i feel fragile now. i've always felt vulnerable, being a skinny kid with long hair i felt afraid of the bullies. i've felt fragile before, but i felt a reserve strength inside and a certain coyote resilience. i don't feel so resilient now. this feels chronic. it's not just my skin, it's the world. it's not just the world, it's my skin. it's a chronic affliction. i don't know how people live with it. 
mental affliction was a given. i think i was born with and into that. the world affliction, though it's got more brutal, more toxic, which may relate to my pathogenic fix, but the world i was born in was toxic and brutal already. we did have more nature then. more solace. it always felt like this too will pass, and we'll make do til something better comes along, democracy or freedom or something utopian or a lesser evil, a better mask. now i doubt it will pass, it's gotten too toxic, the toxicity has a life of its own, like the tinea fungus that occupies me.
the nature of this thing in me i'm afraid is chronic. the malaise of war for money and mass incarceration, thought control, and government by corporations, by lies- this feels chronic too. i don't want to equate my affliction with the world's, but they are mysteriously related. mysterious and chronic. the mystery of skin. i do feel resilience under my skin. i think maybe this thing, this tinea, is to teach me about deep resilience, the resilience of spiritual patience. did someone laugh? i laugh too.
on the fourth walk i began to feel the stress in my soles again, and the tingling between my toes, and i thought the stress will make another crack, and there i am, my heart sunk. i thought, i can live with it though, but just, if it gets no worse. not like before, i can't walk like the old me, not as relatively lightly, nor free. so i'm still me, and a different me, i'm me and my affliction, and how that will work out is a mystery.