Busy day at winery but started off in optimal fashion with my sudden turn left down Yoakim Bridge Road, to take pictures, shoot a video which had some tech difficulties on YouTube but either way the trip gifted me time to collect before day’s ignition.  Had to chuckle not long after we opened, as a kind and convivial guest, friend of some amiable wine club members, “Canadian Mark” I called him, said I was a “sparkplug”.  Rather, to be contextually accurate, he said “If you were mechanical, you’d be a sparkplug.” After telling him my background in lit and writing, that I have a blog and continue of the literary milieu.  My energy fades but I ignore it.  Why is it that every night, now, at this old age of 37, I’m so tempted to be lazy, just sip my wine or beer as I am now and look through my emails a million times.  Check social media accounts, post a picture and just watch the reaction.  Scroll through the days pictures and videos and loosely brainstorm in the Carpe Journal?  That’s not being a writer, that’s not writing, that’s not at all the discipline I want to be known for.  After this beer, shifting to decaf, dessert, setting alarm for 4AM, and four pages WILL be coagulated before I leave for the winery.

I will say, though, the pictures I took on Yoakim Bridge Road this morning, before the early arrival was actuated set me in the right rile of character for such a long day.  Something about where I park, on that thin dirt stretch, off to right, I pull over and sit in my car so eager to get out and walk the Zinfandel rows around me, like I’m from some other state, like I have another name—  Ron from Alabama, never been to California but a farmer back home and just knows he can make it out here.. he debates whether or not he should just pack and move— what does he have to lose?  41, not married, no kids, just his dreams and each day—  Just the story possibilities and images I needed before 8:30AM.

House now quiet, wife and babies upstairs, dormant, for now.  Writing father tries to write faster but hears something upstairs, could be wife or son, then he hears the neighbors outside.  I’m tired, I want no sound, I only want to wake early, show the world how crazy I am with this writer discipline, that while others are in downtown Healdsburg or Santa Rosa getting obliterated I’m in the A-Walk Studio writing my story, prepping for my first travel, which I hope is somewhere here in the U.S.  Start domestic, then go abroad.  Just my philosophy.  And I could change my mind.  Knowing me, I will.  Looking at another picture, I get further distracted and lost in dreams and possibilities of travel, drinking wine in my hotel room and noting in the Carpe Journal how the room feels, smells, sipping wine to the view of those city lights, realize I’m in Miami, that I never imagined that I’d actually get here.  There’s a beach down there, I should walk around, I could, but I’d rather stay in my room, write.  Have a lecture tomorrow morning at the college, then I fly back home.  Can’t wait to tell my babies about my trip, all the intricacies of what I see, saw.  Not sure they’ll care.  Doesn’t matter.  Just want to go home to them, be home with them, always.  But still, somehow, stay that sparkplug.

(10/1/16)