changing vectors, emotionally

There are two primary schools of thoughts about how to work with one's own emotions.

The first is, to change course, change course. If you are going down a slippery slope, apply the brakes and reverse course as aggressively as mecessary. That's useful on minor funks. On major ones, you have a problem...they are sometimes pretty intense.

The second one is more for those of us who actually have souls and react to more complex stimuli than hitting one's thumb with a hammer. That is the momentum braking technique. Feel yourself going into a blue phase...don't fight it, get ahead of it. Think of it like rowing so fast that the currents in the river become irrelevent, you are actually moving faster than the flow.

Get out some old pictures of a forgotten time in your life...put on your headphones, flip to the "ARRGH" playlist on iTunes...you know, the one with the songs that once were only "yours" (as in the song that was the background music to a major relationship) or true mood enhancers like "Heart of the Matter" by Don Henley (makes me weep, every time), or "Heart of Gold" by Neil Young (okay, now we're getting there) or even "Secret Garden" by Bruce Springstten..."Kiss from a Rose" by Seal..."Tupelo Honey" by Van Morrison... "Glory Box" by Portishead... "Shy" by Ani DiFranco... okay... enough...

Now, having achieved maximum emotional velocity...I mean, at this point, I would pity a heavily armed Kzinti warrior who walked in and growled at me... I can feel my disengagement from the blues (at a certain temperature, it goes red, emotionally...it's a natural survival mechanism) and then I can write...I write in burst of words...sometimes coherent, sometimes incoherent, sometimes entire villanelles and sonnets and cycles (my recent "Amongst the Castled Rocks" for instance) and suddenly, I have control again and the mood lifts.

Dangerous? Probably...what happens one day when I don't pull out? Hey, it'll make a great epilog to my memoirs.

Until then, I'll depend on what always works.