this evening. Killed the Pinot I opened last night but I’m nearing the point of excess exhaustion from the day, asking myself where I’m going in my “career” and do I have one, and what do I write next and do I want to write about fucking tour companies and pet-friendly hotels in Napa, and “What are the best [or ‘prettiest’] wineries in Sonoma?” Is that what I’m setting to write about and is that who I am, one who just types as I’m told to describe something in some marketable way so that I’m “published” on some website? I’m most certainly in a mood this evening as I’ve too much cared, most of my life, being told that “discretion is the better part of valor”, which of course I should all so much digest as I’m living in a house I can’t afford, so every penny profoundly counts, yeah? I’m adopting the mentality of Plath in all her poems, her journal entries, tonight I feel flat and defamed and plain– I don’t want to have to be a certain kind of writer, and I won’t.. her collection to my left.. “The black ducks dive…stones are nothing of home/To that spumiest dove.” And I’m in a certain ocean, one that wants to hold me under and I do fight but as a writer I’m always in opposition’s mechanization– the industry and the teaching and what “profession” I choose, by this age I should have some response but the only constancy is the writing– wish I had some coffee now, stay up all night and write and log the day, each specific and what each character said– went again to aPhD program site, haven’t done that in a while, and what of the winemaking– I don’t know, what of it– look at my sister, one passionate and more of true wine knowledge than anyone I’ve ever known or what to know and she’s told what to say– watching some of her videos and interviews the other night nearly made the writer, her brother, sick, sad, seismically incensed. I must tonight adjudicate my truest and most honest and growled of determined paths.. so.. it is.. of course writing but I can always write.. so what else… teaching? The Adjunct War? Again? Part of the writer renders, “Sleep on it.” But the writer refuses, I think of my wife and how she refused to do anything but teach and then I come home and see my son and his face in the bath, turning around and smiling at me, his father, the one upon which he confides and calculates, and I go to the drawing board again.. the lectures and the Summer term coming up, and the teaching blog, the one to which I haven’t contributed in weeks– don’t kill that blog, I tell myself.. I’m seeing tonight, I’m seeing, as Emerson said, “The poet is the sayer, the namer…” And with such, and if you have the conviction and sight I do tonight, we are all poets! We all name our notes and path, and the negative staplers can’t adhere us to their soilings! I’m sovereign, and am radically aware of and radicalized IN my centre!

To Plath’s entries, I find her words: “…to make my own voice, my own vision, that’s another matter…” I feel that I, more or less, have a voice. I certain have a vision, that sight of where I’d like to be and where and what I see myself– that travel and the writing in those hotel rooms where others would think ‘oh he’s a writer on the road away from the family constraints, he’s probably cutting loose and having that free ball!‘ When they don’t know, the writer’s in his hotel room, writing, more than caffeinated, sober as the archbishop, and counting his words and looking out the window wondering where he’ll be next, and when he’ll get to see his wife and children again, where he’ll be reading, what that next airplane meal will be like; will the next lecture go as well and seamlessly as the last? Plath so much writes about work and dreams and career possibilities, the career.. what we’re expected to have by a certain age and it should be something unique to us, no? Something you’re proud of, yes? I have to write a lecture for the first day of Summer Term, one that will propel a profound pedagogical shockwave through the campus, the city, all academic culture; so the students know their truest of rights! That they can think for themselves and write differently than they have been pressured, past. Tonight I;m full of sight, this poet, this prose-ist– the artist abounds from my circuitry and molecules and pores, thoughts and pages and what can someone in the wine industry, that pithy minimizing micro-”industry” do to me, a writer, a freethinking dire diarist? Mom always tells me to mind what I write and post, but why? What has caution and template responsibility gifted me to this, thus? Why not take a risk now, rightly, at my old age? Truly, what do I have to lose? And why did I lose sight of my studies, this term, toward the end? Observation, the study of what writers like Plath valued and how it contributed to their Creative Morality– “And if I have learned nothing else, it is to listen and to love: everyone.” And I confirm, concur, Ms. Plath. But it’s difficult, more especially when so much is pulling; be responsible, be mature, you should have a house by now.. you’re a father.. you’re a husband.. writing’s a hobby.. and so and so and so–

11:47PM. At least I have a thousand to my name, the day. So tomorrow, who knows.. but I need to go where my brain emboldens.. a winery recently turning me down, saying “we’ll keep your info on file.”, and I just wanted to be considered for a half-days, events.. who do these people think they are? Small specialty Pinot houses.. who fucking cares? This is K—- all over again, I swear it! But I’m done. It’s wine. I drink it. Maybe write about it, MOCK SOMM it, and that’s it. How serious can you take an industry that rejects innovation of speech, of description of and reaction to wine? And they say, “wine is art…” Oh. And so… The writer further meditates, Sees… “DREAMS”, she wrote about. I’m still dreaming. But I’m quite done. Now I can sleep. Exorcism yes done. I won.

(6/6/15)