In Good Company

Hubris. Ego. Machismo. Combine all that with a lot of success, and it can make you feel invincible. It certainly did that for me.

When I returned to Boston from treatment, I felt like a rock star. Hell, in treatment, I was a rock star. Because I rocked it. I got it. I attacked the work; tenaciously; tirelessly, passionately, energetically; honestly; with integrity and courage and a smile on my face. Others looked to me for help, for support, and I was always there for them. I was told that I was an inspiration, a role model, a one of a kind character amongst characters. 

I loved the people I shared my experience, our experience with, in treatment. I loved them with everything I had. And I felt their powerful love for me. I felt a sense of community, of family, of love and support that I had never experienced. I felt powerfully connected to my Spirit Guides, and spoke to them; and heard them speak back. 

On top of all that, I was doing Yoga. Meditation. Working out. Writing. More of all that than I ever had.

I felt the best I ever had in my life. 

As soon as I got back to Boston in early August, it all crashed and burned. I felt like "Hey, I Got This!", and that's when my ego and my hubris and my bullshit lead me to believe I could coast for a while. So I stopped doing all those things that had made me so healthy. I had a clear aftercare plan in place, but I didn't execute it. I was like a Ferrari with no gas.  

I got triggered by some old shit, temporarily forgot everything I had learned, everything I had absorbed, all that I had embodied, and started hitting the bottle. I didn't tell anybody I was having a hard time (there's my male macho "I can do this myself" bullshit), and I soon developed a bad case of the "Fuck Its": so I quit my anti-depresent meds cold turkey (an absolute unquantifiable No-No) and practically had a psychotic break down. 

Put all of that together, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why I went through a full blown relapse.  

Despite all the work I had done, there were a few pieces missing. The biggest piece was that I was in denial about my addiction to alcohol. I admitted that to myself about a month ago, but even after that, it's been a struggle to stay off the juice.

So hello from detox, my third stint in six weeks, my fourth overall (first one was in February). I have no plans on ever being here again. Ever.

I'm going to attack my sobriety as tenaciously, as seriously, with as much energy, passion, and excitement, as I did the work I did on my depression; as I did with my my work on my racing negative thoughts; as I did with my work on my often elusive sense of self love; as I did when I dealt with the traumas of my past. 

When I accepted that I suffered from depression and stopped beating the crap out of myself for having it, I embraced the process of getting better. When I approach my addiction that way, I can not fail. I will not fail. 

My shame around my addiction is gone. My hubris, my ego, my male macho bullshit around this shit, has been shattered. When that happened regarding my depression and my anxiety and my trauma, I hit the ground running and started to heal, immediately. I'm using that as my blue print for recovery from addiction.

I've realized that most of the people who have made the greatest impact on my life, who have touched me the most, have (or had) addiction issues. For example, most of the therapists I had in residential and outpatient treatment are recovering addicts. Those people changed my life. Then there are the artists who have profoundly moved me, who have also changed my life: Steven Tyler. Tommy Lee. Eddie Van Halen. Robert Downey Junior. Stevie Nicks. Tchaikovsky. Ben Affleck. Elton John. James Bond. 

I'm in good fuckin' company.

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

Chemistry (The Art of Kissing part 2)

When I was a teenager, sex scared the crap out of me. Kissing, however, did not scare me at all. It seemed completely natural. No clothes had to be taken off. No blood had to be pumped anywhere special. You just had to move in close enough, and then take that risk. 

The chemistry of kissing another person is like the chemistry of well, chemistry. It works, or it doesn't. When there is romantic, sexual chemistry between you and your lover, there is a magic, a je ne sais quoi; an undefinable, beautiful, almost mystical element. 

Chemistry between two people can be cultivated, but it can't be created out of thin air. There's a reason it's called "Chemistry". 

In the kind of chemistry we learned in high school, at least two elements come together, meeting in a beaker, or a test tube, or some other medium. Some of those elements interact with each other, creating colorful, beautiful, dynamic reactions. Other chemicals don't react with each other at all. They flatline. And there's nothing you do can about that. It’s just the way it is. Or isn’t.

Someday, I’m going to do a video series on kissing, Of course, I’ll need a female partner who’s up for that, and it probably won’t happen until I’m with the woman I marry. But I would really like to do it because, well, it would be really fun. More importantly, I believe I can help people kiss better. Just like I believe I can help people have better sex lives. There are things I have learned, things I know, that may be of servitude to others. 

