Tonight I write for me. And not “blog”– pretending I don’t know what tht is I just write and be a writer and live by the pen, only promoting this moment and my thoughts promulgated by the wine. Quiet downstairs with this Pinot just below my legs that are extended to the ottoman. Tomorrow back in the class and I need to be more fiery and electric and just a fucking writer than I’ve ever been. So I start with the subject of Life, and what we’re to take from it. For the students and the short stories we’ll be discussing– more I think about wine and wine making and all the tasting I did today with Tony from work, at all the spots we hit, I see there is no right way to do any of this. Any of it. Whether it’s starting a winery or pouring in a tasting room, selling the wine in some way or being someone in the industry tasting at a neighbor’s bar. There’s nothing right or wrong about any of this– it’s wine and I’m a writer seeing the wine for what it is, something beautiful like her and the way she smiles at the scene at her front’s the way I greet a Pinot like this.. and everyone around me making wine, starting their own labels and having logos designed and some marketing approach– my buddy Blair telling me how hard the harvest has been on him and I can only imagine. But soon I don’t want to imagine, I want to feel what he does; I want to hurt and be dirty and touch more incoming grapes, taste from the tanks and monitor the fermentation and what notes progressively themselves present.
Tomorrow I’m going to do something utterly writerly. And I mean with completely obviated Literary intention. Going to write about everything, and everyone, everything that everyone says and everything I see; even the way the door to that pathetic adjunct office looks, if there are prints on the knob, or if there’s another adjunct in there when I enter, giving me some annoyed look like it’s their office and how fucking dare I enter. Tomorrow I’m not a creative content marketer, I’m not a professor or instructor, I’m not a wine writer. Just a writer. A novelist. I again think of the question dad darted that night at Monti’s, about my “perfect world”.. so that’s what tomorrow is, for me and for always. I see myself generating all this content for people, many of whom don’t pay in fashions too timely, when I could finish this novel, and the next, and my collection of short pieces.. all content for ME. What a thought, a writer writing for him. And making a couple bucks. Not bad, right? I mean I could do that– I think of the piece I Hunter S. I started watching and never finished. Promised Alice I would be up at 10:45, meaning 10 mins from now. Let’s see what she says to an extension…
No answer. Probably asleep, poor queen. She has to be at her school quite early in morrow as she’s being observed by the principal, the same woman who slighted me, yes with humor but it still bothered me, about me being an adjunct rather than teaching high school English and getting benefits. I said nothing. Someone like her could never and would never understand a writer than only teaches for the material of it all– yes I want to “educate” the youth or whatever but the real jolt I receive from teaching is the pages for me, those moments to log reflection on interactions with the students.
Closing the night and now I feel like a writer and not just some wine lover drinking wine after a quasi-workday. Again thinking of the travel and going back to my city and speaking French to the same hotel crew at the front desk when I first visited, and that high-octave lady a the coffee shop by the train or metro station.. and now I’m ready for bed. I finally wrote today, I’m a man only getting older, older, extracting myself from my journals, and I know I should be in bed next to Ms. Alice. But I can’t stop writing, and write I do but get nowhere, so I think of what raports I have and which if any I want maintain and massage into something.
11:01, I hate the clock, and the darkness of real life if you have to work like so many do, 40+ hours a week and I know there are some that claim you have to hustle and work hard or struggle or whatever. But what if I just want to write? I don’t know what I want to do, but drink wine and write about it, and sip more and talk about the voices I taste in the wine, and the wine’s basic thesis to me, this writing sipper,t he Pinot produced by my new friend Glenn, but who knows if he’ll remember me a couple years from now or if he’ll like this book, if it’s a novel or memoir or collection or shit.
And I don’t know what to do now so close to my bedtime and what, what now, what do I write, what is my cause, and what do I do with tomorrow. When they turn in their final drafts– I need to be, no not controversial, but something. Maybe ‘loud’ is the word, when I go into the library after the 1PM section for my coffee in that little side café, watching all the students study or pretend to study– of so many thoughts, now.. ailment, the writing, the writing, these books and these fantasies– me and this wine, right here, intimately and exclusively.
More footage of the republican debate. I want to punch them. All. In the fucking face. When they talk, I growl, my fangs are out. I’d go after any one of them in a verbal transaction. And I’d love it. To learn from stupidity. Lovely, luminous stupidity.
(9/2015)