I don’t mean to run on and on, but the gastrointestinal distress occasioned by my annual salted-peanut blowout during the World Series has led me to investigate what the worst-case scenario might be. Can you die of such a thing, or just wish you could, like a Yankee who lost the game he was ahead by five runs in?

I did fine this time. I had only three pounds of peanuts over four days, rather than the five pounds I was once accustomed to. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. But you never know how long you can keep up that kind of self-abuse. Things happen as you age, without your permission. Things grow on you. Things grow in you. Unauthorized things. And it can sneak up. It’s been at least fifteen years since my gynecologist cheerfully informed me I had “thinning tissues,” which is startling, when everything feels normal from the inside; but on the outside your lady bits look like Homer Simpson’s dad’s face.

Later the thinning tissues are more obvious, even to casual onlookers with no intimate privileges. Spots suddenly appear on your skin that had been cooking up since your teenage years, when you lay in the sun all oiled up like a moron. They’ve been there all along; but the thicker flesh of youth hid them. Your biceps develop draperies. You can hear things flapping when you walk. Sometimes you get a bruise from a stiff breeze.

So, it occurred to me recently, it stands to reason all your issues thin. Including the ones on the inside. And perhaps that nice reliable intestinal lining that has served you so heroically all this time is getting threadbare and shreddy. Maybe something could poke a hole in it. That’s not what you want in your poop chute. Perhaps, I thought, I could buy the little bags for the World Series. Or forgo the peanuts altogether. Unless the Red Sox are in it, of course—I’m not an animal.

They specifically tell you to not eat peanuts for, like, a week before your colonoscopy, so I have to assume they’re hanging out in there causing trouble. Worse, I don’t chew them up very well. I only have two molars that match up, and besides, chewing gets in the way of wolfing. I might as well thread pine cones in series on a string and pull it through the maze.

Well, evidently aging changes your cells in numerous obnoxious ways, which means nothing works as well as it used to. The problem is we are chock full of cells. Damn cells. They can get larger, and less able to divide and multiply, leading to a surplus of cranky old cells, including in the intestinal tract, where your digestive juices motor around with the turn-signal on the whole way.

There’s no avoiding it. I had a gentleman on my mail route who was an extraordinary physical specimen. He was weight-lifting 50 minutes a day into his late nineties, and owned pretty much all the world records for swimmers over eighty. Track and field, too. He could still walk on his hands at age 89. (I am unconscious thirty seconds after being held upside-down.) He finally died at age 104. Some sort of bowel blowout, as I recall. Done in by his own epithelial tissue.

It could happen to me, too. If I’m still around in 2057 and the Red Sox are in the World Series, I’m a goner.