Confessions Of A Topless Jackass

        The other day, I was biking to the beach. It was a sunny day, not particularly hot, probably in the low seventies. Less than a mile from the beach, a truck passed me, and as it did, the passenger stuck his head out of the window. A skinny teenager yelled “Put your fuckin’ shirt on you $@#*%!!”. I knew it was an insult, but I couldn’t make out the last phrase. Being a teenager, his articulation was less than stellar.
        I reacted instinctively by smiling broadly and flipping him the finger. It was a knee jerk reaction, because I was in a great mood, and I could have just as easily ignored him. On another day, at another time, maybe I would have. But that day, in that moment, I didn’t.
        There was a part of me that hoped the truck would stop and the kid would get out. Then I would pull a James Bond move on him by leaping off my bike and taking him down to the ground. Where I would make him eat my bicycle chain.
        The part of me that wanted to throttle the kid is not a very evolved or enlightened part of me, but he does exist. His metaphysical body is fueled by whatever unreleased anger is still inside of me. Some of it going back to when I was a little kid. This part of me is the garbage container for all the shit I’ve ever eaten and haven’t let go of. He’s an eye for an eye kind of guy, and sometimes his voice is loud and he has lots to say. That day, he flared up for a moment and then went away.
        What this incident brought up for me was how, occasionally, when I do something unconventional, express myself, or just simply be me, people have reactions that are less than positive. I’m not unusual or unique in that regards by any means. That happens to everybody. For those of us who are different, it happens more frequently. It goes with the territory.
        Making peace with that reality is a process that I sometimes struggle with. The primitive, neanderthal part of me that wants to settle everything mano a mano, and the inner garbage can of unreleased anger, want to scream at the other person; “What the fuck is wrong with you?! Do you have to actually insult me? Attack my character? Demean my actions? I’m not affecting you in the least. My not wearing a shirt doesn’t impact your life at all. So shut the fuck up.” These parts would love to do that. Or just bash their face in.
        Of course, those parts of me don’t get that, by not wearing a shirt, I am impacting those people who choose to insult me. If I wasn’t, they wouldn’t react like that. But what it’s affecting is something on their insides, not their outsides. And if those being affected don’t know that they are being triggered, if they aren’t self aware or introspective or somewhat enlightened to that process, then they lash out. They make it about me. It’s easy to do that. Much easier than going inside and trying to figure out what the hell is going on in there.
        The not wearing a shirt thing is just one example, but it’s a good one because I don’t like to wear a shirt in the summer. I mean not when I don’t have to. Obviously, for work and when I’m in buildings where going topless would be against policy or simply inappropriate, I wear a shirt. But in my home, or driving around, or whenever I’m outside, the chances are that I will be shirtless. So there’s plenty of opportunity for getting flack. I actually don’t get much. At least not that I know of. But who knows? Maybe more people inaudibly call me a topless jackass than I could possibly fathom.
        I do ask the question why I like to go topless. I’ve gone within, and keep going back, to discover more about myself. This is a good one to look at too. Because going shirtless is something I do frequently, something I like to do, something that some people don’t get but makes perfect sense to me, and it has to do directly with my body, which means it is intimately connected to my heart and mind. So I gain insights into what I think and what I feel by going through my body.
        Part of it is unbridled vanity. No question about that. I only go shirtless if I look the way I want to. If I think I’m too heavy, the shirt stays on. That’s telling me something. And I like how I look without a shirt. There is a part of me that is into looking good and attracting attention to myself. Going shirtless and exposing a lean, muscular torso is one way of doing that.
        But it’s certainly more complicated than that. I work very hard on my body, and it’s not all vanity. I feel so much different about myself, and about my life, when I’m really fit. Like I’m experiencing my life through a different lens. There’s definitely a je ne sais quoi to that part that I haven't figured out.
        When I work out religiously, the endorphins are really cranking every day, which definitely effects my mood. Looking the way I want means that I’ve set a goal and achieved it. Automatically, that sets me up for another goal, an ongoing one, of maintaining what I’ve achieved. That gives me satisfaction the same way the achievement of any goal does. And at the end of each day, if I’ve exercised and eaten right, I feel good about that. If I’ve had an otherwise difficult day, maybe a day where I didn’t get much done, or a day where I beat the shit out of myself, I can go to bed at least feeling that I did something good and positive for myself. And that helps me have better days ahead.
        I’m proud of the body I’ve been able to build, the same way you would be if you built a beautiful house, maybe with your own hands. I try not to be too proud, because I understand the pitfalls of pride. I work just as hard at keeping myself in check as I do keeping myself fit.
        If you designed and actually made your own line of clothing, and it fit you really well, made you look good, and you put lots of work into making it, wouldn’t you wear it all the time? Well that’s how I think about my body. If you wear your own line of kick ass clothing, nobody would fault you for it. I suppose going shirtless is my equivalent of that.
        Maybe because of all of the shame we attach to our bodies, not wearing a shirt just brings up so much stuff for people. I understand that. I used to be a chubby kid. I didn’t like how I looked, and I got lots of teasing from other kids. I know what it’s like to have a very poor self image. Which I’m sure is a major reason why I’m such a fanatic about it today. The scars go deep, and now that I have the ability to control, to a degree, certain aspects of how I look, I’m very driven to do so. It’s helped me heal. We’re not encouraged to love our bodies. Working out is one way of showing love for my body.
        But I’ll admit, it’s not unconditional love. That’s where I stumble. I don’t love my body no matter what. But I also know that there’s a center in me that doesn’t care how I look. My soul doesn’t care what my waistline is. The more I develop that center, the more in touch I get with my own soul, the more unconditionally I’ll be able to love my body. And if I always have this part of me that wants to look good and is willing to drive me to do so, that’s not a bad thing. That will help keep me fit. If I can keep that part in check, it can help me raise my quality of life. Getting and staying physically fit to me is just as important as getting and staying emotionally and mentally fit.
        David Lee Roth once said that every minute you’re up on stage, you’re flipping off everybody who ever tried to stomp on your dream, or told you that you’d never make it, or otherwise attempted to thwart your hopes of success. And let’s face it, there are plenty of people out there like that. People who are unconscious and hurtful and want to see you go down in flames so that they can feel better about themselves. They may be the same type of individual who would find perverse pleasure in insulting somebody or attacking their character because of what they were wearing. Or not wearing.
        Maybe going shirtless is one way of flipping off anybody who ever called me fat, or beat me up because I didn’t look right, or insulted me because I was different, or otherwise shamed me for being myself. Not the most mature attitude, but I'm aware of that. And I think we all need a little “Fuck You” in us. And not wearing a shirt is a pretty harmless way of saying that.

