mood, it’s this night. After this day. Which is strange as the 12th started rough but then later softened and smoothed to my favor, then again plunged. Reminding me of my age and what I’ve done, my decisions and vocational directions. My self-estimation and calculation this evening is low. So how to fix— maybe I can’t. I just need quiet, which I now not have. Looking forward to office hour tomorrow, where I can just write, my time, some semblance of a weekend, then home to run, I will force myself.
This morning I woke at 4, all by unknown cosmic circumstance, but I back to bed went. Setting alarm for 4 again, and WILL wake at rise at the hour to write, stretch, meditate (both in writing and in physical/mental). Free Self from whatever I’ve done to myself and my attitude. Needing travel, but I’m still, and if I were to take another job, be it a contracted assignment or something else, anything other than writing, I’d really be damned. And I can’t have that. I promised myself no more mistakes, and I think of the ‘perfect world’ conversation Dad and I had at the Monti’s dinner. Any more “work” would just be death to my travels, my writing and books, memoiring… One more glass of the Cab before the writer to bed goes. Maybe a 7UP, some thoughts, reading.
He knew he had to change something, and he always wrote about that, but what— what exactly. Earlier in the day, at the winery he read about other adjuncts, and what they went through, and how horrible their lives were, and how everyone was out to get them, and how it’s not fair, not fair, not— He didn’t want to be like that. To short, life, for that. So, another sip. He could hear his wife moaning, crying, tired in the other room— “You need some help, Meliss?” he asked.
“No, we’re good,” she said. Little Emma went back to more playful-sounding sounds, hands in mouth, teething he didn’t know, neither did Melissa, but there was something with her tonight, and it only pushed Mike more to something. What, who knew. He didn’t. And how could he. Teaching at the JC wasn’t even his ‘bread-n-butter’ anymore. The winery was, which wasn’t his passion but it paid decent, provided hours, benefits. So why did he care? His position, positions, but him in a mood. And he always had these moods. He was tired of the goddamn moods. What did he do to himself?
Class tomorrow at 7:30. Advanced Comp’, his favorite section of the term. Did he want to leave teaching, no. But he didn’t want to chase anymore. Start his own school? Or writing workshops? Something. Something else. Something wild and different. An old manager at some past job, which he was fired from, said “Channel your mood…”. Okay, but how? Sipped again. Wine… “Wine…” the reverberant echo oscillated about his cognition like a famished dingo.
The mood’s evaporated, or at least asleep, for now dormant. I’ll defy physical shifts and revolutions in my entries, readings. But I’m bound by certain actualities. But aflutter in dream— so, wait till 4. Rise and write. 7UP in fridge and I need just pause, meditate, but then not pause when it comes to these types. Emma still making her sounds. Maybe she’s reading something she in her head wrote. Sounds like verse, with the pacing and breaks between bursts and octaves— Some order to this, there has to be, the writer coming down from handing the little beat to her mama for feed. The mood encroaches a return but I deny. Still thought, my scope and measure of my world, fuliginous. Only prompting self-ossification. Necessitated, at my age, and with my adjunct reality. Reading those blogs earlier… why would I continue with this? Why would I stand in front of the students (my whole reason for even doing wha tI do at that campus) and just pretend like all’s well? Like I’m that content with what I do, where I am— Like that’s ME. What I scribble, these collective compositions advancing upon their order, what they want from me— these devils don’t know what this adjunct can do— the adjunct ring has to be penalized. And with, by, OUR voices. All these blogs and adjunct bloggers sound miserable cuz they let themselves BE that way. I’m tempered, yes a bit incensed, but measured in my meter, mode, mood now. “Ha ha,” I think, “this is all just catalyzing.”
12 hours from now, I should be running. I’ll shoot for 10 miles, or more. Changing my yardage, pushing through cosmic blockades, seeing the peripatetic promise told in moments arduous. Tired as time wears, on, out, stretched from my patience. I breathe like I will when woken by alarm, 4 or earlier. Told Meliss that if I wake in night’s equator I’ll descend downstairs to the office, to my laptop, to words. Final drafts, no abbozzos. I haven’t the time for excess revision, or even slight obsession over perfection. What will get me to the Road is my rawness and my lack, or void, of excuses. I close in on a thousand for day but for what? Well, to know I wrote. And with my delicate time delicacy, a thousand a day’s noble and humble, and relatable, goal.
The Autumn Walk Studio, so now silent. The Dharma tells me this is my guerdon. I accept, I guess. The wine’s ripples and aftershocks, fled. Life, shortening for me. Age… Age….. fuck “age”. What about me and what this writer quips? I can only see myself aging with sights of the calendar and all days that by me speed, the writeradjunctfatherwhatever knows only what he wants to see and what he may not see should he not intensify his reads.
The Kerouac book.. phone… wallet.. pen… keys….. bag. Am I ready for morrow or not? Who can be sure. “Mañana,” I think, “mañana.” Tonight, I’m writing, not working, not worrying. Not warped in responsibility or maturity. I’m just writing.