Class done, giving Self ten minutes to write, so leave Emeritus at 4:55 to get Jackie.. long day but energized, successful, productive, what be.. great meeting with grape growers about writing assignment and now I realize I haven’t done a goddamn thing with the poetry collection due this Friday.. do I even have the funds to publish it?  Doesn’t matter, the poems need to be gathered, and I need it in publishing position.  No wine tonight, as I want to prep for tomorrow and the interviews Wednesday morning at the grape growers office for the stories I’m to record.  My schedule quickly fills and I notice more a need for the write to log items for schedule in ONE location, and not this bloody laptop schedule.  I’m tired, hungry, need a snack, and some music– for some reason I feel a crippling crave for music, for Hutcherson or Thievery Corporation not sure but I want to keep writing and in the presence of music like I’m playing an instrument on some stage in some smoke-smattered bar, but I’m here in Emeritus Hall with.. with… well, books all around me and me at the head of this T-formation’d two tables, for those very important conferences and meetings the full-timers have.  Everything logged, my style of writing you could say–  I hope people would say, noticing the meticulous obsession with all things ordinary or otherwise dismissed, like the paper shredder to my right, wonder when the last time that was used– and the students in their chairs, when they do their freewrites in class, and now they bury themselves in their studies and that’s their foremost concern; due dates, grades, transferring to a 4year.  And me, only getting older, finally somewhat finding myself at 36– maybe my wife’s right, I should apply to these FT openings.  But is that what I really want?  It goes agains the answer to Dad’s ‘perfect world’ inquiry.. I do want to teach, or “teach”, like I did today, typing up my lecture on Plath, and sharing it with the enrolleds.  Not preaching or sounding pompous, but just sharing my findings and ideas and if they’re lost with the text then maybe the ideas I typed might help.  That approach to teaching I love– if that’s “teaching”.  HAVING to attend meetings or panels or conferences, or having to devote myself to a certain project or initiative when not being justly compensated interests me none.  And that’s what I can’t see myself doing.  How I taught today, or whatever I did today in the classroom which the students very much enjoyed, far’s I could decode, I very much will continue to do.  But that’s it.  So maybe I shouldn’t.  Apply…..

Have to get little Kerouac.  Excited to see how the day went for my little Beatnik boy.  What he learned, if he napped, if he falls asleep in his seat on the way home as he’s done a couple cruises of late.

4:55.  Time.

Now at home, waiting for the interview I shot with Glenn last Friday to upload.  Tired and with a bit of a sharp mood– not in the mood for TV, or conversation, or thinking about tomorrow, not even wine.  Not at all.  All I want to do is write and remove myself from the pattern, the patternized, anything and all things predictable.  Tired from day, from the lectures I gave and really what am I doing at the head of that class– I’m speaking passionately about Sylvia Plath, sharing my ideas.. is that “teaching”?  I can only see education at the college level especially as flawed inherently and with intrinsic illness.  But what can I do, nothing.  And I don’t want to do anything, nothing excessively drastic.  I’ll take the check, use my role in such regard, steer as I want to then get into my office off the Healdsburg Square, and write on wine, taste when I wish and personify it as no other wine “writer” does.

Now the writer’s tired, disconnected and surrendered.  And my alarm sounded this morning at 4:30.  I woke.  But only to turn it off.  Bloody hell…  My mood further sinks.. need a nightcap, and not in wine’s form, but something sweet.. like… 7UP?  Better than some Halloween candy, I guess.  Or not.. I deserve.  Deserve what.  Something.  I don’t know.  This is the day talking, okay– so I move on, and into the kitchen.  For something sweet, kill my impatience and indecisive whatever.  I’m like Esther in New York, I should be confident right now and defiant and writing something explosive but instead I’m here just whining.  And I hate it.  At least not all the whining’s making it to page–  Writers experience this I guess, or I know after writing for so many years, and now seeing how quickly time by this penner flies.  But I can do nothing but try to keep up with Time– or no, just outrun it, refuse its reality and what it does.

I’m ready for bed, and ready to restart, but I don’t agree with that mentality.  I want the conviction of this day being the last, of the urgency, the life-or-death attitude with each page, like I urge my students, “Do something crazy” when the writing or the day bores you.  So–  A story: professor offered a lecturing opportunity, but he passes, not sure where it will take him.  So then after he wonders why he said ‘no’, why he passed.  His attitude changes.  He becomes bitter, scornful, he starts writing crazy essays about the institution and drinking and calling in sick to write and travel, drive across state, Oregon, in his car which could any day die.

Huh, I think.  An idea.  Novel?  Something for NaNoWriMo? (If that’s what it’s called..)  Not sure.  This is my exhaustion talking.  Now, a tall glass of water, rocks, and this cluttered desk, the narration from my wife’s show in the living room.  Jackie upstairs, asleep.  Thinking of Plath and my lecture on her, her character, what Esther wants and what I want– life, careers.. shit, too much for so late in the evening.  And, night…..

(10/26/15)