©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a no shirt of Wrongs) Reserved.

Love At Last Sight

        Many people fantasize about love at first sight. Human relationships are so diverse, complex, fascinating, mysterious, and wonderful that I believe virtually anything is possible. I can’t speak from experience about love at first sight. But I can speak from experience about love at last sight.
        Love at last sight is when you look at somebody you already know, maybe intimately, and for the first time feel the true depth of your emotions for them. It may not actually be the last time you look at them, but it could be. Something inside of you pops, and everything that was already in there, but for some reason you couldn’t feel, suddenly becomes available to you. Like an internal flash flood of love, you get swept away by something that you didn’t even know was there a second ago.
        At once beautiful and debilitating, it happened to me. We had gone out for ten months. Spent lots of time together. Went through quite a bit in that short time. I loved her, but I was not in love with her. Or so I thought. When I saw her that night, it was as though I suddenly saw her with new eyes. Actually, what I was doing was looking at her with a new heart. An open heart. In the time it took me to raise my head, cognitively recognize who I was looking at, and acknowledge her presence, my heart opened. I don’t know exactly how. I don’t know exactly why. But I do know it happened. Because I felt it. It was unmistakable. It was unlike anything I had ever felt before.
        It wasn’t so much an emotion as an awareness. A sensation. A deep knowing. A sudden awareness that there was something inside of me that I had forgotten about. I always knew it was in there, but it had hidden from me so effectively, for so long, that it had become a stranger. And for many, many years before it went into hibernation, it hadn’t dared show the scope and magnitude of it’s true presence to me except in short, evocative bursts. Because that was all I would allow.
        That something was my heart. When I say “my heart”, I’m referring to a life spring of positive, powerful energy. My heart represents the best of who I am. It is the center of all my passion for life. For all my hopes and all my dreams. For all my compassion and tenderness and gratitude. My heart is the holding space for that definitive nebulosity that makes me different from anybody else who is alive or who has ever lived. My heart holds all my capability to give and receive love, in all of it’s infinite forms and shapes. My heart is a vital part of myself. My heart is a huge part of who I am. And my heart had been in exile. Until that moment.
        In the flash of an adoring gaze, my heart came out of hiding and made itself known to me for the first time in almost two years. With an intensity that I was completely unprepared for. So I did what I knew how to do. I left.
        Immediately after looking at this woman and experiencing this epiphany, she walked towards me, opened her arms, and invited me to hug and kiss her hello. I remember looking at her doing so, and I remember walking towards her. But I don’t remember hugging her or kissing her. Because just before I did so, I went away. My body was there, I’m sure, doing the hugging and the kissing, but the rest of me had gone. Clint had heft the building. Clint had checked out.
        I disappeared. I had disappeared plenty of times before. It’s a coping mechanism I developed as a kid when things got too emotionally intense for me to handle. I would leave my body and not remember what happened. My memory of the event would have a big hole in it, where I remember something before and after, but not during. I still do it today. It’s involuntary. I don’t consciously choose it or even know I’m doing it. It’s only afterwards upon reflection that I realize it’s happened.
        It happened then. I know why. In the moment that I saw her for the first time with an open heart, I instantly became aware, for the first time, of how much I cared for her, how much I wanted to be with her, and how much I loved her. And I also knew that I wasn’t with her. An explosion of one’s heart is a big enough event in itself. Throwing that, along with the crushing truth that I was no longer with a woman I was in love with, into the emotional mixing bowl just overwhelmed my internal mix master. So I just bolted.
        But whether I was there or not, my heart had exploded open. And the consequences of that moment literally changed my life.
        My heart had been in lock down since my father died. I know myself to be a sensitive, emotional, demonstrative, emotive, outgoing, loving, artistic person. Having my heart shut down is like restricting the oxygen flow to a runner; he can function, but only in a limited capacity. That was me for a year and a half. Functioning, but at a fraction of my self.
