11:32 and at Solano Community College. Have interview with a grower and today I feel urgency and a roaring push in my character to make all this happen, everything I want with wine and with being a winemaker and wine writer and blogger and journalist. And it all will, I know. Just had some time freed on the calendar, and I’m going forward with my wined story, seeing the wines I’ll produce and the winery I’m at.. hard to find time to grade and write, but I’ll make everything happen. And running? Not sure.. have to look at everything. Tonight Alice goes out to a birthday dinner with a friend of hers.. and Jack and I left to our Autumn Walk base. He’ll play and watch his cartoons and I’ll plan, grade, plan grade write blog, measure and plan and be calm sipping the remainder of the Sanglier blend from last night.
Ready for my interview with the growers. I think. My approach will be to get into their characters and why they farm as they do, highlighting the connectedness they have with the Earth. It’s quite interesting, actually, the whole reality and execution of sustainable farming. I definitely notice in my own character that I’m more interested in the farming side of the wine world, how the vineyards are cared for and how crop is thinned, when you’re supposed to water and the like. Need to call one of my clients and ask about something concerning.. nevermind. Stay moving.. think I’m going to get some coffee really quick.. then go back to planning for class.. not stopping for anyone or anything. I know what I want and I will get it.
Just sent email, now I’m thinking of other pieces of imagery, copy, video, anything for the wine startup, which is intended to “educate” I guess, yeah, but more so just share and distribute the loving reality that wine is and stands for. Yes I see the value of scores from Spectator and Laube and whomever, but that isn’t everything, in fact it’s a small, small part of what wine tells. Its collective story.
The great consolidation in my life had begun, and I can only feel an unusually elevated elation and free sense in this all. The new open spot on the calendar, all the pictures I have dedicated to and for the startup, and everything else for my relationship with wine.. I see Jackie on the crushpad just as Glenn’s granddaughter was a week or so ago. That’s what wine is.. it’s not sales obsession, it’s not self-anointing. It’s genuine communication and again that sharing of stories and of loves.
Tonight I’ll be up late and tomorrow I wake early for content devoted to the startup. There’ll be so many subscribers, I’m quite sure, and devoted readers, that next semester I’ll only be teaching one class. No, two. I want to keep my two. I want my story, at its core, to be me as a professor, as that’s how I’m seen. That’s what people call me, jokingly and endearingly.
Home, and posting to client’s blog, then the teaching blog, now this Bottled Ox’s blog. Thinking about the interview today with the grower and how he, and his wife, started from nothing. “The American dream,” he called it. And it most poignantly is. And wha tI want for my site, my .. what do I call it….. I don’t know. Not an ad agency.. not a blog, or– A content shop? Yeah, I guess, that is what I’ve been calling it, of late.. So a Wine Content Shop. I’m dropping the word ‘marketing’ because — or maybe I shouldn’t. My mind’s in a million milieux, scattered and somehow sane in wine, but there’s no wine to drink in this house so I have my night’s cap be a beer, while Alice is out with her friend for her birthday, with several other ‘mommy friends‘ I’m sure. My little Artist, upstairs asleep, and I think of the students tomorrow and how to come at them– first telling them that I’m handing everything back, then lecturing on the colors of the novel, ‘Sur’, and what it does to modern readers, today, distracted by so much and so many levels. What would Kerouac think if he were alive today, seeing everyone as they are, with their goddamn faces pinned to a little screen you can hold in your bloody hands?
And there I was, just a second ago, checking my messages and accounts on my phone here in my home, here in the quiet when I should be holding to the peace I have before I have to be in bed. This writer’s time is limited. I’m imprisoned by my business, by my busyness. But let it be, let it be so, and the TV plays on, I’m not watching, some reality TV my wife would watch. Her “escape” as it were.
Alice on her way home, with some Thai leftovers. And me, thinking again about the wine I’ll make, touching those skins and the juice, doing punchdowns by hand and pullups, like I did with Blair in ’13/ wine is my topic– and it’s more than that, my story and progression and how funny would it be if me, a writer/blogger, had his own label before my professional winemaker sister. Not that I’m in competition with her, as there is no competition. She’s pro, I’m merely a bloody dreamer. I just think it would evoke and pull a couple a chuckles…
Alice just pulled in.. garage door open.. then closed. Leftovers for me.. the writer is hungry, and wondering when he will be on the Road..
After eating I’m ore composed and eased. Progressing like a wildly raconteuring penner. I see myself racking into a barrel, I see myself walking my vineyard, I see myself 4 weeks after bottling my Merlot taking a sip after a two-hour decant. And smiling, pouring for guests at my house, my new ranch in West, West Healdsburg. Find my self in a poetic stammer and splinter into tangent. this is just the beat’s exhaustion, the paino in my head telling me to continue in poetry and some pulse rhythmic and recited, the music going on and tempting me to awake stay, no more wine just words, and the pages and recitals, more to my collection, adding content for me not some stale gangly ad agency.