"Passing It On" feels like a duty of our life wisdom. Our Life Wisdom is an amalgamated gift we learn through powerful experiences, our desire for knowledge and enlightenment, an unquenchable curiosity, and the school of hard knocks. My belief is that we all have some responsibility to pass that on, in the hopes that somebody else may benefit from it. It’s the same way I felt when I lived in The Purple House: “What good is paradise, what good is love, what good is anything, if you don’t share it?”. 

When I kiss a woman, I bring all of Me. Just like I do when I play drums. Just like I do when I’m doing my best at life. When you kiss your lover, bring all of You to it. Don’t take it for granted. You have a special "thang" that no-one else has. So does your lover. If you both Bring It, if you both Bring Your Thang, you get to discover if you have that precious quality of chemistry. 

We can learn something emotional and beautiful from the physics of elemental chemistry. In elemental chemistry, when two elements react, they don’t bring just a piece of themselves; they bring it all. And when they bring it all, and there's a reaction, something new gets created. When sodium reacts with chlorine, for example, it creates something else: salt. By themselves, sodium and chlorine are completely different. But when they react, they manifest a whole new entity.

People do the same thing when they love each other. They create a relationship; they create something new, something special, something that can not exist on its own. It takes a joining. A connection. It takes the union of two separate, unique, one of a kind, creations. 

Think of people like the naturally occurring elements on the periodic table. Except, instead of there being a limited number of unique, naturally occurring elements (92, from Hydrogen to Uranium), the number is unlimited. Because each person born is like a new, unique, element. Each person born adds something new and unique, to the chemistry of people. To the living of life. To this world. To finding others who you beautifully explode with.

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

Hard Head Huge Heart

When I boxed in college, I never got knocked down. In one fight, my nose got broken so badly I looked like a cartoon character. I incurred black eyes, bloody lips, and gashes on my face. I could take a punch. Because, literally, I have a hard fuckin' head.

That's an asset in fighting. Not so much anywhere else. In the figurative sense, I'm capable of having a hard head when I do life. I can be one resistant, stubborn mofo. Not proud of that, but at last coming to terms with it. Particularly around my struggles with substances. 

At the same time, I have a huge heart. When I love you, I love you with all I have. When I love you, I'll take a bullet for you. 

Sometimes, my hard head and huge heart are at odds with one another. My stone headedness comes from a place of fear, whilst my big heart comes from a place of love. The two don't mix well. They don't play well together. 

I'm working on softening both. And strengthening both. At times, I don't have a clue how to do that. Really, my ultimate objective is to change the paradigm. To change the game. To raise my whole life to another level. To approach the whole challenge from someplace else. From a wiser, more enlightened place.

I know I have that in me. I proved it to myself in treatment. I'm proving it to myself every day.

I don't want it to feel like a war, anymore.

I'm doing that one day, one hour, sometimes, one moment, at a time.

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

Drums & Girls

Drums are the inanimate musical objectified manifestation of Girls. Because, how I feel and think about Drums, is pretty much how I feel and think about Girls. 

 Even the word "Girls", which I consciously chose over the word "Women", is beautiful to me. It speaks to an innocence and a purity of beauty that the word "Women" does not have. It has nothing to do with age. It has to do with a very personal and intimate literary and emotional charge. 

Drums and Girls: I love them both. Unconditionally. They speak to my heart. They ignite a passion and a fire and a wanderlust. They are both so fuckin' beautiful; powerful, magnificent creations that capture my imagination. They are both wonderfully complicated, and at the same time, incredibly simple. All you have to do, really, is Love Them With All Your Heart; With All You Have. Simple, but not easy. Just like a lot of life.

Drums and Girls are at once primitive, and of this age. Sexy as fuck. I am at once their equal, their master, and their slave. I walk beside them. I walk in front of them. I walk behind them. What's the fuckin' difference? Because, no matter where I walk, I am devoted to them; to their energy, to what they bring to this world, to what they bring to my life.

At about the same time that Girls became really important to me (around twelve), so did Drums. Drums provided a "Motherly" energy; a feminine, unconditionally loving, nurturing, caring, responsive, powerful sense of belonging; something that I never felt before I started playing. Drums gave me an emotional anchor, an emotional outlet, that saved my ass. That saved my life. 

 I was a pretty awkward adolescent. So I didn't have much play with the opposite sex. But, when I played Drums, I got a response. When I spoke to them, they listened. And they spoke back. I gave to them, and they gave to me. That dialogue changed my life. 