        In truth, my heart had been hiding for a lot longer than a year and a half. Throughout my adult life, my heart had been poking itself out here and there. Some periods more than others. But I rarely came from my heart. I was in my head almost all the time. I wasn’t communicating with my heart. I wasn’t integrating how I felt into my life. And integration is essential.
        My mind is a wonderful tool. It’s very analytical and insatiably curious. It sees things in a unique way, and it’s usually very open. But it’s a tool. It’s not me. And like a chain saw that develops mobility and a mind of it’s own, it can wreak havoc if it’s not manned. My heart just wasn’t in my mix enough. I was living in my head. I was trying to do everything with nothing more than my body taking orders from my mind. And there’s a lot of shit in my mind that doesn’t belong there. My mind, just like everybody else’s, has some twisted ideas about who I am and about how my life should be lived.
        My mind is like the world we live in: there’s an amazing amount of great in it and there’s an amazing amount of shit in it as well. Undirected, it can lead itself very much astray. I need to be telling my mind where to go, not my mind telling me where to go. But for the longest time, I wasn’t doing that. I was letting my mind lead me everywhere. Like a puppet on a string, I followed. Like a power crazy general who thinks he knows it all, my mind wants to completely control me, all of me, all of the time. And just like a power crazy general running a country, that doesn’t work too well. The general needs to be an instrument of the state, not the other way around. My mind needs to be an instrument of my self.
        Not digging that role, however, my mind fights constantly to keep control. It’s always trying to run the show, twenty-four-seven, and sometimes it still does. But I have another voice now. A voice that I pay much more attention to. The voice of my heart. The song of my emotions. The power of my feelings. The energetic nothingness that’s responsible for the tears I cry, the laughter I expound, the sadness I no longer hide from, and the boundless child-like joy that I indulge myself in. My heart is the indescribable circle of energy, residing in the center of my chest, that holds the essence of who I really am.
        That energy is incredibly powerful and positively beautiful. I’ve found it again. And I’m integrating it into the very fabric of my life.
        And it all began one otherwise unexceptional evening, just about a year ago. When I looked at a girl. Felt something happen. And never turned back.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a Boston Design Center full of Wrongs) Reserved.

June 12, 2008: Z-Day

        Why “Z-Day”? Because “D-Day” was already taken. An alternative explanation could simply be, paraphrasing a burping, drunken brother Blutarsky from Delta Tau Chi: “Why not!?”
        Actually, I just like the ring of Z-Day. And although the moniker is silly and arbitrary, the day that it denotes is not. Not for me anyway.
        It was a year ago today that I literally felt something inside of me move. A little explosion happening just in the space of my being that rearranged my mind and altered how I felt, about almost everything, in the course of a single moment.
        I didn’t know it in that moment, but my heart had exploded. Shut down and hiding in isolation within the darkness of my pain since my dad had died twenty months before, my heart finally allowed some light to enter the prison that it had walled itself inside of. And that light caused a blast. A big blast.
        Just like in a real explosion, the second before it happens, things look and feel one way. And the moment after it happens, everything is different.
        Inside of me, I could feel that something big had occurred. But I could not fathom how big. Nor could I grasp how drastically it’s consequences would change my life. I just knew I was different. I just knew that my life had somehow changed from what it was just a second before.
        The heart explosion happened so fast and so powerfully that my mind and body immediately went into a kind of shock. I actually felt myself disappear for a minute, just after it happened. I felt a rush sweep over me, a massive wave of feeling crashing against my insides, and then I was gone. I came back a minute later.
        In a flash too bright for the rest of me to see, my heart was now once again alive. My heart could now once again allow itself to feel. My path had just changed. Drastically.
        The catalyst for this explosion that was to alter my life was my heart’s blinding realization that I was madly in love with the woman I was looking at. And I had been for a long time.
        Please join me on my next post for more gut wrenching honesty and all the gory details....


