should be working on the novel but the Story has thrown me a bit of a curveball, if you would– Nick sending me some information about a place where bloggers/writers may be compensated for content (what an idea!) and Jackie staying home with his writer-father to ensure he gets better and back to his ever-frenzied form. Going through these pictures of wine in glass and the vineyard, the tasting room and my notes even on wines I’ve tasted at the winery and elsewhere, I’m clear what my beat is, not just wine but ‘Wine Language”. And buy such I mean the communicative properties of wine, how it speaks and what its intent is, and what we say in response to wine, how it impacts and stamps our memory. Reading again Kerouac’s ‘Atop and Underwood’ piece “[One Sunday Afternoon in July]” I appreciate his sentiment “My eyes were glued on life./And they were full of tears.”, a reaction to a song, music, music associated with memory and Time and Life and our place in It. Kerouac remembered exactly where he was when he heard that song, the exact point in New York. Just as we remember the setting and Time and mood when we sipped a certain bottle, or walked a certain vineyard block. And that’s why I only stayed at that tasting room on the Healdsburg Square for a couple weeks– it wasn’t on a vineyard, they wanted me to recite from some hokey simplified and non-inventive scripts they wrote (at the fourth-grade level); no stimulation, no push, no curiosity to follow. I was dead there. That’s not wine. At the current estate with whom I’m working and writing about, there is only life, only the constant reiteration wine and the pours and the voice and Time and Literature to wine. It’s own story, and one I want to read. Kerouac later writes, toward the middle of the piece: “…I find myself the brethren of many other poets…what is my next move?” My next move, this writer, can only be with wine, this new winery (Arista, Westside Road in Healdsburg). And to what and to where, I don’t know, and I shouldn’t know, not now. The story will take and tell me, the wines and those Pinot Blocks in front of the tasting room will instruct me what to write while syncopatedly encouraging autonomy. Delicious duality in this wine, this wine scribblers life.

I push the ‘Underwood’ MS to the side, open some of JK’s poems, much of which I can’t understand but enjoy. And that’s more than lovely with me… So much to do today and I only want to write, escape into my wine fantasies, of when I have my own room and pouring out of state at some restaurant or hotel, explaining and showing my story and how the Literature and the Wine formed what they see, taste, hear– All five senses arrested, and that has to happen with what I produce.. so picture: The Cabernet chasm; dark, deep, opaque; you smell the chocolate darkness and espresso whirl and the subtext of charcoal and rich thick moist earth; you taste and feel a texture essentiality you never have, heavy and holistic, softly aggressive; and what you hear, your own thoughts and voice and the elatedness of learning a new character, a new reality; new Newness…

(5/26/15)