Here is one thing you can count on if you’re reading the blog of a rapidly aging blogger. You’re going to read about all the rapid aging. Which is truly startling, even to the reporter. You’re trucking along in life with a sort of steady deterioration that transpires slowly enough you can pretend it isn’t happening, and then WHAM, someone turns off the hormone spigot and everything goes straight to hell. Mostly the cosmetic stuff, but your recognition that you no longer need to be physically desirable lags behind the reality, so you’re unduly disturbed by it. Then there’s an adjustment that happens when you settle in to the new status of being someone no one needs to be attracted to.

So now let’s chat about arthritis, shall we?

Talk about sudden. One day I noticed my index finger was a little sore. It seemed normal enough especially since I got a doozy of a wound there a while back. I had flayed it open on a can lid so thoroughly I could see twenty layers of flesh with little alien teeth gaping back at me between spurts of blood which, by the way, showed no signs of slowing down for several days no matter how tight the bandage. I was pondering whether a person could bleed out through a fingertip at one point. But eventually the little sucker closed up again.

And then, a year or so later, the soreness. Huh, said I. Did my finger just have a flashback? Well no. What it did was swell up in a decidedly bony way and quit being able to bend properly. And it did this over the course of a few weeks. It looks like a snake that ate a small pig. I have glared the heck out of it but it is not easily intimidated.

This is not part of the plan. The plan is to sail smoothly into my hundredth year with a little slow-down but no pain or illness to speak of and to shuffle off my mortal coil, revealing the pink unblemished soul of the eight-year-old I’ve always felt like. That was the plan.

Arthritis was this mystery thing that elderly people have for no good reason. I thought it was just part of the old lady kit, along with the little pocketbook and the hat with a net on it and the rolled-down nylons. It was the old-lady bric-a-brac that they accumulate and the kids will never want it.

Anyway, now I have a big sore knobby knuckle on a finger that was just fine mere weeks ago. And I looked it up. There’s no fixing it. Speaking of plans, I had plans for that finger. I need it to pull weeds with, write with, draw with. I need it to not hit two piano keys at the same time. That finger has more to do than just operate the TV remote. Seems to me some other person, a more sedentary person with no hobbies, shall we say a lesser person in some ways, could have been saddled with my arthritis, and not been much the worse for it.

Well, thought I, maybe my earlier injury had something to do with this new affliction, and this will be as far as it goes. But a few nights ago, I noticed my other index finger was inexplicably sore. In exactly the same way. Especially when I bend it, which I still can. Like, one day it was fine, and the next day it said: I think I’ll whomp me up some more arthritis. Sudden as anything. This is not a good trajectory. If all my fingers start swelling up I’ll have to use tools to mine boogers. It’s not a good look. (I’m told the other thing wasn’t a good look either.)

Okay. The suddenness of all this has got my attention. It was like if all my new hairs exploded out of my chin at once, audibly. But yes, children, I am aware that people can become flat-out elderly overnight. They fall and break their hips. They have a stroke. They get a high fever. They go from being just fine to not fine at all in a heartbeat. It’s too big a loss to comprehend, let alone absorb, all at once. I am a big fat baby writing about my finger. I know that.

But it’s my blog. And I’m the big fat baby with the big fat finger. Deal.