Garlic Boy, Guantanamo, and why no one has to punish me. Ever.

[Excerpt taken from Other Previously Anonymous Blog: https://gdomenica13.wordpress.com]

There is no one in the universe (Well, that's a lie. I don't actually presume to know all of the universe's beings and their abilities to influence me) who can reprimand me the way the inside of my head can.

When I was a kid and did something wrong, my parents' punishments for said wrongs were a bit, well, redundant. But by far, the worst punishment they could ever give me was "You think about what you did and we'll discuss this later."

Cue <amount of time parent decided would be appropriate for me to think> of the deepest circle of the hottest hell.

My brain would commence uncontrollably spinning circles of self flagellation of the harshest sort, to the point where even if the transgression wasn't, in reality, that damn bad in the grand scheme of things like murder and torture, I'd emerge from my thinking banishment a shaky, shriveling, soulless thing ready to turn herself in to the international war crimes bureau.

(I'm not entirely sure there is an international war crimes bureau, but if there is, I'd have surely been the worst offender they'd ever seen).

So after years of practice, my capacity for finding, feeling, and compensating for my own perceived faults became a rocket-science-level skill. I could win prizes. I could get a job at Guantanamo. And possibly become manager. But only if my charge was myself.

So, I find it odd (and my Guantanamo alter-ego finds it self-toruture fodder of the highest caliber) that I still have these bursts of judgy-ness aimed silently at certain folk around me for the very sorts of things I tend to super-judgy-ly berate in myself.

A most basic example:

I was in a yoga class. You know, the class where you're supposed to be full of gratitude and love for your fellow yoga practitioners and for whales and for those "less fortunate" than yourself.

Side note: I have a ridiculous sense of smell. It's hound dog caliber. At Guantanamo I could also fill in for the canine assigned to sniff out and find escaped prisoners when he is sent away to be neutered. (These days it's all about versatility, folks). If you were in a room an hour ago, I could wander into said empty room and smell your former presence. It's a rough life. Particularly when walking through Port Authority bus terminal.

So back to yoga class. We were just getting stretched out for the real sweaty part of the yoga class, and it was an aerial yoga class in Manhattan, so we were very closely placed with our swingy orange hammocks.

Partway into the warmup, a latecomer (the only male in the class) shows up. Of course, he approaches the only free hammock, which happens to be two feet away from me. He's also 6'5."

Before he even reaches the hammock, I can smell him. He has a very intense "I drank too much whiskey and ate too much garlic and didn't shower" odor that makes me "UGH" right out loud, which I then cover up by pretending to struggle with my hammock. I do a little deep breathing to try to deal with the smell and let it go, but turns out deep breathing is not something one should do with a hound dog nose two feet away from last night's Mario Batali who ate ALL the garlic.

So he gets in his hammock, and for a while, I don't know, the wind in the very small closed-window room changes direction and I can't smell him anymore. But then we start to swing around a bit.

This is when I began to lose my composure a little. At first I calmed my judgy-ness with a "I'm sure I've smelled like this before. It's a free country. We're all allowed to eat and drink and go to aerial yoga if we want to."

But then, like some insane Chinese garlic torture, the instructor began to swing us around in the hammocks in a very predictable rhythm, which not only caused the full capacity of Garlic Boy's odor to forcefully blow directly into my nostrils, it allowed me to ANTICIPATE it each and every time.

So I started turning my head away. Which normally is not that big of a deal, but when you're tangled up in orange fabric with your left shin to your neck and your right shin flailing around somewhere near your left shoulder blade, turning your head becomes a bit uncomfortable.

This is about when I started envisioning Garlic Boy caught up in all kinds of tragedies. Like all the garlic coming out of his pores, but not like it went in: with big pointy teeth, pooling on the floor beneath his swinging, tall frame (so tall, by the way, that it would slam his pointy garlic foot into my side with similarly stunning predictability) and pouncing on him and removing all his skin.

Or him exiting the studio leaving a stink trail like Linus and tragically meeting with an oncoming errant bus with Mario Batali's face ironically plastered on the side, just because I like to add humor to my "I wish death upon you" mind stories.

In this mind, he became a narcissist of the worst sort. "How can you enter a room like this and expect people to LIVE?" I could picture the halo glowing on top of my head as I congratulated myself for my excellent self-awareness and hygiene. I could feel myself swooping up onto pedestals that smelled of cleanliness and sea air, standing there, looking down on Garlic Boy, shaking my head gently and gracefully as only one with a halo and of superior moral character can do.

Then I started judging all the other swinging people in the room (who happened to be a tribe of Jersey girls who were most definitely not bullied or ridiculed by those on top of the popularity caste in high school fresh out the end of a four-day bachelorette party weekend in the city). Why? Because they didn't seem the LEAST bit bothered by Garlic Boy.

At this stage in the game, we were preparing for savasana. Resting pose. Forgive yourself, forgive others, forgive the whales. In aerial yoga, you do this pose wrapped inside your hammock like a giant orange clothy womb. So, trying to breath out the by-now spiraled out judgy-ness that had caused me to hunch into a decidedly unyogic posture, I climbed into my hammock.

It was at this moment that I realized the error of my judgy hubris. Now encased in my hammock, Garlic Boy's odor was locked out and my own was locked in.

And it was not good.

I mean, it wasn't terrible. It was probably a normal amount of odor brought on by the intensity of lifting your own body weight and suspending yourself in pretzel formations for an hour and a half. But all the judging and all the anger directed at Garlic Boy was made with the ironic assumption that I did not smell at all, and based on my marveling, "HOW CAN YOU NOT SMELL YOURSELF?"

I could not smell myself.

Until I climbed into my own private Guantanamo hammock. With the judging exponentially multiplied and aimed toward myself plus that exquisite sort of guilt that only comes when you end up silently wishing those around you hit by busses for the very same transgression you have made.

So take this instance and imagine it happening in varying greater and lesser degrees several times a day/week/month/hour. And believe me when I say the judging of myself bit lasts WAY longer than the judging of others. And it's far more harsh. And nobody can step between me and myself except myself.

Which I'm working on.

The near-psychotic dichotomy of the smell pedestal and the Guantanamo hammock is oftentimes too large for my brain to handle. So I have to retreat for a while to my bed ensconced in a too-narcissistic-to-be-around-people pillow fort and watch Magnum PI and Gilmore Girls reruns feeling sorry for myself. Then yelling at myself for feeling sorry for myself. Until the feeling sorry for myself begins to feel more narcissistic than the thing I did that got me into my pillow fort to begin with and I have to get out of bed in order to quiet the shame.

So, bottom line, if I ever do anything that you find unacceptable, know this: I am aware of it. And nothing you could ever do or say (though please feel free to do or say it because it would be far more humane) could ever be as bad as Guantanamo hammock.

*I apologize to any reader who might possibly have a personal connection to Guantanamo or Mario Batali that would make my flippant and casual use of said topics offensive. It wasn't meant that way. :Climbs into hammock: