Brethren

Over….thirty years ago

I found myself a tribe

At a college outside of Philly

That had an Augustinian vibe

Corr Hall, t’was the incubus

A dorm, just for Freshman men

The bonds were formed, tight as fuck

It’s been one wild ride since then

Sophomore year, most of us lived

In Sullivan Third Floor West

Those who didn’t, just came on by

Always giving us their mayhemic best

Our dorm wing, oh baby did it reek

Of beer, of pizza, of pussy, of dope

The Boys Were Back In Town you know

And mama, we pushed the envelope

Third Floor West was a bastion of testosterone

A seething cauldron of Mayhem, Noise, and Madness

I played my drums at 2 AM

Fuck ‘Em if they wanted to rest

We partied, we laughed, we were very naughty boys

We even formed a band

The Albino Skunks, my brainchild

The Best Band In The Land

Skullduggery! Debauchery! Tomfoolery! Outlandishness! 

That was our stock in trade

But we were all so genuine and lovable

Man, we had it made

Mole, Murph, Charlie, Harry, Hawk

Coons, Billy Bud, Mike, Cage, DoucheMan, Prep

Bobby, Timmy, SuperFly, Triple Jay, Andy

Who did I forget?

The next two years, The Skunk House was the epicenter

A Total Dive of ill repute, scandal, and fun

We defaced her walls, nearly burnt her down, 

Billy Bud painted giant murals to the envy of everyone

Today, years later, my life’s sweetest sugar

Is that we still make time for each other

The dance we do

Can not be described

By any other word but “Brother”

In every group 

There has to be

A romantic, a poet, a soul

One who will always say The Unsaid

To help us ROCK AND ROLL

“I Love You KnuckleHeads With Every Fucking Fiber of My Heart.”

     - SuperFly Clint

        March 15, 2018

©2018 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publiahing. All rights reserved.

Jasmine (The Art of Kissing part 3)

I've been with a call girl just once in my life, back when I was 24. It happened the night before one of my best friend's wedding. 

The groom to be and three of his lead trouble makers were hanging at a buddy's house, whooping it up the eve before the big day. Unbeknownst to the soon to be husband, we hired an escort through the yellow pages (this was years before Google). We wanted to get our pal laid by another woman the night before his wedding. 

It was a completely baked idea, which wasn't surprising, because by the time we hatched the plan, we were all completely baked. The three of us knew there was no way the upcoming groom, was gonna go for this. But, there was, at that naive age, a certain powerful sense of perverse male duty; as in "This is what you're supposed to do for your buddy as a 'Goodbye to Freedom' ritual the night before the ball and chain of marriage got impaled to your ankle.". We saw the opportunity for him to be with just one more girl before monogamy as a great gift. Maybe we even felt it to be some sort of Right of Passage into Marriage.

Sound ridiculous? Sure. But again, what the fuck did we know? We were 24 year old dudes. Hormone Raging, Egotistical, Self-Centered, Unenlightened, Pig Headed, Know-It-All-Ocasional-Assholes.

Plus, frankly, none of us liked his bride to be. In fact, we couldn't fuckin' stand her. Neither could any of his other friends, male or female. His family didn't like her either. Nobody could figure out what the hell he saw in her. Many of us had had talks with him, trying to dissuade him from taking this high dive into what he saw as a deep, smooth pool of connubial blissful turquoise water. In actuality, it was clearly a shallow, rocky, turbulent cesspool of sure as shit divorce misery. But nobody could get through to him on that.

Maybe our little posse that night figured getting him laid right before his wedding would be our ultimate inside joke on her; a silent, passive aggressive dagger in her back.

I'm not proud about trying to take prevenge on his soon to be wife. It was immature. Mean. Stupid. Morally Bankrupt. But, we loved our friend, and thought he was making the biggest mistake of his life. "Maybe she'll find out about this and call off the wedding!", we fantasized in our compromised mental condition. Our intent, as misguided as it was, was that we were trying to save his ass. We had all seen, for years, what a disaster the relationship already was. And by the time we called the escort service, we were stoned, pretty hammered, and had plenty of the devil's dandruff up our noses; a combo that leads to less than stellar thinking.

After much anticipation, Miss Jasmine arrives. Beautiful little blonde in her mid-twenties. Our friend, tomorrow's groom, wants nothing to do with this. But she's made the trek, along with her gigantic bodyguard just outside the door, and she's getting paid, no matter what. And if we had to pay her, well, one of us was gonna get our rocks off, damn it. I happen to have the money, and had never been with a call girl. Plus, I was horny, and found this girl very attractive. So upstairs we went.

