Went home between classes and found that I left the most recent little notebook in the pack pocket of one of my khaki pairs.  “Shit,” I thought, “it had that writing I did the other morning about Jack and I hanging out and the metaphors of the sea and sharks and how time was a shark, and how we read books and hung out and… SHIT!” But why am I getting this way?  Learn from it, grow from this folly.  I’m obviously with too much in a multitude of regards.. too many comp books, too many writing projects, too many pages here and there, too many docs on this laptop.  Too much does nothing of benefit for the writer.  So I stop and breathe and before I go home after a wondrous session with the 1A-ers, I remind myself of singularity’s boon and inherent advantageous nature.  And I recommend students not stray too distant from any given core, or epicenter, or nucleus.  If you have one Composition Book for your writings, or some place where you log your thoughts, be they for some assignment or something you’re working on, remain in that one singularized ethereal echo.

A long day for the writer/professor, teacher, instructor-whatever, so I head home yawning and entertaining just going to bed early.  “But then I wouldn’t be writing,” I think to myself.  Well, that’s quite another panegyric pulse in a writer’s life.  When you don’t write.  “What?” you might at me throw.  Well, it’s true, I’ve found.  Some of the best writing you do is when you don’t write.  If it’s meant to stay with you, it will.  Like the writings I lost in that journalist mini-tablet.  I just have to re-write it.  That’s it.  This could be the exhaustion giving way to an even more obsessive octave than I already exercise, who knows.  I’m too tired to think about it.  Time for home.  Time for rest.

But when I get home I find there’s things I need to get done.  With writing, for school, for the wine world, nothing stops for me and the atmosphere that pervades won’t allow me to pause even momentarily.. part of me finds this incredible in being a writer, the whole ‘never stopping and always living, gathering material’, but the other deems it altogether repugnant.  “Can’t I just take a bloody break?” I ask.  No ‘bloody’, but rather ‘goddamn fucking’.  My honest argot.  But that helps no one, confessing that.  I put the papers I have to grade right on the desk’s top, so I can’t ignore them.  Not even for an hour, or minute.  Would I recommend student try this behavior?  Curtly, NO.  Live more than you write, don’t always have IT in your thought-stream.  This is a handicap with me, assuredly.

I cough a couple times, take a sip of the Zin and think about the next day, a day off denotatively.  The connotation is “that’s what’s on paper”.  There is no day off for the diarist-style writer, the one always scribbling and dreaming of pages and afraid to sleep as he could be moving that ink along the line.

Sick, I know.

I should have left myself in the washer, dryer.  Thrown myself into that tall plastic dump under that sink.

1/26/16