Berkeley October

I remember

I remember

I remember

There was magic in the moment

of October

There were whispers

of the members

of the people I remember

In the Dreaming of the moment

I remember.

In the waking in

the morning

were the words

that I recall

All the magic of the memories

of the magical October

In the Berkeley of

My memory

The crispness of the air

I remember 

I remember

I was there

Not the people

Not the street names

But

The music and the magic

and the fact that

I was there

I remember

How the feeling

Stunned me

I was free

How the memories

Of Glendale

and the family

Seemed a dreamtime

Like a memory

Someone else

Had told me

and the reality was

The smell in the air

The crispness of the frost

and the faint

memory of tear gas

and the faint

Memory of running

was the memory

I remembered

On that Berkeley morning.

Health Turns and New Issues

For about a year now I have been experiencing a strange outbreak very few weeks. It starts out as bumps on my forearms, slightly reddish like a bug bite, but they appear without the bugs. The welts grow and develop little blisters on the end, the blisters pop, the thing sort of opens up and I get this nasty thick volcano which finds a nearby welt to link with and they grow until I have a massive patch of red, weeping, burning, itching skin. It develops on my forearms, torso, legs, neck and scalp at various times and to various degrees. They thought contact dermatitis, poison ivy, flea bites, etc, but the latest biopsy showed changes in the cells, the structures and the description was tagged something like "Possible Well's Syndrome" so I looked that up.

wow. The description was identical to my experience right down to the color of the skin in the middle of those big plaques, a sick green surrounded by bright red edges. Anti-histamines don't work, steroid creams don't work, antibiotics don't work... only oral Prednisone and that shit stops the growing sores overnight and by the second day the whole thing is a slightly different color than before the outbreak but no scars, no itching. NO idea what triggers it, what causes it, how it works or why only prednisone stops it. The good news is that most people seem to drift out of it over time, although that "time" might be decades. My personal observation is that when I am stressed these days rather than trigger a migraine the stress seems to trigger an outbreak of this skin problem. Each outbreak came at a time when I was stressed from lack of sleep, chronic pain and trying to accomplish something important, like run a multi-hundred person medieval reenactment event in the middle of July.
My thought is more meditation, more artwork and less watching the news. Our glorious leader is going to destroy the government, take us to war, whatever he has to to avoid going to prison for tax fraud, money laundering, perjury etc etc. Just ignore it... plan the garden, work in clay, think about how nice that power hammer and forge are going to be... maybe I can avoid a new outbreak of "exploding skin" if I stay calm and creative.