A Cabernet, one my sister made, on desk at left.  And me, after today, after the group of drunken southerners toward day’s close, I’m bit nervy.  but I maintain and look at the stack of books, or “tower” as Jackie said, to my right, all my books, he insisted on making a “big huge tower, Dada!”.  And I welcomed it.  It reminds me I need to write more as well as read more and mimic and study the paginated saunter of my metered beacons, these authors I follow and immerse myself in.  This could be the wine talking but I don’t care, I just follow my own impulse at the moment, and it’s not that late, only 9:57PM on this Halloween eve, my desk looking like that of a, well, a ‘Me’.. the writer/professor, working for Self, and staring at the Plath entries, the Capote short stories, Emerson’s words– Alice messages me from upstairs to tell me little Kerouac is out, “passed out baby” as she says.  And oh yes, he delighted in his costumed and canided  carousal, my little Beat.

That dog still barks, from outside, off to the right.  Annoying, but I take another sip of Katie’s Cab and retreat into wined thought, into my visions as a wine something.  Going upstairs to check on the Beat–

And indeed, very much asleep.  I remember when young always wishing that Halloween would fall on a Saturday, well.. I’m here, on a Saturday, it’s Halloween, but I’m too bloody old to enjoy it as I would have when in San Carlos, walking around the old neighborhood with my then-friends– Matt, David, Adrian, Erick, or whomever.  Time’s pocketing a severe advancement and trumping of my self-esteem this eve.  But, ‘huh’, the writer thinks, ‘nothing a little wine won’t fix!’.

Wine education.. Wine consumers… Wine whatever…..  Whatever Wine whatever connecting people with wine and selling wine crEATively.  How bloody hard is that?  I don;t know, but I’m knowing, I need to organize myself more, I thought all day, writing notes to the ’13 Arista Longbow Pinot, thinking about that coy sweet ebb on the last bit of palate contact.  But somms won’t want to hear that, and maybe that’s what I should go after, just write against them and challenge them kindly.. the other day at the Grower’s office I so many times hear people mention somm opinion, like it’s something they should fear or what– Wine isn;t that, it’s not fear, it’s not for the bully bull, it’s not the fear mongering tarantula “journalist”– this is definitely the wine talking, so I should have on more glass, and this is me– I’m not out “partying”, I’m not at some dimwitted useless timesuck of a wine industry “social” or openhouse.  I;m here at me desk writing, next to a stack of books my son architecture’d.  Like he wants me to read more, like he wants me to draw from this building, this tower, as I sit here.. it’s taller than me.  I don’t want to stand, I want it to continue its lurch over me, staring at me, saying ‘READ!”, “STUDY MORE!”, “Be a REAL professor!” So, then, okay.. I adjust and augment.. but that Autumn Walk mystery dog, whosever it is.. barking like a harassing howler, just wanting to puncture a poet’s peace–

And it won.  So I get more wine.

And the glass, partially full, and my thoughts are just jumbled in the optical of this book tower.. Capote’s short fictive foreards, and me with this Comp Book open, my classes ending in just over seven weeks.. or six.  Feeling like my daughter may early arrive– can’t think about that, much I want to, much I want to see little Ms. Austen in my arms and being held by Ms. Alice, and by my mother, Dad, everyone.. this is definitely the wine boasting its oration, and its stampede of confidence (it is a Cabernet afterall), but I ignore it or try–

Admiring the sight of the night’s cap, in glass, in my moment’s immediacy but I feel like I alway play with that word, the life of the writer at his desk like that’s something to be impressed by, who am I talking to me or you– the poet knows nothing but his own fantasies– her on the page and me in control of her character and where she goes what she studies what punctuation I implement to do what.  So what.  WHAT.

Old pictures on the camera haunt me, tauntingly, the old winery and what that did to me.  But I forget it, think about my son tonight and how all he wanted was more candy in that plastic pumpkin.  That was his prime priority, just finding the prize, the sweet, for he and Addy.  Ugh.. the writer’s being overtaken by the wine now, but not drunkenness, just slowed, and the day’s as well to blame, working behind that bar, one woman saying the wine was so strong “my eyes can smell it!”.  Meant to write that down but it became so busy and I wasn’t in the mood to scribble it into the little mmc book, black, but I remembered it so that means it deserved a page, right?

And I think I’m defeated, old journal entries calling to me but I don’t know where they are, probably in some box but post-move into this Autumn Walk writer-bunker I don’t know where they’d be.  Too late to check with mother-in-law asleep in living room, Alice upstairs in her dreams with Ms. Austen inside her, and Mr. Kerouac snoring till his decision.–  Look at me, reader; 36, married and house and children and pressure but I still write– so many father-husbands turn to something, and I guess I am as well but it’s the alphabet, my cored expressionism, which is flawed in so many dimensionalites but it’s me.  So that makes me…..  I don’t know.

That dog barks again.. goddamnit!

(10/31/15)