With family since wake.  Just back from walk to Starbucks where little Kerouac bought us all breakfast.  After the walk through Coffey Park, seeing workers rebuild and resurrect the neighborhood’s various little corners and micro-neighborhoods, enclaves and hamlets, many of them waving and saying hi and me thanking them for helping rebuild—Lost in those thoughts and conversations sitting here on couch in home office of home that wasn’t evaporated, that doesn’t have to be rebuilt.

Feeling tired from walk and what I thought about, again with my overthought but then I stopped at the Hopper-Coffey intersection—just write.  That’s it.  Moving past that quite quick, I think of wine and what I sipped last night, what I didn’t buy yesterday with a little time to self going to Bottle Barn.  I didn’t buy a thing.  Not one bottle.  Not even that red blend for less than $20 which I did actually have in my hand but just didn’t pull the trigger.  Didn’t walk it to the reg’.  Why not.  Why didn’t I get anything.  IS wine being diminished as an interest?  I think so.  In fact I’m certain it is.  But why.  Am I getting bored with it?  I’m letting that happen.  I have to make my wine story remodel itself.  Need a different approach to wine…. Play like I noted yesterday.  All my babies want to do is enjoy themselves, play, make everything around them entertaining and interesting for them.  So I do, with my writing, with everything.

After our long walk, the kids watch some Troll cartoon in the other room.  I move to office where I think the sounds and volume will diminish a bit in my favor but it doesn’t too much.  Wife naps on couch next to them, and I write away.  Could use more coffee but I want to cut back and down on that, everything from the lattes to coffee, to anything with any caffeine in its body.

External hard drive I bought the other week not cooperating, I’m still on this wife/elementary school teacher laptop, and I frustrate.  Didn’t wake when I wanted which seems to be my story of stories week to week.  Harsh, harshness, making the story leave the ground and climb at rates seemingly too rapid.  Nice being on this couch, imagining it’s my true office, door over there leads to hallway right next to stairwell taking me downstairs to a door that throws me into the sensory stretch of Healdsburg’s Square.  Decide that’s where Mike’s to write.  And write about Sonoma County from there, from where he feels is the aorta.  Mike walks down Matheson to HBG, where he orders a salad and ice water with lemon.  He takes notes of everything around him, everything, from the waitress to the bartender, to the tourists on their who-knows-how-many-th bloody mary.  Mike only lets himself write.  One hour into his sitting there in the far right corner as soon as you walk in, he’s not even half through his salad.  He thinks about taking the rest to go but he wants to remain.  He’s not in the mood for the couch anymore, not now.  He wants that bench on the actual square, the one next to that one tree, where he can clearly see the art gallery.

Kids still watching their cartoon.  Me on couch, thinking of that office, the walks around the square, tasting in other parts of Sonoma County.  Why didn’t I take sister-in-law’s counsel in ’09 and just write about wine.  Why am I thinking about this, overthinking it, thinking at all….  Last night’s red, a Cab which I did open the night before but only had singular pour, giving me more a rough delineation of Cabernet.  Not so much a brett brushing but something of the tune and tone of brett.  No declination of communication, from what the Cab wanted to say and what I was in the mood for last night, something not passive nor aggressive nor in between, it offered harmonious step and say.  With it wine made a return to my story and general composition and code as a character.  I’ll taste something new, at some point, today.  Little Kerouac may have a play date or something, at some point, wife and her friend acting as present proprietors of that present when it materializes.  May head to Dry Creek, taste some old visits and muse haunts for self.

Mike tells Self that wine is still very much an interest.  He tells Self that he asks why he ever fades from it as a topic, as a story.  Mike tells Self he doesn’t know and self tells Mike he doesn’t need to “know”, but merely make it his own.  Wine and its voices and scenes, hills and Roads still very much precipitate and actuate for Mike’s writing, Self notes.  Today, Mike re-opens certain wine notebooks, looks through old photos—Dry Creek and AV, Sonoma Valley, that one visit to Napa with friend Chris.  Not so much the wine that Mike wants for his work as much it is the work itself, the singularity and consistency of wine and the wineries, the people visiting, Sonoma County where he lives, the wineries down the road on Olivet, his sister and her stories from harvest, the old videos that pop up as memories in social media feeds.  Wine has formed Mike’s story, he sees.  Wine is his story, it is his BEAT, and beauty.  Composition of character and sense, meditation, thematic anchor and climate.

9:27.  Writing in quiet in kitchen, at counter island, or island counter.  Glass of Brandy mother-in-law gave me recently.  Unexpected gift.  Never had Brandy while writing in fact I’ve never had it before period so I’m not sure what the print will be.  Today tasting at two spots, Sanglier whom I’m more than familiar with and Lioco, a label I’ve been a fan of for years and have only been to the tasting room off the square twice.  Today being the second visit.  Wine communicating in different waves and movements the past 48 hours.  Today was thinking that thought, you know, the one about me having my own tasting room or wine shop, wine business of some sort.  But then I came across this Charles Dickens quote about concentrating on one subject at a time.  Story of my life, or hasn’t been.  What if now it is, with this book or blog on thought and knowing now, the Now as it presents itself to a writer.  Publishing and independent efforts from this house, the office or kitchen or the couch in the office.  This is something I’ll remember…. The Brandy night, with the laundry going upstairs, making that clunky clanky sound, hoping it doesn’t wake one of the babies, or both.  Thoughts, here with me at this counter, with this wallet next to me, the Germany journal, me telling self not to think so much but then that’s all I do and I laugh and scorn self to high elevations then let self fall to ground…  Took another sip of the Brandy.  Not for me, I have to say.  And why am I giving it any focus.  Thoughts hide in essays, essays I’m about to write, ones I’ve written, one I’ll try and finish tomorrow.  Thought, a sword with like eight edges, eight angry and pursuing points, after writers like me and anyone thinking.

The walk around the neighborhood this morning told me several things, made several declarative voices known to my character.  The first, stop with thought, just write…. And stop writing about writing dilemmas.  The second, Newness.  Travel.  Mike needs to get to the world, see as many corners of it as he can.  And how does he accomplish such. How does he sit on some bench in Prague and write about the bread he eats and the people he sees, the hotel he’s in.  Mike starts a new story.  He ditches and sheds everything.  Everything.  He pours the Brandy into the sink.  After one more sip.  He pulls some sparkling water from the refrigerator and starts taking notes.  Writing about writing and what the writing will do.  He’ll do all of it, all of it, for them.  Those two small, needing faces.