We were hanging at the house of our friend. I'll call him Biff. Biff's parents were out of town, so us knuckleheads had the run of the place. "Where do I take this girl?", I wondered? Why, the parent's Master Bedroom, of course! Why screw around with a double bed when you can go at it on a king size job? It was a no-brainer, even to me, who wasn't using much of his brain at that point.

Having never been with a call girl, but having been with girls, after we removed our clothes, I went in for a kiss. "No kissing", Jasmine said to me. "What?", I replied, completely startled. "I'm paying you $125 and I can't kiss you?". "Nope. No kissing, sweetie. At least not on the lips or on the face".

This was dumbfounding. I loved to kiss. I had kissed way more than I had been to second or third base, and certainly more than I had been laid. I had far more experience and confidence in the art of kissing than any other physically intimate act. And I was a great kisser. Now, that, my most valuable asset, was being liquidated from my sexual portfolio.

It got worse. I knew that when I'm being sexually intimate with a partner, I have an oral fixation: my mouth has gotta be doing something; it's gotta have something on it or in it; your lips, your tongue, your mouth, your neck, your shoulder, your thighs, your ruby fruit jungle, your feet, a gag. Something. But with the no mouth kissing rule, I had to get resourceful and just go after her neck or someplace else.

After I had my jollies rocked, I asked Jasmine "Why is kissing on the mouth not allowed?". She said "It's too intimate." I didn't know a whole lot about intimacy at 24, so I didn't get what the hell she was talking about. But, although the idea that I could have sex with you but not kiss you because kissing was too intimate didn't make a whole lotta sense to me, it certainly intrigued me. It felt counter-intuitive, even paradoxical. But hell, I had just heard it from a pro, so who was I to argue?

 I was a late bloomer, in many areas, especially sexually. But once I bloomed, I exploded. And if I applied my passion, my intelligence, my intuition, and my insatiable curiosity to a pursuit, I became a thermonuclear bomb of excited knowledge and eventual wisdom. This "Intimacy of Kissing" concept fascinated me. So I wanted to learn more about it. Both through books, and through field research. 

I'll share more of what I've learned about kissing and intimacy in part 4.

©2017 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.

Slut

 About five years ago, I saw a bracelet that had the word "SLUT" cut out of a piece of pink metal, so that the word "SLUT" occupied the negative space of the bracelet itself. And I had to have it. 

Why? Well, immediately, the concept of a heterosexual man wearing a pink metal bracelet that said "SLUT" on it appealed to me. The humor and irony of it was so powerful that buying it was a no brainer. It wasn't compulsive. It wasn't impulsive. It wasn't repulsive. It just made so much absolute sense to me. Just like painting my house bright purple, a color I loved, made such absolute sense to me.

Since I was a boy, I have spent considerable time digging into the depths of myself. And I will continue doing that long as I live. As far back as say eight or nine years old, I spent time within, asking myself questions, trying to answer them, creating an active and probing dialogue inside that could carry itself without anybody else there but me. 

I did this out of necessity, because I was a lonely kid, even though I'm a twin, and because there was something ticking inside of me that encouraged that dialogue; like a voice from within that I couldn't ignore. I knew that. And I knew that early. Thus, I practiced self-awareness and introspection before I had any concept of what the terms meant, before I even knew what I was   doing. Out of the necessity of loneliness, of feeling that I was the only person on the planet going through this and having nobody to talk about it with, I heard the deafening roar of my inner voice.

It was clear to me I was already very different from kids my age. I wanted to have the kind of discussions with my ten year old friends that I routinely had with myself. But I couldn't. Because none of them had a fuckin' clue as to where I was at. And, because I couldn't articulate what was happening inside of me to anybody but me. 

The cultivation of this inner dialogue created its own pros and cons. One of the biggest and most destructive cons is that it put me in my head an awful lot. Even as a kid, I went upstairs all the time. I don't have to tell you the myriad of mental and emotional issues spending too much time in your own mind can create. I don't have to tell myself either, because I've spent the last two months climbing my way out of the dark canyons that too much mental masturbation can cause.

