PASSION

I’m on it like a fat kid is on a value-pack-Costco-size box of hostess cakes. I’m all up in there, sweating, grinding out the deed. Failure is not an option. You need to want to succeed more than Trump needs a haircut. The burning passion has to keep you up to at night, scrambling for a pen to jot down a dream-induced thought or idea that needs to be flushed from your head and onto to a scrap of paper on your night stand. I know this has a lingering feeling of a pep-talk that Mickey would give Rocky before he would fight Apollo Creed, because for me, in my eccentric mind this is a fight, except I’m alone in this one.

I have an unfaltering need to be the best at whatever I am doing at the time. OK Psych 101, it’s not perfectionism, what I’m describing is a value which my father instilled in me and it involves integrity and a strong work ethic. If you are taking out the garbage, you should be the best garbage-taker-outer this side of the Mississippi (to spell Mississippi I had to use that sing-songy thing I learned in third grade in order to spell the state with a donkey load of s’s). Integrity, doing the right thing even when no one is watching? There are a multitude of definitions to this integral value. Create your own and live by it, unwaveringly.

There is a creative ninja living inside this 5’11” body and he wants to sneak attack and kick some existential poem’s ass. OK, my metaphors and personification’s are blending, bordering on the highway into crazy town, yes, but that’s OK. Each unique individual plods through this world in their Crocks or Gucci slip-on’s (two very different type of species) and leaves an imprint in the lives of the people around them and sometimes, on rare occasions, on the world as a whole. Like a precious five pound pink diamond, I want to be the latter. Therefore, the question I propose to myself when I set out to write is: How do I want the reader to emotionally react to my words? From this jumping off point, the imagination is gloriously infinite. So Rocky, get back up and fight again!