A Big Daddy IPA as the night’s cap, knowing Week 9 tomorrow initiates, and I can’t hold myself much longer till the term’s close comes. More new ideas with my entrepreneurial urges and new tendencies– tonight I’m here in my home office much pretending I’m in the Healdsburg office, eventual, looking out the window typing my new book and realizing I’m here, there, here, where I need to be to provide from my pages to my family– and I have only wine and its world, and its industry I once hated but now embrace as I’ve made it my own to thank. This is an interesting time for the Beat writer, how he sees everything and how he knows he’s on the path to winemaker, his own small label– the Merlot and the SB, backwards and forwards, listening to Hutcherson and Monk, starting out my window. Time for lunch so I go to ‘the Goat’ to get one of those sandwiches they do, if they have any left or just get another coffee and write for an hour there in my Comp Book then walk back to office to type.
Healdsburg is my Sonoma Paris. I found that in my character while walking down that wide alley to Center Street (I think) to Bravas, to have a beer after another day in the Sanglier tasting Room.
10:02. I know I should be readying for bed but my thinking’s in the know, knowing it has me and all my functionality. Not going to state here how I hope I wake tomorrow in enough time to write at 5AM but I just did so I know it’s jinxed, hexed from a devilish hymn– if only if only, what is me with my travel fantasies, from here to Chicago like my winemaker friend David (Napa), traveling to Chicago, then Sanglier Scott headed to Florida tomorrow morning, quite early, headed to Florida for some wine dinners and pourings and sales missions. Why am I not doing that? A better question: why am I waiting? Why don’t I just make that be the currency? Indeed. So I intensify everything to a stunning degree and BPM. Music again, everything, and nothing too rehearsed or thought-out or edited.
I should consider food more, what I eat and where I eat and turn it, every meal, into content, and I could blend this, yes a pun, with my new fitness and workout efforts; tracking what I allow into my character’s circuitry and how I allow everything to be more balanced, if that makes any sense and I’m not sure it does. Should ready for bed, this writer, and write letters to Dav, and other friends that claim they write– but why. None of them can keep up with me. Even Paula, an old friend, expressed in a message today that she wished she could “move as quick” as me with vocables, images and expressions. She’s giving me far too much laud, but even still it feels planetary being so acknowledged a writer, a Beat. Bed nears, and my patience with the semester is queered. But what can I do but behave, be a good adjunct and do my job. Till I’m making my wine, that is.
Alice goes upstairs, I say goodnight and tell here I’l soon be up but I don’t know if that’s true as I’m in a certain literary film tonight with my recall of day and my wined dreams, and last night sipping the Devil Proof with Mom and Dad, then the Lancaster ’11. Wine is every turn and cliff in my story and all skies, rise and tries.
Books all around me, a picture of Jack on the day he was born, in the hospital being held by Alice’s mother– And I know, think, appreciate and wonder at, “3 years ago.. no, more…” How? Time with its evil intent, making us all age and move on.. Grandma telling me before she died, “It’s YOUR life. You have YOUR choice.” Echo, echo… And I have to act if I’m to see the world and write about it, taste wines in Italy and France, return to my Paris.
And I find myself being distracted by life. By messages and moments, the papers I have to grade, this empty IPA bottle left, the little horizontal slices of the street I can barely view through the blinds– the fan in Jackie’s room I can hear from my chair here, that picture again of Jack on top of my Fall ’15 Comp Book (the book I’m supposed to be writing over this semester before my daughter arrives but I’ve been very much slippin’, to use Godfather talk). I’m a mess this evening, frankly, but one beautiful, one confident, not caring about what happens in the morrow hours as I know what will happen. I’ll wake whenever, have of course the poet’s coffee, the write a bit, ready Jack for school take him to school then come back and ready the papers for passback. Then.. write, on this blog and in the book, finish the poems gathering.. be more and more a writer.
The quiet of this home office, making me think I’m in a hotel room while on the Road on some book tour, having to lecture tomorrow about wine or writing or writing about wine but I don’t care I pour myself another glass and write in the Comp Book, notes, not full sentences but singular words, thoughts, expressions and impulses. I’ll go to bed thinking of my lecture, what I’ll say and the next city I’ll visit. I’ll talk about words and there expansive qualities with wine, and how wine is a story, it IS literature, telling us something about its creator and what we’re to do after experiencing it, like after reading a text.. the author wants us to do what? Nearly where I want to be, actuality and paginatedly. Still hear Jack’s room’s fan, and Alice upstairs, slight sniffle. Life moves far too quick, and I keep thinking of my babies one day reading this in college, or something I write, wrote, about drinking wine and the life and voice, narrative I find in it.
And then what–