One of the biggest pros is that I got to know myself, got to know what made me tick, at a very young age. I knew I was different. I knew my inner machine worked differently than others. I knew what rocked my world, what set my heart on fire. I can't say I was comfortable with it, because no kid wants to feel so different that they have trouble relating to other kids (I did). In fact, I was so uncomfortable with it that I didn't let it shine until I hit my teens. And when I did, I didn't just come out of my shell, I exploded out of it and left a crater where the old me was. That happened when I was eighteen. 

What does all that have to do with the "SLUT" bracelet? Well, because I was aware that I was different, because I was familiar with this inner dynamic since I was a kid, when I finally embraced it, when I finally owned it, I knew it was real, I knew it was a part of me that I couldn't get rid of, and I really liked it about myself because I was so familiar with it. That gave me the boldness and the confidence I needed to show it to the world, and damn the torpedoes. It gave me the strength to be myself in a world that didn't encourage that. Because I knew I had no choice. I knew this was who I was, so I better get used to it, even if other people couldn't. 

Back then, it wasn't so much a conscious decision as an unconscious one. I've spent considerable effort and life resources embracing myself on a more conscious level, driving it deeper and deeper into myself. That's made it easier to be me, to be a non-conformist and one unconventional MoFo in a culture that really doesn't value that as much as it claims.

It's not lost on me that some people who see me wearing the "SLUT" bracelet, especially if I am shirtless, will draw conclusions about me that are completely inaccurate. I get that what I wear (or what I don't wear) may create certain perceptions about me that are not reflective of who I really am and what I am truly about. I run into this at times. What I have come to understand, especially in light of my recent work, is that, with all due respect to those who have known me and decided to throw me away like yesterday's salad, it's not my problem if you can't reconcile me. It's not my problem if you don't "get me". If someone can not come to terms with all of me, with the vastness of who I am, then that is not something I need to spend any time on. I'm not saying it's anything they need to spend any time on either. But I know it's not a concern I'm going to waste anymore of my precious seconds worrying about.

This is because I'm more OK with me; I've had to learn to be, because I've been aware of it since I was a kid. But anyone can learn to be more accepting, more loving, of themselves, regardless of age. But it takes some desire and some work. 

And when the white pages of my book come out, I'll tell you more about how to do that......

©2017 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.

Cut Offs

       Fashion. At once completely superficial and shallow, and at the same time, a window into something about who we are and how we relate to each other. Fashion is at once a statement of our own humanity and of our own individuality. Its fascinating to me.
       So I’m hanging at one of my favorite local watering holes and start talking to a woman who I’m guessing is about fifteen years or so younger than I am. She notices what I’m wearing, and says to me, “Are those cut off jean shorts?” It seemed like a completely rhetorical question. Part of me wanted to reply in a total wise ass way. “No. They’re actually made of human skin, sewn from the hides of my most recent hostage victims. Like in The Silence of The Lambs…..”. But I refrained from that retort. What’s great about having so many creative voices inside you is that at any one moment you have a tremendous range of options from which to chose. In this moment, I went with something a little closer to home as opposed to a voice somewhere out in the stratosphere of my own imagination. But let me say, I’m grateful for those voices out on my cosmic imaginative fringe.
       Anyway, when she asked the redundantly rhetorically rhetoric query that had drippings of contempt, I said “Yes they are.” There was a pause, as if she was somehow surprised by my response. “Those……(longer pause)…..aren’t in” she said, her voice now laced with contempt. I immediately responded, “In What?”. Again, I think she expected some sort of pause after her probing question, because the rapidity of my retort caught her by surprise, as she stammered a bit and eventually came back with “Ah….in style” This time, she practically sneered when she spoke, and her voice was now completely overdosed with contempt .
       Ah yes. Style. How silly of me. Once again, it didn’t take me long to respond, which again surprised her. I’m not sure if she was used to dealing with men far less intelligent and articulate than myself, or if she expected me to be apologetic, or if she believed her questions about fashion and style so daunting to a man that it would render him tongue tied. No matter, but the pace of our conversation clearly flummoxed her. Without skipping a beat, I said “Who’s style? Yours? Madison Avenue’s? Silicon Valley’s? The World At Large?” Like a deer in a set of ten thousand watt halogen headlights, she gazed back at me without any clue how to keep the conversation moving along. So I didn’t wait for her, and provided something else for her to potentially latch onto.
       “Style comes from within. Style has nothing whatsoever to do with what other people think works. Style has absolutely everything to do with what you think works. With what you feels works. For yourself. You rock it form the inside out. Not the other way around. Can you dig it?”
       Another slight pause. “No. Not at all.”, she said. I then thought of my dad, who would abruptly walk away from a conversation (without so much as a good bye or any excuse whatsoever for his departure) from someone who was boorish. Dad would just vamoose from anyone who talked only about themselves, about how much money they made, who effectively carried on a monologue about how great they were without any interest in what he had to say, without any interest in having a true conversation. This woman didn’t qualify as that, but I could tell this was not going to qualify as stimulating conversation. So I said “Have a nice night”, and took off.
       Sometimes life feels like a pleasant long cruise down a straight highway. Sometimes it feels like an exciting formula one race through a thousand curves. And sometimes it feels like a hit and run accident.


