Telling to Tell

Leaving in 23 minutes.  How many thoughts can I expel, extol, troll?  Hate that last word but love going through these pictures I’ve taken over the last few years.  Wine is more than a consistency or perpetual motif.. it’s dominant, it’s telling, it’s exposition and reveal.  Music in everything like the older vines and the clusters that don’t yet have their stems away, just sitting there on the crush pad wondering what’s going to happen next?  What will happen next… yes, they think the same things that we all as incredibly flawed human entertain and think, ponder, obsess over.  Book, when are you going to be done?  When will you draw yourself more clearly so I can travel, photograph vineyards in Austria or somewhere?  Put it together, one page at a time it tells me.  Thinking back years ago, more than twenty now, shit, to when I was sick, in the hospital not knowing what would happen and the doctors coming in and out and treating me like some kind of fucking lesson—  What am I waiting for?  Approval?  Acceptance?  Be that bold winemaker, make the hugest Cab you can, or the lightest, most delicate and artsy, feminine poetic piece of a Pinot you can, Mike…. Stop thinking.  Just do.  In fact, no “just”.  DO.  I’m doing, I’m typing, enjoying my music and seeing myself in some Paris street, just walking not writing, watching people and listening to them as they talk and see how much I can understand…. Should have studied more.  Why not now, with this day off?  Just called in and spoke to Department Admin… Loretta, who was retired but returned to fill in for Janet who’s out for surgery.  When Loretta said “surgery” it took me back to my duel with death, how I won.  I fucking WON.  So why am I not on the road, not on the bestseller list?  I will be, once my story’s out beyond this fucking blog.

On the first blog, I focused on wine in a naive, amateur-y way.  Why don’t I return to that?  Why don’t I just have fun and talk about it as I want to?  I do… but I need to do it more, and more freely.  Friend of mine occasionally publishes her “Amateur Tasting Notes”, which are anything but amateur.  She deconstructs the wine with descriptors but the reliability is something I should emulate, a book from which I should pilfer a page or two.  She currently works and wraps up harvest in WA.  Wine, deciding our stories, consistencies and pictures, frames, senses and language.  As soon as I park my car behind the building, I feel it— taste and see and hear it, even if I’m the only one on campus.  I need rewind, to when I first starting blogging and writing about wine.  That’s what will get the writer to his Road.  Mom at times cites my wine writing as too “wordy”, or too academic, something.  Oh do I see my sweet mama as précis with her estimation of her diarist son.

10:22.  Have to leave to go get my little Beatnik.  When back, more to page, more to book.  Empty that fucking backpack.  Be light, lean, swift and quick and magically coherent.

12:39.  Lunch in oven, sandwich I got last night from Kin but fell asleep before I could eat it.  Tired from the inventory I guess, or more tired than I thought I was.  Never used to be able to do that, fall asleep before 21:00.  But I did last night, or just a minute or two after.  But I’m here thinking about my son, his strut fearless into the dentist chair, how excited he was to see me, how excited he was after the appointment sitting at one of the cement picnic tables with coupled benches, talking to me about how the lunchtime routine works, how the “yard-duties” as he put it were there to keep everyone safe.  Sitting here in our home, where my wife and babies play and  eat, rest and grow, I see there being nothing more immediate and imperative than them— my family.  This is all for them.  I don’t need a thing— just them.  What else would I need?  Nothing.  I do have a dream car, yes, and a dream home I guess, but that’s all to improve life quality for them, us.

Truly, I want my son to have the same work ethic as me, Alice, my Mom and Dad… but I want him to work for himself, or for a family business.  I don’t want him to have to answer to strangers.  I know this is fantasy, but is it?  I need to get mikemadigancrEATive into self-sufficient outer space, the highest high of the career atmosphere.  After lunch, go for drive… take pictures.. need to charge camera.  My son, my son… the way he looks at me, the way he follows, assures himself that I am his protecting provider.  I’m in circles and I know he’ll have to work for someone, a few someone’s, along his story.  I want for him, though, the same I want for self, and I’d love to work with him, little Kerouac already showing artful direction, a creative Personhood climate that tries anything and everything that has creative in its recipe.

Lunch done, coffee made.  No break.  No nap as I’ll confess I thought of doing.  Emptied one backpack.  And another.  See how long I last without them.  See this as an exercise in not only organization but foresight, planning, consolidation (which I guess is much the same as organization).  Not sure where I was going with that thought, but I need other things to throw away… sipped the coffee but feeling tired.  Have to fight it.  OH.. have to email students.  Will after this thousand.  And my coffee.  And maybe a drive.  Someone told me Fountaingrove is open now, to drive.  Don’t want to be a lookie-loo, if that’s even how you spell that.  So maybe I won’t.  What does a writer do?—  How about finish your bloody book?