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and five emotional beach fronts of wrongs) Reserved.

SledgeHammerHeart

        I dug up this poem that I wrote a year ago next week. Back then, it was the first truly emotive piece of writing that I had shared with another person in years. I wrote it a few days after my heart exploded, and I sent it to the woman who blew it up.
        When I read it today, many things come up for me. I can recall exactly how I felt a year ago. The intense power of such heartache isn’t there now, but it’s memory shall always remain.
        That’s not a bad thing at all. It helps remind me of how far I’ve come in a year. How much I’ve grown. How much I’ve changed. It helps remind me that today, love is a vibrant, living, breathing, feeling, spirit that pervades all of my life. It reminds me that I really have made a quantum emotional shift. And that shift has allowed me to become so much more of myself.
        This poem represents the beginning of the finest year of writing of my life.


SledgeHammerHeart

why did my heart have to break to be opened up?

was my heart like a geode? a rock that housed a beautiful crystal on the inside. but the only way you could get to the crystal was to break the rock wide open?

i did everything i could to not have my heart broken. and it still happened. so what does that tell me?

maybe that to hide your heart is a waste of time. and energy. and love.

how could she break my heart if there was nothing there to break? she couldn’t have. so there was something there. or i wouldn’t feel this way. i just couldn’t get to it. and i couldn’t let her get to it either.

but she did. and i didn’t even know it. and i spent all that time hiding when i could have been seeking. for something. with her.

why does it take so much pain to be able to feel something that was there all the time?

why does it take a sledge hammer to smash a beautiful soft heart?

because it was a heart disguised as a rock.

you tap on what looks like a rock, what feels like a rock, and nothing appears to be happening. but something is happening. because the rock is really a soft heart. so finally you get tired of tapping and smash it open. and only then does the illusion of the rock disappear.

only then do you see that it’s not a rock at all. it’s not hard and cold. it’s soft and warm.

and it’s splattered all over my life.

and i played just as much a part in splattering my heart as she did. i can’t be mad at her, and i’m not. i can’t be mad at me. and i’m not.

but i am so sad.

sad that i couldn’t remove the illusion of the rock.

and the heart is really who i am.

it’s big and soft and warm and beautiful.

but i just couldn’t let her see that.

and now that’s all i want her to see.

we were both great illusionists. i created the illusion that i didn’t care that much. she created the illusion that things were okay.

i wonder how it would be with no illusions?

she reached my heart.

and she didn’t even know it.

because i didn’t even know it.

©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a Flintstone quarry of Wrongs) Reserved.

