Honestly, it’s not easy to write exclusively about Aikido. I really don't know what to say sometimes.
What can I possibly contribute to such an impressive corpus of inspirational literature?
Especially after personally speaking with so many brilliant minds, and reading so much of the illuminating work written about this profound art… Really, what can I add?
I'm clearly not a motivational speaker - not “successful” by any stretch of the imagination. Describing myself candidly: I’m a prime example of how certain intelligence agencies sociologically ravaged particular segments of the working class population with drugs and delusions of grandeur.
I can't escape the spectre of my parents’ influence. Long before I started Aikido, I'd already solidified this aspect of my persona.
As ridiculous as it sounds now - in my early 20s I was confidently on my way to becoming a self-destructive celebrity shaman.
My father was an actor. He was never really "famous," but he was on TV pretty regularly—and he was in some big mafia movies. So, growing up, I just always assumed that I was going to be an actor, too.
My parents never married each other - they were young and wild. I was raised in separate homes, a few blocks apart, mostly by grandparents. I wasn’t neglected, spent a lot of time with my father. He often brought me with him to his rehearsals and acting classes.
We all lived in Brooklyn until I was 8 - when I moved to New Jersey with my mother to escape her immediate sphere of bad influence.
My father ultimately made his way to Queens, not far from where I’m writing this now. I’d visit him one weekend every month, most of the summer, winter, and spring vacation. Even when he started a new family, he still always made time for me.
When I was 14 my mother got diagnosed “HIV positive” (a diagnosis I dispute in retrospect) and we subsequently moved down to Florida.
This was 1990.
My grandparents had already moved down there - because that’s what most Italian grandparents do. When my mother got delivered her death sentence, she naturally wanted to be closer to them.
Obviously, this cataclysm shifted my psychological perspective. Before the “diagnosis”, I was a quintessential class clown - voted as such in a landslide by my 8th grade class. My father was on TV. I was living a fat Jersey guinea boyhood dream.
But then moving to Florida - living with the stigma of my mother’s so-called "infectious disease” - suddenly far from my father’s positive encouraging presence - I developed more of a dark, lonely, brooding poetic side to my personality. For instance, I listened to The Doors - a lot.
After my mother died: Now I’m 19 - I start going to open mics and poetry readings and soon I start a band myself. Singing in a band - it was a bit of a suicide mission. I was aiming to die at 27 - like Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison. I wanted that notoriety.
And I was on my way there.
My parents were junkies when I was a young child, and I witnessed my mom almost OD when I was 6 - so I never really could bring myself to do “hard drugs” but I was drinking and I liked pain killers and psychedelics… I wasn't acutely self-destructive - but I was self-destructive.
I felt like I had to famously destroy myself to achieve a satisfactory result from the tumult and sorrow of my young life. I needed to destroy myself and present it as an offering to the public somehow. Nothing else made sense as a conduit for the pain I felt inside. That's pretty shamanic, in a way, right?
A few years in, after reading Henry Miller (don’t ask) - I had an identity crisis in which I quit my band in Florida, moved back to NY, tried writing a novel, went back to acting, and eventually found myself married, living in Chelsea, working as a waiter near Union Square.
One day - on the way to work - I found an world famous Aikido dojo and popped in…
When I discovered Aikido - it gave me a reason to take better care of myself physically because I wanted to become “good at it”.
But I can't attribute my salvation from a destiny of glamorized doom to Aikido alone. In fact, if I'm being vividly honest, what’s saving me from ultimately destroying myself to this day, ironically, is my own vanity.
I'm prone to a “chronic disease” that affects my skin.
I don’t wanna say its name because I'm superstitious like that. I feel like the more I dwell upon it - the more pervasive it becomes in my life. (And, for the record, I don’t accept the pharmaceutical cartel’s nomenclature.)
I can say, right now, knocking on my wood table, that it's not that bad—i.e., I’m not currently using steroid cream—but I'm always living in fear that it’ll get worse and I'll be doomed to a life of physical misery.
