes. We wiggle the big toe and maybe the next two toes to see if the shoe fits. The baby toe isn't involved in that decision at all. Completely left out. No one wants the baby toe's opinion on footwear, even though it affects his life. The baby toe is constantly marginalized. Forgotten.

Same when you test cold water just before a swim. You stick your big toe in, don't you? Who cares if the baby toe is shivering away. If it put up a fuss, you would ignore it, wouldn't you.

A sad existence, indeed.

And what the hell is that growing out of the baby toe? Is that a toenail? I don't think so. It's either the ugly talon of an extinct reptile when it grows long or a cankerous sewer lid when it's short.

I'm not saying the other toes are long stem roses, but the baby toe in comparison looks like a rotting ginger root.

The baby toe will never really fit in.

Yes, some days I feel like the baby toe.