In the morning on campus feeling like a vine after a brutal harvest.  But I’m here and present and ready for the day’s instruction.  I always say wine is life and wine should be positive, but more than anything wine is instructional.  It’s literary and people always ask me ‘why wine’ and ‘Why did you get into the wine business?’ Well, for all the stories.  At this point in the semester, Week 3, we’re still talking about Hunter S. Thompson and the psychology of his characters and his psychology and how it impacts us as readers.  We talked about lawlessness in the text, how the characters just let go, how he let go.  What we sip tells us to let go for a minute, or at least when I taste something I’ve never before or am greeted by some new story, I think “Life! Life!” You better live it or it runs away.  It is running away.

In the classroom while speaking I looked at the students in the early hour they registered for.  I always want too be a student.  In this wine life you are always a student of wine, yes, but life itself.  Wine’s taught me that there’s so much more than you, out there.  So much life to live and an excess of pattern is death.  That “doubt is death,” like I told the students this morning.  Thinking about my drive north to Geyserville— don’t want to be rushed, so I’ll probably leave soon.  Need today to be more fucking awesome than anything I’ve ever experienced.  “Recycle your ideas,” I wrote in the Composition Book and offered the idea to students that “There’s nothing wrong with recycling and reusing your ideas…. Use what you already have.” I see winemakers do it all the time when troubleshooting vintages and stalled fermentations, marketing departments writing what they think is “literature” on their brands.  I’m in a tireless classroom, so I need to be the tireless writer I boast that I am, everyday.  For the kids, for me, for wine, for my relationships in wine’s wheel and world and concept.  Conceptualizing what happens in less than 30 minutes— on Road sipping 3-shot mocha, listening to Thievery, or Hutcherson, anything.

Mornings are always kind to this writer, you know.  Always.  At first, like this morning being pulled from some odd dream where I actually woke, singing repeating some chorus to some song that doesn’t exist.  Early hours are gifts, are characters, the make me a more interesting character and I wish I could wake even earlier than I did this morning.  Why can’t I?  Inward jots and outward about me, envisioning me traveling, speaking about writing, wine, literature, reading…. Wine has told me not to settle, to be diverse in what I do.  To strive for singularity and focus, yes, but have it a reaching and motley.  But, always returning to that singular place.  Precisely what the ‘bottle’ in ‘bottledaux’ conveys, or I hope it does at least.

The morning is good, the morning is kind.  I’m on campus, I’m a student, I’m here.  Wildly present and hungry for the coming hours.  I’m instructed more than I instruct.  If wine’s to be in my life forever then people around me have to accept I reject any expertise I might have, and I will not recite scripts, or hurl pitches.  Wine is positive, and it predicates honesty, genuine and truest of true conversation.  I’m a viciously focused student, and I will NOT be distracted.  Need that mocha, now.  And the music.  I’ll drive arrow-like to the winery, but a cruising soar for an arrow.  Nothing hurried.  Life is too curt to hurry.  Although I always boast we can outrun it, and I’m a quick runner and blah, blah.  Haven’t reconciled that, yet.  And maybe I never will.  NO, I will.  But probably right before I graduate.