My First Manic Monday

No, today was not the first time my ears were met with the sounds of that classic 1980s Bangles hit. This will be my first official jump onto the blogosphere's Manic Monday bandwagon. For those who do not know of what I speak, this is simply a weekly theme that is posted and then people are invited to post about said topic in whatever way that word or phrase strikes their fancy. While it doesn't originally stem from her, I learn the theme each week by keeping up with Lizza's blog.

So I'm sitting here on a mildly dreadful day, made so only by the fact that I overslept this morning (thanks Kirby and Zubov for waking-up my lazy arse) and the idea buckling down and working feverishly until dinner time is making my left ear hurt a little (that, or someone's talking about me to such an extreme that my isn't just burning, it's combusting internally and creating a pressure change inside my head—yes, that would be painful indeed). Wishing it were Sunday. "But if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak." Instead of quoting Joss Whedon characters all afternoon, posting about a random word seemed the most logical direction for my life to take at the moment.

“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.” —Henry David Thoreau

How very true. There are stories and plays I started years ago that were never finished and now I find it hard to get them to their respective endings because, as Thoreau said, the iron has cooled.

But I'm not here to write about heat as it relates to writing when there are so many levels of meaning in one small four letter word. Naturally, the first thing I think about when I see the word heat is, well, heat. Warmth. Fire. And that bridges to other things, like life. Passion. Danger.

Life can be very dangerous, even if you're careful. And I do not speak of that kind of mortal danger, where we might fall prey to attack or a falling piano. But danger that stems from heat, from passion. Finding ourselves swept up in an emotional tsunami that rips through us, through those closest to us, and leaves nothing but gutted destruction in its wake. Or maybe, to help with the analogy of heat, I should have used a volcano.

Yes. Beautiful and destructive, it draws us all in, like moths really. We want to see the majesty of this force up close. That heat, that intense, dangerous, beautiful heat... there's nothing quite like it. True passion in its rawest form is something we should be so lucky to experience. And in an instant, it can explode. And then what have you got? After the fires die out. After the ash settles. After the lava cools hard and cold. The heat is gone and you're not doing so hot yourself.

But that passion lingers. A passion for the arts. For living. For cooking. Painting. Writing. Singing. Football. Family. For your job. Your pet. For saving the world. Helping people. For that one person who is your fire. A passion to see your dreams through to fruition.

Where does that come from? Heat. A heat deep inside us all. The core of our beings. It fuels us. We do the things we do for one reason, at the base of all other reasons, because we want it. Yeah, we do things we have to do... and sometimes we're even helpful and unselfish and we do things for others. But something drives us to it. Maybe it's just a want of survival. Doing what you have to in order to make it to the next day. Maybe it's nothing so dramatic. But everyday we make choices. There's something driving that and I'd wager it's a little bit of heat buried deep within us.

And can this heat be misdirected? Could the passion be misled? Sometimes I stop and wonder why I do the things I do or why I've done the things I've done. What, at my core, made me take the path I did? Don't know, really. This year's been... it's been odd. And today I feel like the heat inside is cooling. Sure, it's meant to fuel me, fuel my passion; but I think it's a symbiotic relationship. I need to fuel that heat as much as it fuels me. And I haven't.

It's staggering how much thought one word can produce in my brain. How it can go from a simple noun referring to temperature to referencing my very soul in the span of a blog written in quiet rebellion against the established institution which asks me to sit in on long, boring meetings that cause me to look around and wonder what the frak I'm doing there. Seeing a future filled with meetings and rescheduled meetings and frakkin' meetings about other gorram meetings.

I'd scream. But that would draw unwarranted attention and discussion. And probably a meeting. So I'll sit here and just go quietly mad.

And I'll think of how to recapture the heat of my spirit. The ocean didn't do it. Maybe I should seek out a volcano.