With this move, there’s always something to do, so I come home to an empty house, Alice and Jack at the store and I have to rush this session. I need a session unrushed, which I’ll get on Tuesday, after the final, the 7AM 1A meeting. Heated quiche from the other night in microwave. Soon as I came home I started my snacking, so hungry and barely eating a thing all day. Have to finish the short story I started drafting yesterday– or last night posted. And more winemaking notes for this vintage and my label.. thinking of writing a certain piece, something like a manifesto but not really about how my label will be executed and how I’ll make wine, and how I’ll sell, and everything about the model the business will take. And I’m learning more than I ever expected to from Arista, just in the one and half months of being there, seeing how Ben and Mark interact with guests and ‘list members’ at the even yesterday.
On that ride back up to the pavilion, Ben pulling us on tractor, how I just thought, narrated internally and I wish I could have recorded it somehow damnit but maybe that’s what makes it so rich is that I can’t remember precisely what I mentally wrote but that I knew and know that I took time to Self to merely think, observe and appreciate the moment. The Estate, the Ride, the Road, ME.
Quiche finished.. and the novel, the novel, and how I’ll fund it as I noted earlier with the media and the blogging and videos.. all for the novel. I’ll have this blog be like my day job, if you will, and all else, which is printed, my true focus. This beer tasted incredible, especially after going to the condo and removing mold with Dad, best we could. This new house will be a pristine palace for my family, a safest of safe places. No impurities or clutter or filth– it shall be clean like my prose, and welcoming, something my son and second little Madigan can be quite proud of.
Can’t believe the semester’s over, but I have to get over the nostalgia, bid adieu to the two most forwarding and inventive student groups I’ve had in years. And I keep thinking, thinking about the adjunct role and what to do with it, how I can use it and how it’s entirely my story, my novel, even more than wine is. Wine is merely something that I relatively recently fell in love with. It’s more what I do contrasted to who Mike Madigan truly is: a writer, Literature lover, teacher. And that’s why I write about wine the way I do and why I think my approach to wine is more than merely “marketable” and that this business idea will catalyze and fund my printed projects. Me, in that haircut place today, scribbling like Paradise on the Road, in the back of a truck or in some field somewhere, journey path progression– all! And why stop? Like Michael said to me the other week: “It’s still being written.” His counsel and narrative, like tutelary talk, arrive punctually and with gravitational sagacity.

I’m not sure how much time I have left in this quite house– ha, used to say “condo”– but I breathe, and refuse to get stressed about anything this move, or now just a matter of selling the condo, involves. I told Alice over the phone that we should consider this prepping the condo for sale, and just selling it, like a war. And I know I always note in those emotive curvatures, but I’m quite serious. That goddamn structure, with its mold and its cracks and its bloody surroundings–from the neighbors (but not Ken & Jen) to the neighborhood to busying Yulupa Avenue–needs to be forced from our lives. Done. Departed and divorced, and thematically scorched.
So.. what do you want, Mike? I mean, what do you really want? Enough bullshit. Enough of the goddamn wishlisting. What does this writer want? ‘Well, to write, and live from it, buy some land somewhere, in Central Oregon maybe, Sisters I’m thinking, and take my family there every summer, play and relax and be in Nature and just reflect on life and my children and how lovely it now all finally is, and be with true Personhood.’ But who knows, I can only wish, I guess, but not anymore, no, what am I saying– I will make certain things happen and keep noting in this Comp Book I’ve kept all semester and draw my existence from the view required to be the writer I need be. Like Hem with his residence in the Keys.
I don’t have the luxury of preliminary anything, I realize. Just leap, and act and publish and do– oh now I’m rolling, and I should write Bear Republic a thank-you for this very Racer 5, the one that gave me a thousand rushed words before Ms. Alice and little Kerouac came home. No, no preliminary, this is the actual, the tangible, the pages that will make the remainder of my presence, stage, me in role in character in actuality, in this new ME. No distractions no devices right now I just don’t have time for anything that doesn’t directly involve the page– I watch the footage I shot from the trailer, and I need to be around vineyards, always, and there’s more money in the wine world that can fund my Self-publishing aims and visions, the plateau that all writers want: approval on everything, passage on all projects, and who better to rely on than mySELF? Oh.. and don’t think this entry is parergon to anything! Just like I’m not an adjunct! This sitting is whole, it is coherent and tells its own story, the capture of a rushed adjunct between houses, and between ideas, and between stages, sections, one mundane and the other radically cosmological! Just wait, reader. Just wait…..
Been dying for the keys all day, and here I am, and there’s my mind, out there, wishlisting, and what’s wrong with wishes? But they can be made immediate, not so distant and not so theoretical.

So this novel, this novel, this bloody fucking novel. What about it? What will it tell? The adjunct’s life and what he thinks of, or how he regrets what he chose but he knows what he chose, to be an English Professor, and now thinks ‘oh maybe something else.’ This has to be Bear Republic talking. It has to be–