©2104 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.

The Spirit Of My Perverse

       All these years, after reading Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, The Imp of The Perverse as a junior in high school, I’ve incorrectly referred to it as The Spirit of The Perverse. But this makes perfect sense. Because as perverse as Poe may have been, for him perhaps the perverse was just an imp. For me, I can definitely say that it’s a spirit. A monstrous yet playful, spirit; at once frightening and benign; both scary and alluring. An immovable object and an irresistible force.
       In countless interactions and situations throughout my life, at some point, my internal dialogue will go something like this: “Right now, what is the the most absolutely horrific, inappropriate, traumatizing, unforgivable thing I could do that would completely fuck up this moment and instantly ostracize me from the entire human race?”. Sometimes, it’s just a passing thought, let go of as soon as it enters my mind. Other times, it sticks around, and I start playing with it, riffing on it. I fantasize about how it would actually look and feel, and how people might react. I jam on the unspeakable act like a musician jams on his instrument, letting the music, or in this case, the madness, guide him.
       At a wedding, for example, the church full of people gathered to witness the sacred union of two people, I will think about running up to the alter during the ceremony. Then, embracing the bride, her and I start fucking, right on the alter in front of a stunned audience. The real fun begins when I start asking myself a bunch of very relevant questions. Like, how long would it take before we were stopped? What kind of fallout would there be afterwards? Would they be able to continue the ceremony that day, or even ever again? Would the groom still want her after this rather public indiscretion? Would I go to jail? Would I become a tabloid celebrity? Assuming it was consensual, is fucking in church a crime? And if so, what’s the actual charge?
       How about this stroke of demented genius: taking an eight ball of cocaine, a bottle of Percocets, and a fifth of Jack Daniels into Kripalu (one of the country’s most prestigious centers for yoga, meditation, and higher learning), and spending a week there, floating around the halls in a haze of chemically induced euphoria. I wonder, would anyone catch on? Would the highly attuned and conscious beings there see through my charade? Or could I hide it well enough that nobody would notice? If I got bagged, what would be the consequences?
       Funerals are incredibly fertile ground for my perverse spirit. In fact, Spirit Of My Perverse: Rule One is: “the more intense or serious the occasion, the more powerful the spirit, and the more insane and horrific the scenarios imagined become”. Going over to a corpse and trying to get him to dance with me in front of the receiving line would be a winner. As would preparing a speech beforehand and, in the middle of the church services, running up to the podium, uninvited of course, and telling the mourners about the dead’s true hatred for his mother (who’s still alive and in the front row, mind you).
       More times than I could count, I’ve wanted to run up in the middle of a beautiful, heart warming, full-of-adoring-praise eulogy and yell “Bullshit!”, over and over again. Then, the stage mine, I would launch into a diatribe about all the fault’s of the deceased, maybe reminding people that “These character flaws that I’m ranting about make the dead more human, thus endearing him to our hearts even more. So I’m actually doing us all a valuable, albeit unconventional, service. My ramblings actually help us keep his spirit alive all the more. Certainly more than that sappy amalgamation of sentimental and highly embellished word drool coming out of the official eulogizer.”
       For now at least, these perverse thoughts remain in the confines of my mind, and here, for the first time, on the page. Owning and embracing My Spirit of The Perverse, in all its glorious perverseness, has subtly and perhaps paradoxically allowed for a greater capacity for self acceptance. In fact, it’s subtly shifted my relationship with my very own life experience. Maybe all of that will form the basis of a follow up post, entitled “The Spirit Of My Perverse, Part Two:Under The Hood. Welcome To My Hysterical Nightmare”.
       Imagine. All of this from wanting to jump the bride’s bones on the alter…….


©2014 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.