Fall In Love

       Autumn is the most romantic season. Many will sight spring as the ultimate time of year for love in the air, but not me. Especially since I don’t like the spring. Spring for me is Limbo. It’s too warm to snow anymore (and I’m a snow junkie), but it’s not warm enough to go to the beach. It rains a lot, and mud is omnipresent. And look, I’m not complaining. Nor am I trying to put the kibosh on anybody’s love affair with spring. If you dig that season, more power to you and your daffodils. I’m just not into that time of year. But I digress.
       The romance of Fall in New England starts with the explosion of color that makes my heart sing. Scream, actually. The entire landscape comes alive with a most fiery palette. Autumn means weekend road trips to the mountains with your lover to immerse yourselves in the foliage. It's the first time of year you light a fire, and fire is a symbol of passion, of ignition. At some point, you make love in front of the flames, stoking your own burning heart for the person you’re with. That works for me.
       Fall means All Things Pumpkin. And pumpkins are just the coolest veggies going (even though they're technically a fruit). They’re big, bright, unique looking, and each one seems to have its own personality. I can’t say that about peppers. Or oranges for that matter. What other fruit or vegetable so defines a season? Pumpkins are to autumn what Santa Claus is to Christmas: a mythical symbol that embodies everything that’s magic about a particular time of year. Pumpkin hunting, pumpkin carving, pumpkin tossing, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin pie, pumpkin everything. I can’t get enough of them.
       By October, the holidays are right around the corner, starting with Halloween. And I love any ritual where you get to put on a costume and act weirder than normal. Girls in tight leggings and high boots come out of the preverbial woodwork, and man, is that sexy. The air is cool and crisp, yet, there is a particular loving warmth in it, a palpable comforting spirit.
       Summer is all about heat and sunshine, about spending as much time outside as you possibly can. Thus, summer is all about putting yourself out there, almost to the edge of being outside yourself. And now, fall is the start of a sweet embrace. Of yourself. Of who you are, and of of what you love. Of the people you love. It’s a time of year that encourages us to go within, and to spend as much time inside ourselves as we do in the great outdoors. Fall to me is like a big giant metaphysical hug from the universe that invites us to wrap ourselves around our own spirit, our own lives, and around the people in our life who really matter to us. That’s part of why I love the fall so much.
       That and all the pumpkins.


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

Jupiter & Moon

       This morning, at ten minutes before six, I stepped out of my foyer and instinctively gazed up at the city sky. And there she was. A lone, tiny, slightly yellowed jewel shining brilliantly against a midnight blue canvas. Jupiter. I stared at her like a lover, frozen in a familiar trance. After what felt like an hour but was in actuality just a few minutes; after it felt like every thought I have ever had in my life had somehow just floated through my mind like a series of clouds; after the eternity of this moment gave way to this moment in eternity, I shook my head in stupefied wonder and moved on.
       As I crossed the street, I felt something behind me. A presence. I turned around, and there she was. The moon. Nearly full. Radiating her magic. Another lover in the sky. Once again transfixed, I happily surrendered to her mesmerizing beauty, and gave her all of my attention. Then I suddenly remembered Jupiter. So I turned back to look at her again. And of course, she was still there.  
       The totality of my existence was just the three of us. Three crazy lovers, silently going at it, in this metaphysical bedroom of just one infinite moment.

©2104 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. 

Writing The Inner Beast

    I wrote the following piece a few weeks ago as an exercise during a writing workshop up here at The Omega Institute. The prompt was: “I don’t want to upset you, but…..”. We had fifteen minutes to write something that somehow incorporated that phrase.
    The great thing about the exercise is that you don’t have time to mind-screw your writing. You just roll with what comes out of you; you tap into your flow, and your unique voice comes through loud and clear. You write from a different place than just your head.
    When I read this piece aloud to the class, I really got into it, and became very animated. There was a lot of laughter. But one woman said that I scared her, in a good sort of way, with my fervor and intensity. That’s great news. It’s important that my writing impacts people, that it evokes an emotional response. It’s not up to me what that response is.
    For months, it’s been crystalizing ever more clearly for me that the performer in me aches to read my stuff aloud; to perform it for people. It’s apparent that writing alone will not quell my creative beast of story. The writing must be there as the backbone, but the rest of animal is growing hungry and must be fed. I need to broaden my output media. And I am.     

       One of the linguistic conumdrums of modern communication is when somebody prefaces a conversation with “I don’t want to upset you, but….” . Are you fuckin’ serious? Why on earth would anybody start a sentence like that? They’re asking to be found guilty before they even commit the crime. Our school system should teach you this in third grade English class. Just come out and say it. Let me ask you: Would you rather get stabbed and slowly bleed to death? Or would you rather just get a quick kill shot to head? Exactly.
       I question the motive of somebody who begins a sentence with “I don’t want to upset you, but...”, because it’s such an obviously moronic and inflammatory thing to say. I would wager that upsetting you is in fact precisely what they want to do when they open up with that. But they’re disguising that nefarious intent by proclaiming the exact opposite. It’s linguistic passive-aggressiveness at its best. Then, after they’ve given you the devastating news, and you’re having a nervous breakdown in front of them, they can cling to “I told you I didn’t want to upset you! Don’t do this to me!” That’s beautiful. You’re headed to the psyche ward at Bellvue, and they’re laying a guilt trip on you.
       Or, another trick is to use that phrase to set you up for something that really sucks, but doesn’t suck quite as bad as whatever your mind is going to make up in the four seconds it takes them to spit it out. They fake high and go low. But a shot to the groin, at least for a guy, can be just as nasty, or worse, than a shot to the head. At least with a shot to the head, you might get a cool battle scar out of it that you brandish proudly to the world. A testament to your toughness. To your manhood. A scar on the face may even get you laid, a consolation prize to the devastation your life suffered after hearing “I don’t want to upset you, but…..”. That’s still better, however, than a punch in the nuts, which could actually severely inhibit your ability to get some tail.
       Getting hit in the face is also preferable to getting a shot to the balls because a strike to your face is likely to create blood. And, I don’t know about you gentlemen, but when I see and taste my own blood, it’s like adding nitro to jet fuel. I get jacked up. I get pumped. I get juiced. The primal “Kill Or Be Killed” instinct takes over, and it’s possible I won’t even feel a shot to the face. Not until much later, anyway, when I’m sitting at the bar, downing shots of Jack Daniels, surrounded by adoring females who are admiring my facial gash and cooing me like the warrior I am. I’ll take that scenario over laying in bed alone with a bag of ice on my balls any day, and twice on Sundays.

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