before babies and wife are moving about. Not the same feeling in writing as I had yesterday… Short stories from the tasting room and other wine instances….
Sitting on wood floor downstairs, coffee, day with son ahead. Nothing to now write as nothing’s happened. I know, make something up… like what…
Older man, late fifties, just retired and on his porch, glass of some old Burgundy in hand, listening to crickets and a couple bats fly back and forth… He thinks of what to do now, with his remaining life. Successful career managing portfolios and retirement funds, “And now what?” He thinks. He doesn’t know how to not work.
And then I look inward, and think, “Is this what I survived for, to be a part-time English Instructor and pour in a tasting room?” Certainly not. Adjust my own psychology, lead myself away from what gives me these moods and low self-estimations. Decide that I live from what I learn, put it to page and hopefully it elevates and mends others in some way. And again, I love wine and the industry, and teaching. But, like you, I want more. Like the retired man, I want to keep going. I want another chapter. No…. another book. A first book of this new sight and suggestion of self.
06:48…. Study son, today. Little Kerouac and all he wants to do. Write everything down, reader. Everything… what in the story do you want to keep, what do you want to vaporize, cut out?
Like you, if you haven’t already, I’ve arrived at a situational still where I need decide. “DECIDE”, I wrote in some gorilla-sized letters in one of the semester journal’s pages, last night while skip-sipping through that Viognier, then much slower the Kuleto Cab. Now it’s cold coffee, made before bed last night. I’ve decided… what I’ll die for. And no so much that but what I want my kids to say Daddy does.
Tomorrow is when it really starts. Into the Room with a freed scope and unconcerned character, but entirely invested in his story, what he’s doing. They’ll want me to care as. I have as them… be they industry guy who acts like this is his story. But, no, a set of chords and wires in the anatomy of my book. Or one of them. This first one, anyhow.
Still in floor…. flirting with story ideas, in and out of the tasting room. Jelly, the 20-something artist with a corporate job, selling paintings and working at a wine bar on weekends, only wanting to one day be in her own property with her studio overlooking grapes and just watching them grow… painting them as they shift from breaks on a vine to self-pollinating pictures, to clusters daring some vineyard manager to call the pick. My other character… me. Well, yes and no. Me, but no wife and babies. Mike the part-time professor who is convinced he’ll never get tenure, works in the wine business doing whatever he can to cover all nuts, writing and hoping. A morning, a single morning much like this one for his author, he decides to stop. Be a winemaker. Translate wine like no one before has, and no maker of wine ever will. He wants to intensify his relationship with the juice, the ground. The rocks and soil variations in some blocks.
He’s decided.
The old man…
Kelly…
Now, me.
Much better than yesterday’s A.M.
