Pas de Deux with Shiva

“Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy.” - Salman Rushdie

Furies pursue us...some of us more than others. I've always considered fury as a positive force. Fury, savagery, aggression...properly lensed and directed they can solve a lot of problems. They also happen to be unavoidable by-products of passionate living, so why fight the system right? No runaway reactions allowed though; accelerate it, stimulate it, focus it and burn through obstacles...then shut it down.

Recently that fair-weather supposition has broken down a bit along the lines of SR's missive above. A well-focused fury can start lasing an unexpected, unmeasured source of fuel without warning. Things can go negative fast when that happens, and you might wind up on the warpath ('pure unafraid destruction' is seductive as hell) with a hole burned right through your reason. Dangerous...and maybe irresponsible. No matter what provocation you receive, regardless of how the accelerant gets added, uncontrolled outcomes involving high energy emotional reactions are just as likely to crater you as your object, *and* anything/one close by. So unless you're a misanthropic loner with no one to care about, your beloved proximates are likely going down with you. I've seen it, I've been on the receiving end of it, I recommend against it.

So what to do? Button up and repress?...cowardly, and ultimately deformative (I have one of these lurking at an edge of my life). Ignore it, and hope for the best?...that's magical thinkin', the 'haints and boogies you count on wont save you if/when that goes wrong (dive bars and prisons are full of the folks trippin' this way).

I think the only reasonable choice may be to mix up the metaphor. Maybe stop burning holes through things and instead cowboy up...break it, saddle it, and ride it around the problem.

I'll keep you posted.