April, l, 2025 — 4:03a.m

Awake since 2:00, skin agitated, headache.  Skin riddled, tortured with stinging, itching, burning, whole torso like cobwebby nets of nerve fibers, thinner than a human hair, conducting the sparks of pain, itch, sting, scald.

                  There may be happening a different sort of death — emotional parishing, wherein awareness is of the terrible that terrible makes; wherein the pupils of the eyes grow into blackest black dinner plates in the face; whereby flabberghastation and gobsmackery are not even expressive enough to describe the pitch and rake of gouging disturbance of one kind or another.

                  This trappery is crammed with the realization that there are no doors or windows out of which to escape the isness of the situation and comeuppance.  It just is.  It is.  For me and you and the whole world.

                  How can the human mind, full of intent, full of ideas, creativity, will power, excitement, full of intelligence — in whatever measure — conceive of and plunge into the fatal abyss of emotional peril.

                  The oil lamp is the soft light by which I’m writing.  It doesn’t extinguish the way this blackest morning will, with only me being awake to hear no morning dove outside this bedroom window.  Yet my fountain pen ran out of ink on the previous page of this journal #75 that I am filling with more of myself than any photograph can say about me.  These marks on paper tell my story more than any object I’ve owned, more than the aged clothes, dusty on hangers, more than anyone knowing me can tell.

                  Yet this story of me is nothing new or special.  It can even sound like my Mother’s written story of her life.  And I’ve savored reading and identifying with her writings she left behind. 

                  What is anyone’s story but a reveal of the human condition in a galaxy of variables, all with a common denominator — energy.  It’s all energy.  Positive and negative energy. Energy and how each one of us creates more or less of it, how we use or save it.  The energy bar indicator on the gas gauge of my own life is feeling as though I am at the lower register towards the E.

                  These sleepless three or four hour nights that haunt my physical wellness or comfort, taking it away in the form of stinging, itching, scorching skin….they flirt with pushing me towards despair, those four hours only.  It feels like I’m floating in a tank of warm water that can turn incinerating, water filled with hundreds of minnows that are covering the surface of my skin like barnacles, nibbling at me by sting, itch, scorch and bite; and no thing known to man can say what is happening or have any remedy to stop the frenzy.  It’s physical peril that creates emotional peril.

                  I would distract myself with thoughts of, or reading about, the Hurt Locker this whole world is in, but that is a colossal emotional peril vastly more painful than the fire burning my skin alive.  That would be trying to douse my flame by seeing that all the forests in the world are ablaze, are burning down.  Nowhere to hide.

                  So I’ll take my warm water tank of sting, itch and scald, and be grateful I’m not standing among the mighty majestic sequoia trees, orange-red with the fierceness of that hot transformative energy.  It hurts. The world is hurting. And yet I’m grateful.  The slap-kiss of life is pain and gratitude in the same bite.

4/1/2025 ~~ djl entering year #5 of Long-COVID