For nearly two weeks now I’ve been a low-energy shell of my former self.

I don’t bounce out of bed with enthusiasm anymore like I used to do. My days are long and uninspired. There’s a listlessness about me that cannot be overcome with gallons of coffee or dollar store energy drinks.

I can get myself up a mountain or to an emerging crime scene across town, sure enough. I’m not a complete invalid. But I do these things robotically and without any of the high-strung spirit of adventure that used to carry me like a lightning bolt from one place to another.

And I could sit here all day long hypothesizing about the source of this malady: Is it the flu? Another tick-borne illness? A lab-leaked plague even now having its way with my immune system?

But there’s no need. I know exactly what has brought me so low.

It’s the water.

Or the lack of water, as the case may be.

Those of you who have been reading my drivel for a while know that for the past 15 years or so, all of my drinking water has come straight out of the ground at the magical Cooper Spring in Buckfield.

I’ve said so before and I’ll say so again: The water at Cooper Spring is water enhanced by the alchemy of benevolent elves who live in the hollows of nearby trees. What comes out of Cooper Spring, as far as I’m concerned, is a life-sustaining tonic twice as powerful as anything ever put in pill form by Big Pharma.

But as I sit here, drooped over my keyboard and nodding off after every other sentence, there is something different in my water bottle. Because two weeks ago, I made the supreme mistake of heading to Cooper Spring in the middle of the day instead of the middle of the night.

On a Saturday afternoon, this was, and the line of people waiting to fill their jugs and bottles at Cooper Spring was longer than I’d ever seen it. Six cars were pulled to the side of the narrow, snow-choked road and things were moving slowly.

“This is unbearable,” I said, drumming my hands on the steering wheel, already jonesing for a sip of that sparkling Cooper Spring elixir. “Surely it won’t kill us if we get our water somewhere else.”

I know now that it was the Devil himself speaking through me.

Off we went, bouncing up Mt. Mica Road and headed for Woodstock where a roadside spring offers two spigots for faster filling. And it’s fine water that pours out of the Woodstock spring, it really is. It’s cold and clear and does everything that water is supposed to do. It wets your whistle and fills your coffee mug, sure enough.

But it’s not Cooper Spring water. It’s not the fairy-dusted magic potion, enhanced with mysterious minerals from other dimensions that my body had become accustomed to.

And so for two weeks now, I have languished in this god-awful state of torpor, paying the price for my haste and impatience at the roadside in Buckfield.

“Dying,” I’ll croak as I elbow crawl from the bedroom to the kitchen in the morning. “Need Cooper Spring water or will . . . perish.”

I usually pretend to pass out for a few minutes here just for dramatic effect. But I tell you, it’s hardly an act at all. Call me bewildered. Call me a sucker for a placebo effect or call me just plain mad, but I KNOW that I will be restored to my former bliss as soon as I can glug big mouthfuls of that regenerative water from Cooper Spring.

Over a span of seconds, I’ll be transformed — much like the pale, moribund E.T. when he came back from the dead. Much like a shrunken, hollow-faced vampire when he finally finds a neck to bite. Much like Superman after he tricked General Zod into entering the molecular chamber at the Fortress of Solitude.

Or something. I have trouble thinking clearly without Cooper Spring water in my veins. I have trouble doing EVERYTHING when I’m not on the stuff.

If I can’t find time to get my withered soul to Buckfield soon, my friends, this may be my last transmission.

Searching for more LaFlamme? Check out his mini column, “Cherchez LaFlamme,” which runs in both the Auburn Now and Lewiston Now newsletters.

Mark LaFlamme is an award-winning Sun Journal reporter and columnist. He’s covered the nighttime police beat since 1994, which is just grand because he doesn’t like getting out of bed before noon. Mark is the author of eight published novels and rides a dual sport motorcycle everywhere he goes. Unless it’s winter, in which case he just sulks a lot.