Teeth…

Business thoughts– consolidation, wine vs. teaching…

Trying to quiet Jack and his friend, trying to sleep again but no use so I shot to the “living room” portion of the hotel room. If this is a living room. Can hotel rooms have living rooms? A room part of a principle room? Too much thought and they’re too crazy, my son and his wee ami, Addy. Nothing bothers them. All they want to do is grow pillows and make forts from these blankets and the blankets we brought from la maison.

Downstairs to lobby for coffee and breakfast if some shape and arrangement for kids. Eggs, bacon, two waffles – one of which jack ate and addy no as she’s either gluten intolerant or just told by her mother not to eat gluten anything’s..

At work and the winery’s more quiet than I can ever remember it being when I get here this early to write, collect, meditate, take pictures, what do…. Not much coffee left but I refuse to focus on anything but my thoughts, the thoughts from this morning, and the gradual steps, and swift I hope they materialize, toward my shop.

Wonder if there’s coffee downstairs in winemaker breakroom.  Hope so.  Need more.. need more if I’m to get to store, my store, quicker.  Nothing new opened last night, and I still need post and review notes from the past couple wines I found myself kept and educated by…. The Cab (AV, ’14), and the Oregon Chardonnay from Mom and Dad’s shelves.  Thought there was another… oui, the Dutcher Vio’.  I’m behind, and wine writers I’m positive, confirmed internally and all over my thought-globe go through this.  So what else to do… avoid.  Write freely, put it off.  Why not.  It’ll get done, right?  Can’t have that actuated echo if I’m to have my office, MY shelves from which I sell and invest, support family, get other shit I want like a car, or home in Monterey, send babies to Stanford, or SFSU, UCLA, wherever they want.  My mind’s of course wandering but so what… co-worker can’t get me coffee she says, texts, as she’s broke.  Shit, I think, now I do have to find a way to make coffee.  They have a Keurig across the street at Chalk Hill.

Added to this inventory is me skipping through the shots from yesterday, in that upper block of Merlot and Petit Verdot.  Go faster, write faster, I tell myself.  Wines downstairs to taste.. but I taste the same ones day after day— no excuses, I self-order, go further into your mad rile and scale, scroll.  Kerouac-ish in my musings and Philosophy-prone lenses here at the deserted winery.  The office, this room of cubes, my temple at moment.  Collect… and what do I conclude.  Nothing yet.  So I keep going.  Keep with my keep.

Wine VERSUS teaching.  Why separate them.  Who said I have to have any chasm between my two identities, modalities?  Who.  Said.  Well then… consolidation isn’t even the answer but more so severance.  Sever distractions… be not so much linear as ardent, consistent, coherent, composed.  Wine teaches me, then I teach from the imagist assemblage of vino…. Et pourquoi pas?  I’m not really writing about wine, either way, but the definition and symbolic, meteoric gravity and thesis, direction, PURPOSE, of wine.  Offered yesterday to someone that came into the tasting room that to me wine isn’t about wine, really at all.  Conversely, wine is “about” all around it, what comes before what’s in a glass and experience, imparting some effect that people abuse and wholly ignore the art and literary forme dans le verre (in the glass).

Jack and his friend so loud this morning.  At first, all I could think of was how much I just want to go to bloody sleep.  Alors, I said, “Don’t resist. Resist nothing.” So I woke, shot out of bed and into that “living room” and started with my day’s notes.  The Pinot last night, losing a bit of her urgency, but still communicative.  She wanted me to slow down with my sips, and I was already in tempered, more melodic glass tilts.  She wanted me to take my time with her, walk, thank, look, listen.  She was collected and contemplative a Noir.  She reminded me that I have a whole life of books to write on wine— a map of avenues and Roads, and terraces, highways and states, countries and continents to page-trap.  So, “Slow….” she whispered.  She was my lovething, my trip to wherever, wherever there’s a view or a hill, some incline atop which I’m seated and thinking of words next, what paragraphs stream I next have to say…

28 days left in year, and I wonder what was the rest like.  Like I don’t remember.  Like none of it happened, or I have to re-write it.  Like I missed a deadline.  But I didn’t—  I’m here.  In the office, cubicles around me and I try to ignore them but can’t and want to drive around the vineyard but can’t, opening soon.  Don’t resist.  Jump into the inescapable.  Oui… Bien sûr.  This quiet, an opiate.  I see myself differently in this room.  Writing my life, my life right now— Life.  What wine tells me to focus on, and learning from each of those clock sounds, each one a step closer to my There.  And where’s that.  Have to keep self on page, wait, see.. keep writing, move quicker, be like Jack and Addy this morning, just crazily playing with sheets and pillows and pretending to be somewhere else, other people with superpowers or some mission, some story.  Just don’t pretend, I tell myself.

I’m not.

Do.

I am.

Phone ringing.  No way am I answering.

09:06.  My winery day, taxiing out to runway.  Cleared for takeoff, almost.

She tells me to listen again, the RRV PN—  “Stop with all this measurement, and theorizing… you’re too much a professor sometimes, Mikey.  Go into your story, our story, further, bottomless from any barrel floor you can brandish.  There’s something there…. I’m there… and something else.”

Getting up to get coffee, finally… if it’s there.

Something’s here with me.