Cleaning up gray mess around text?

[HavingTooMuchFun]

I've got a whole document that looks like this; the text is faded, and there's this pale gray… CLOUD... around it. Anything I do to try to fade or remove the cloud makes the text worse; the light areas of text are just too close to the color of the cloud. Darkening the text also darkens the cloud for the same reason. There's got to be a way, though, right…?