Kitchen and coffee, dropping off Emma before Jack, which I thought would be brilliant but wound up making Jack late and had to go to office and get some pass to return to class as attendance had already been submitted… but I don’t let it slow me, on Friday’s eve, which means nothing to a writer who writes and notes and does something everyday.  Next cup of coffee, after drinking what I made last night from container, or thermos, or tumbler… what I normally drink coffee from.  Giving self an hour to write before hopping in shower and rushing to campus to rush through grading and get whatever I need done, done.  I’m more than merely motivated… I feel a galactic shove or urgency all about me.  Meditation in this kitchen, composition, but more a lightening bolt of boldness to what I want to do… get to my office, wherever it is.  Healdsburg, here in Santa Rosa.. wherever.  Auditing my notes, all writings, and using all, marketing all, selling all… while offering all for free.  And how can that be?  You’ll see, trust me.  Not ready to leave chair and walk the three or so feet to get coffee.  I don’t want to stop writing, ever feel that?  And if you don’t write then the inclination to stay in the chair, or just ‘put’?  That’s what’s me right now, in this immediacy, this containment of my creative character— nothing to do with wine, or at least at the moment but I think about all the sounds and activity around he winery now, after the fires and everyone’s wine country stories of the fires and how they interacted and intersected with whatever blaze was closest to them.  Keep saying I don’t want to talk about it, but I do and don’t.. odd contradiction but how the writer feels this morning, after rushing out the door to two learning places and back here.  Thought about getting coffee at the Hopper Starbucks, which just re-opened, but then decided to just come back here and have hot remedy, free.  Je souris.  (I’m smiling.). This morning tells me to listen to the music, now Miles Davis sharing his “Blue In Green” number with me.  Today, today… nearing end of month, but I don’t care.  Time is irrelevantly romantic, romance in its irrelevance… each moment is its own piece.  Photos of grapes and the winery, my son and his friend standing under a tree in Kenwood… life passing fast but I try like hell to outrun and out-stride it… notes and blazing paragraphs in my modular whim.  I just do what I do, write the moment.. beginning day, with just over 47 minutes to self, here at kitchen counter… what am I learning?  I don’t have two hours to write as I’d like, or even a full hour.  But I have what I have and that’s what I’ll use.  These pictures I shot help, more than “help”… they define my morning definition this morning, like Kerouac with his scroll I have not a single droplet of interest in stopping.  Now I walk to get the coffee…. Hot enough.  Hunger felt, but I make self refrain from consuming any food, at least for now.

Jazz with me, morning with me, wine with me even though I don’t it now sip.  Actually, especially since I don’t now it glass-tilt.  The grapes on the vines, just showing who they are— no makeup, no guise, disguise, falsity.  Just visual candor.  The vineyards.  Me, always there, always.  Write my life from a vineyard, just stay out there and look at leaves, hear the air and the notes it wants to share and how ever long its pieces, numbers, like this Cannonball Adderley track, “Autumn Leaves”, all I looked at yesterday on my lunch walk, the leaves and the colors and how they want to tell me what to now do, how to see the county and that Petit Verdot block overlooking that valley to the north (I think) of Roth Estate. The air in the blocks, now, in Autumn, is all jazz.  Each slight or significant gust is a varying short and sequence of notes, teaching me a wine writer to let go, be free, be wild, be YOU.  Of course, I said back to it yesterday, making reluctance progression back to the tasting room.  Wine for me is nothing to do with wine—  But, out there, in the rows, the cordons, the vines, the rocks around the roots.. the sounds made by a writer stepping, peering in with his camera like a paparazzo more than hungry for ‘that shot’.  I run through more of my vineyard shots, some I’ve already posted and shared with the world but I don’t care.  I “revisit” them for my purposes, to get closer to the music out there, the sounds, sensibilities of the visuals… memories of old wineries, some enjoyable experiences while the others are nothing fleeting of loathsome, horrid.  They all teach, they all had their stories, now part of my story, a wild and wandering wine freewriter— huh.  Thought of something.  But I don’t know if the ‘something’ is a marketable something.  Do I need it to be salable right away?  Maybe.  Or not.  Who knows.  Have more coffee.  I bring the quaint cannikin to my journalistic lips, encouraging more expressive blips—  What I say int he tasting room, how I present wines, everything from the Pinot Gris to the single-vineyard Cabernet that I could never get enough of even if I swore off wine entirely (and even if I did I would write about how much I miss her, and I do, even now…), new languages and poetries, performances for and on and in and all around a writer’s kinesthesia.  Le vin ne me laisse pas arrêter de penser à elle.  (Wine won’t let me stop thinking about her.). Et je ne veux pas.  (And I don’t want to.). She is my topic, my literary love, ever.  My time, my place, my work, my non-work, my play, my passion.. tell and rile, world, storm, Reflective Equilibrium—  In the vineyard standing in front of a vine, not sure of variety but I don’t care, I just recite to her, and she listens, or I have myself convinced she does.  Best reading I’ve ever offered.