Sorry for being dramatic, but that's how I am.
Due to this affliction, I can’t consume any stimulants. This includes coffee, tea, alcohol, sugar, yerba mate, tobacco, etc.
Luckily, I’ve discovered raw cacao along the way - which seems to not affect me as much, but still enough to where I have to constantly remind myself not to overindulge.
I don't eat fried food. I don't eat bread, cake, pizza, pasta, meat, wheat, ice cream, Etc… anything that triggers my “skin issues”.
It’s this affliction, and not any inherent quality of my personality, that’s led me to becoming almost monk-like in my frugality and simplicity.
I never go to restaurants or bars. I make all my own food. Home before 9 o'clock - right after Aikido - I head straight home - eat my salad and my flax crackers, drink my chamomile tea, and go to bed.
This is not my personality.
I was originally destined to be a chubby comedian with addiction issues, but, like I said - my mom got that diagnosis I dispute in retrospect - and after she died - I sought tragic fame. I thought that's who I was - how I was gonna die. I never envisioned having a successful “career” that I’d be able to “retire from”. I always thought I’d just burn out like a comet.
Then when I was around 25 I got a few dry itchy patches on certain inconvenient spots on my body. Not many - but enough to notice - and even though I swore I’d never go to a doctor on account of what happened to my mother…
My grandmother (my father’s mother, one of the rare Italian grandmothers that never moved to Florida) worked at a hospital…
She must’ve thought, like, maybe I’d gotten an STD or something because of the way I confided to her in secret - like - “Grandma, I have an itch and I don't know what it is”
She sent me to her boss, he sent me to a dermatologist, and they told me it was
“psoriasis”.
They showed me a big book with all these pictures of people with scaly patches from head to toe and I flipped out - like - “is that gonna happen to me?”
“Well not necessarily - but you should quit drinking - you should quit smoking”
They gave me some steroid cream which made it go away - so of course, I started drinking, smoking and whatever else again. Eventually it came back.
Since then - for the past quarter of a century - because I don’t want the “side effects of their treatments” - I've struggled constantly with figuring out what I can eat and drink without causing a “flare up”
I think most people underestimate how much influence stimulants have on their productivity. If I was able to simply drink coffee or tea, I’d be at least 35 times more “successful” than I am.
It's really hard for me to engage in tedious tasks without some stimulation as a reward. Back in the day, as long as I had iced coffee - I could put my mind to almost anything.
My chocolate takes some time to kick in - so - even though I eat it as soon as I wake up in the morning, it takes about three hours before my brain is functioning at even a fraction of that frenetic level at which the majority of society functions - that neurotic pulsing. I just can't fully attain mania anymore, because I can't consume stimulants.
You might be wondering how I plan to tie this back to Aikido.
Well, it's funny because Aikido is the one thing that my affliction has made me better at. (Besides the social aspects of not being comfortable travelling to seminars because I’d have to bring all my own food, and not being able to “grab a drink” after class..) Because I eat so healthy - because I can't overstimulate myself - my practice is calm and grounded and I'm able to move in ways that I would definitely not be able to if I continued to drink and smoke and eat all the typical junk food s**t that most people eat.
(I think my mind is pretty healthy too, but a healthy mind does not necessarily make for a successful person. Sometimes a healthy mind thwarts productivity.
I mean, like, I’m sane enough to know that I should probably be living in a permaculture community or something like that. But I have an emotional attachment to New York, and there’s still a part of me that wants to “make it here” as like a pledge to my ancestry or something.)
But I always feel better at the dojo. My most recent class had six people. That's the most it's been in weeks. I was pretty elated. Took breakfalls for the first time in a while. I mean breakfalls from everything - not just koshi nage. I always take breakfalls from koshi nage, obviously, because you have to - but when I'm feeling especially genki I can take breakfalls from anything - from anywhere.
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