Nonny

        My grandmother lived with us for a little while when I was a kid. I wish I could say that, as a child, I loved my grandmother; I wish I could say that I have memories of how she bestowed upon me the archetypal love that a grandparent lavishes upon her grandchild; I wish I could say that she taught me valuable lessons in a way that only a parent of a parent can; I wish I could say that having her live with my mother, father, twin brother and I, was a good experience. But I can’t. Not without lying.
        My grandmother, or Nonny as she was often called, was senile and physically disabled for the majority of my childhood. Or at least, I don’t remember her any other way. She was more than two handfuls for my mother to take care of. Nonny demanded a tremendous amount of my mother’s attention and energy. She would scream a lot at my mother and my father in Italian (she didn’t know any english). She couldn’t dress herself, or move around very well, or go to the bathroom herself, or do much of anything herself, really. She was like a child that way.
        My grandmother was a hugely disruptive element in my household growing up. My mother didn’t have much left, emotionally or mentally, to give me after taking care of her mother. My dad, who worked his ass off, would come home from twelve hour days at the office to an old, senile woman who screamed at him and his wife. An old, senile woman who he was paying to feed and house and clothe and support. An old senile woman who was making his home life very difficult.
        It was a bad situation, for everybody. My grandmother needed professional care from a staff of people. She didn’t belong in a home with young twin boys and a couple in their mid fifties trying to make a life for their family.
        I grew up not liking my grandmother. She was nothing but a horribly disruptive force in an already tense home. She added nothing but mayhem. It wasn’t her fault. She was senile. She couldn’t help it. I understand that now.
        But as a ten year old, I was resentful and angry at her. For taking my mother out of my life so much. For being so mean to my parents. For not knowing who the hell I was. For causing nothing but turmoil in the only home I knew. Truth be told, I was angry at my parents, especially my mother, for allowing this maniac into our home. But you couldn’t get angry as a kid in my house. I was told countless times that I had no right to be angry at my grandmother, or even my parents, for anything. And that’s a real mind fuck for a kid, because some amount of anger towards elders is natural, especially considering the circumstances.
        What I’ve come to realize is that, as disruptive as that situation was, it wasn’t the situation itself that caused the most damage to my relationship with myself. It was how we, as a family, handled it. Or more precisely, how we didn’t handle it.
        We never talked about what was happening, or why. We never talked about how it felt to live under this roof with this very sick, disruptive, screaming, crazy woman. In fact, not only did we not talk about it, I was shamed for feeling the way I felt. Everybody was. It’s how we “dealt” with feelings.
        What this did for me was create the ultimate emotional dead end when it came to how I felt. I wasn’t allowed to express, or even to have, normal feelings, even in response to such extremely abnormal situations. So as a kid, to feel resentment towards your grandmother for screaming at your mother was normal. But then I’m shamed into oblivion just for having those feelings, so I learned not to trust how I felt. And I didn’t learn how to let go of the resentment. I didn’t learn anything about how to deal with how I feel. In fact, I learned to hate having feelings at all, because they created so much shame inside of me. And then, feelings usually created turmoil between me and others if I ever dared express them. Eventually, I developed an attitude of “Fuck that. Just don’t feel. And if you do, fuckin’ hide it.”
        In much the same way dealing with a mentally challenged sibling can either rip families apart or bring them together, my senile grandmother created the same dynamic. If we had been able to talk openly about this as a family; if we could have all been able to express how we felt; if we were allowed to have feelings without attaching truck loads of shame to them, we could have all grown so much from this experience; individually, and in our relationships with each other. The situation sucked, but lots of families deal with much worse. It’s not what happens so much as it is how you deal with it and what you learn in the process. There’s opportunity for personal growth, and for growth in your relationships, at any age, for anybody, especially in such adversity.
        I’ve learned to try and apply that axiom to the rest of my life. Not always with success, but I know that that’s the path of greater enlightenment. It’s an attitude I constantly shoot for.
        My parents did the best they could. They didn’t know any other way. The situation was very difficult, and unfortunately, how they chose to deal with it made it exponentially worse. As an adult, I have a responsibility to myself to unlearn all the bad lessons I learned through the whole ordeal. I’m responsible for it now. There’s no anger towards my parents. Or my grandmother. Just sadness that I never really knew her.
        But there is an incident that still haunts me today. In fact, it’s impossible for me to to even think about it without getting emotional.
        I had this latex gorilla mask. One night, I put it on and peeked around the corner so all my grandmother could see was the mask. It scared her.
        I can still hear my grandmother, the sound of her voice frozen inside of me, as she called out my mother’s name, “Angie”, in a heavy Italian accent, her voice thick with fear. When I think of that moment, if I stay there any more than a few seconds, I burst out crying. Every time. The thought that I could scare my helpless old grandmother like that fills me with a sadness and a guilt that almost no other memory of my life does. It happened almost forty years ago, I was just a kid, and yet it still hurts me to know that I could do such a thing.
        I’ve had dreams about my Nonny since then. In some of those dreams, I apologize to her for what I did. She always forgives me. I guess I need to learn to forgive myself.
        When I’m awake and think of that night and can get past the pain and the tears, I fantasize that’s she still alive, she’s lucid, she knows me, and that she can understand me. Then I imagine a scene with my grandmother that I never had. It goes like this:
        I tell my Nonny how sorry I am for scaring her. I see her smile. She doesn’t say anything. She just smiles and holds out her big, fat, beautiful arms, and wiggles her fingers, motioning me to come towards her. I run to her and jump into her heavenly soft embrace that I never knew as a child. I say to her, sobbing hysterically, “I’m sorry grandma. I love you so much Nonny”. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to, so perfect is her hug. I can literally feel the love coming off of her and wrapping itself around me like a blanket, just like her body does. She keeps smiling, closes her eyes, and hums a lullaby, rocking me back and forth, until I fall asleep. Then she opens her eyes and watches me sleep. My Nonny adores me with loving eyes, and wipes away my tears. I am at peace with all the universe.
        In those moments, I forgive the child who acted out of pain and anger. And all I feel is love. For the boy. For my parents. And for Nonny.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights Reserved.