But there was more. It went beyond me and drums. It extended to the world at large. Other people, who heard and who saw me play drums, who heard, who saw, who experienced, my energetic cries of passion and fire and love; those people spoke back to me too. With smiles. With dance. With love. With something I never got from anybody else when I put myself out there. And so, I fell in love with Drums. The same way I fell in love with Girls. How couldn't I?

If you have ever seen me play drums, you know what an emotive maniac I am. I don't so much play the drums as I do make love to them; as I do make love with them. Which goes a long way in explaining the look of joy and ecstasy plastered on my face whenever I play. Especially at a gig with a band. 

As much as I love playing drums for the sake of playing drums, when I do it with a band, with other people, it ramps the whole paradigm up to another quantum level. To a level I can't get to by myself. Ultimately, I connect. 

Drumming with a band is like making love to Girl I'm in love with. 

Yup. Just like it in fact.

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

Coyote Beautiful

Two nights ago, on my way to my first AA meeting in Arizona, I had two pounds of raw flank steak in my hands. Not the usual carry-on baggage for a meeting.

The how and why of carrying said beef as I made my way towards my car is uninteresting. But the bottom line was that I had to get rid of it. Deboning and throwing it down the disposal would be a waste of precious resources. I wanted to give it back to Mother Earth and let Her figure out what to do with it. Because, fuck, let's face it, She's a lot wiser than I am.

At this time, I'm staying at my sister Cheryl's beautiful house in Scottsdale, Arizona. She lives at the foot of some stunning ochre colored mountains, the hues of which you don't see back east. I've been here a half dozen times in the past few years. And, despite her home's immersion in nature, the wildlife I've encountered here has been limited to birds and the occasional reptile. Nature is magical, and I appreciate any and all contact with animals. At the same time, seeing birds and reptiles out here was nothing to write home about.

As I exited her home the other night, however, my eyes immediately caught sight of a beautiful and legendary predator: the Coyote. The first one I had ever seen in all my thousands of hours here in The Grand Canyon State. There she was. Less than one hundred feet from me. She froze when she saw me, as animals do when they are startled, and looked me right in the eyes. And I had raw meat in my hands. This was perfect.

Not the least bit afraid, for I felt an instant impatico, and I knew that Coyote's are not usually aggressive towards humans. This one skirted off within a few seconds after we made eye contact. Positively transfixed by her bewitching presence, even as she bolted off, I watched her, mesmerized, as her splendid form disappeared into the desert.  

I believe in Divine Intervention. I believe in Signs From Nature and From Powers Far Higher Than Myself. My human interpretation of such omens are open to the infinite mechanizations of my own sometimes hyper-active mind. So I won't get into the myriad of that. 

Let's just say I Saw it, I Felt It, I Experienced It, as A Message From Above. I knew I was In The Right Place, At The Right Time.

Then I Did The Next Right Thing. I threw the raw beef into the desert, knowing the coyote would eventually come back and eat it. I gave back to Mother Earth. To Mother Nature. To my new fleeting friend.

As I drove the thirty minutes to my meeting, top down in my rented Camaro SS convertible, playing on a loop, blasted at full-throttle-ear-assaulting volume,"Enter Sandman" (my current Song Of Compete Obsession), I felt a sense of calm, of peace, of connection to Life, that has recently proven somewhat elusive.

I get to my meeting, and I sit down. Within thirty seconds, a man plants himself two seats next to me, with a little dog on a leash. Adorable little fucker. This was obviously not the critter's first meeting. When we all clapped, the dog rose up on his hind legs and literally, clapped his paws with us. When we were quiet during heavy moments, he was docile, subdued, and respectful. The lovable little dude felt the energy of the room and responded accordingly. He was more humane, maybe even more human, than I have been at times.

The dog, "French Fry", and I became fast friends. He made his way over to me, as far as his leash would allow, and I petted, stroked, and rubbed him under his neck, behind his ears, and on his back, for over thirty minutes. I looked him in the eyes and made that special contact between human and animal. My second experience of such that night. I was on the verge of tears the entire meeting. 

A beautiful, sensitive, man's man named Angel, originally from New York City, read from a book and thus spoke quite a bit during the hour. We connected after the meeting, and he's become my temporary sponsor whilst I'm here in Scottsdale. Those of you who know me can connect the dots on that one. Those who don't, read more of what I've written under the category of "Angel" in the Blog Archives section of this website. 

I won't even get into what happened the next day, which was yesterday. Because I am practicing gratitude. I am practicing acceptance. I am practicing no expectations. I am practicing letting go.

Let's just say I have Angels Watching Over Me. Beautiful, Wise, Loving, Gifted, Angels. In all their Wonderous Forms.

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