2025-11-13

I don’t remember when it started. The itch, I mean. I remember where, at least: the inside of my left forearm.

I remember, if retrospectively, because it’s a particularly innocuous place to get a rash. I had just been hiking and figured it was poison ivy, I’m not some dumbass. I didn’t really consider, then, how poison ivy would have gotten all the way up on my arm, since it’s not as if I’m a clutz and was falling onto the ground all the time or getting in the dirt. I’m pretty meticulous about that sort of thing. But it’s the most rational assumption when you get those sorts of raised, dry, bumpy patches on your skin and go out in the woods with any amount of regularity. They teach you this sort of thing in Scouts for chrissakes, you can’t fault me for that.

But so it wasn’t poison ivy, you’ll see. I didn’t know that at the time, like I was saying, and so I was just trying to no end to put a bunch of lotion – whatsitcalled, chamomile? – and focused all my will on not scratching it. That’s what I learned in Scouts, remember, that you’re not supposed to scratch it, no matter what. That that would make it work. At first that was the easy part, the not-scratching, becuase the whole raised-dry-skin part was still coming in, but once it got all gross and flaky and inflamed, the itching got fierce. It went from just a plain ol’ itch to all that I could think about, like this huge black mass in my head that ballooned until it popped out of my head, the desire to scratch. I tried all the things I heard on the Internet about not-scratching, about thinking something else, really anything at all, or trying to think about nothing. And so at first I was trying to think about baseball and about how I needed to work on my swing, Coach had said, to make sure I got a spot on the team next year, about how my arm was good and how two weekends ago, or three I don’t remember now, how I caught that sub-runner from Westmoreland out at home from out in left field, and that got me puffed up real good but didn’t really help with the itching. If anything it made things worse, thinking about grass and dirt and all those irritants that in the aggregate make up a baseball field.

And so I sat there and tried to think about nothing. It’s harder than you think, thinking about nothing. Doing nothing. It’s hard because you can just empty your mind, but that doesn’t really do the trick, because when you’re sitting there emptying your mind or just staring at the black screen behind your eyelids, you learn real quick that you’re still doing stuff like that. You’re still looking, or emptying, or something, and it gets really confusing how you’re supposed to stop doing the thing that’s stopping-the-doing, if that makes any sense. This is all probably a bunch of nonsense, but really, go try it yourself. Put this page down and sit there for a second, and try to do nothing. Not like “don’t think about anything” or whatever, which is kinda what you’re doing, but really you’re trying to not even do that either. Like, the thoughts think in a way that terminates themselves.

And so anyways when you’re doing this, you start to just kinda watch the itch sometimes. It’s almost out-of-body to do this, even though it’s really being in your body, if you get what I mean. You’re watching the body do things from the inside, but with so much clarity that you see the whole meta-layer about having a body and having an itch, and whatever the hell “having” means there. I know you probably don’t care about all this, but it’s important, with the itch and all, because I’ll get to why this whole thing go out of hand.