A thousand before we open?  I’ll see.  I’ll try.  Walk in an a little cold, thinking about the closer we get to holidays the atmosphere and feel on Chalk Hill changes..  Got here as early as I did of course to write but as well just enjoy quiet.  Enjoy no one being here but me.  This room, mine.  The dark production area with all the tanks and tubes, barrels and barrel racks, tracks on the ground and drains, everything, mine for observation.  I’m going to reach 50,000 by month-end and finish this book of letters and wined notes and NTS’, and who knows what it’ll say.  Technically behind schedule on book, but I’m learning that you have only so much control, and how much control, “control”, you have is only perception.  And another thought that pummel me on my drive up here, right about when going under the Airport overpass, is ‘impossible’.  And I thought of this from reading an article where organic reach on social media and for writers like me using blogs is now being made by companies to be nearly impossible, it said.  Well, “impossible” is perceptive.  It’s an adjective, therefore a word used for judgement, or assessment.  And that too, assessment and judgement are definitively subjective.  I don’t have to agree.  And I won’t.  I don’t.  I’m in control of what I do so I negate my early intonations on ‘control’, I guess a bit.  But either way I’m going to do what I do and that’s write about wine like a newer Mike Madigan, from one day to next, from this day to its morrow.

Before we open… oh this quiet.  Remember it.  Love it and learn from it.  More wine finds a permanency in my prose and poems, the faster I want to move, almost to combat wine and show it and the vines where the bottles came from that I develop with just as much character and dynamic.  I want, too, be more a fan of me, but I have to work at that.  If you’re a writer, or student in my class, or anyone with any kind of Craft, work at being more of a fan of your own creations.  This will yield results that you never thought of for yourself.  Don’t try…. Forget trying and just actuate.  Create.  Tell your story.  All these wineries are merely stories.  Some more interesting than others, yes, but stories with their own audiences intended and unintended.  Same for any business, really.  Family-owned or even the corporations… they all have narrative, some identity to be interpreted by would-be consumers.

What wine will cause the most reaction in visitors today?  I always wonder that… which one will be “the star”?  I’m a student, of everyone coming into the Room, no matter what flight they elect.  Sometimes I think I know quite a bit then after talking to someone who works at another winery either in hospitality or production I’ll be novice-y.  Which, to be direct, enlivens me.  The more I feel a student the more energized and excited I am.  About anything.  Any lesson in life that I’ve pocketed and would want to share, is just that—  Always be a student.  That’s why I have to laugh at my Master’s Degree.  I’m not any type, shape, phylum or genus of “master” or “expert” with writing, teaching, reading…. I don’t want to be.  I want to enjoy my studies as I enjoy the quiet of this room.

Just had an idea…. Tough to get anything done in that hotel, but it’s what I have.  I can’t escape, and not like I’m trying to flee but it’s my, our, current space and unavoidable.  So….  Get to work early, write, and stay after for an additional thousand words.  Will have to if I’m to finish book by month’s end.  I’m going to get guerrilla, special-ops, insurgent, ninja-like with my wine journalism, writing, blogging…. Maybe even escaping to the restroom to post a note to blog and then later rack it back to book, as I did several times when working at Dutcher Crossing.  And here I have more. Chance to do so, with the production area restroom.

So… “students”…..  Whatever chance you have to get something done, get you closer to your vision, to your There, DO IT.  Sometimes you can plan, but more often than, you’ll be an in-the-moment actualizer.  What I’m doing now.  Well, this was a bit planned, but…

I refuse to accept any kind of “impossible”.  That’s utter buffoonery.  Not me.  What’s here, all around the writer now is a precious layer of visual and motioned poetry.  Nothing but forward in my now and later hours.  Everything caught, documented, written and learned from.  Promise to self, you, and you need do the like for YOU.  Why even fiddle in thoughts that are even slightly antithetical to your Story, when you want for you.  I’m not talking about dreams and “dreaming big”.  I’m citing just putting a mentality in your head.  Right now.  That you’re there, you’re going too be there, whatever you see for yourself…. Blogger, doctor, professor, lawyer, store owner, artist, winemaker, winery owner, CEO.  Anything and everything.  Right now, put yourself in a savory quake of acceptance.  You’re going to do it.  Anyone saying it’s impossible obviously doesn’t know the full anatomy of that word, and surely doesn’t know you.  Not like you know YOU.

08:54…. Should go get some pictures of that Sauvignon Blanc block.  Or should I just stay here, write, about the day and the wines and this winery I’m presently managing.  All the “jobs” I’ve had in my story, in the wine industry and out, this provides the most story… the most words and visuals, the most forward to my There.  I will be at 2,500 words for day.  The winery will make sure of it.  I will help, I guess by writing, but the winery will get me there— with this side room with the polished tree half that was hit by lightening in ’12, split into however many pieces… the dark production area, left, with the tanks making those deep grumble sounds that will at times startle me and disrupt the paragraph… the wines themselves and the reactions, what people say, how they describe them… lady yesterday saying the ’11 Napa Valley had “notes of chocolate asphalt and Heath”, as in the candy bar.  I was by myself in the room but I looked for someone for some eye contact, ‘cause the first thing I thought was, “Should I ask her to say that again?  Would it be weird if I wrote that down?” Well, I just did.  Or typed it directly into my ‘Wine I’m Here’ pages.