Category: Health/Wellness

Two minutes past when I wanted to be writing.  Yesterday in Brentwood, having to walk about two miles to my car, thinking and taking pictures, enjoying the sun and how it hit those hills.  The drive back, music and thoughts of vocational banality, and now, finally, I experience no such thing.  I do credit Sonic but as well I credit the way I approach what I do here, my perspective as soon as I sit down at the desk and tackle tasks.  Obsequious this morning and much lately especially in Brentwood yesterday, walking with the Reps and one Lead down streets and hearing what people had to say about their current internet and how long they’ve lived there, their homes….  I took note of architecture and the front doors, how many of them were in what was a mock-bell tower.  All that was missing was the bell.  Reminded me of sister’s winery and how at the hour the bell sounds, often starting or plainly scaring anyone in the tower right at that sound-time.

8:23. The nook, mine.  All mine.  At least for the next 30 minutes.  Class tonight.  Still no sections for Fall.  That could change, but in no way do I hold my breath.  In.  NO.  Way.

Thinking at lunch I’ll go to that café, whatever it’s called just down Sebastopol.  Get some word done for tonight’s class.  Just checked email, nothing from students, or nothing important anyway and no notice of classes for Fall.  Letting it go.  Completely.  Hear someone walk into the breakroom.  Tempted to see who but I resist.  Putting self in classroom, taking notes, student and instructor.  Have ideas pummeling me from all angles and my voltage increases and refuses to cease in any regard.  Learning that I’ll always be learning, about how to approach time for lunch to what I do first thing in the morning, to notes I notes to self and for more strengthened self, to questions.  More questions, capturing observations and studying them for the day and how it presents itself to me.

Wipe nose.  Better not be getting a cold, what little Emma has.  Coffee still hot.  Have to use restroom but won’t.  Write, write more… start writing talk for 3/9.  More or less know what I’m going to talk about.  Freedom, how individuality muffles the vocational banality, and how we decide to be free.  We decide to live more jazz-like, musically and poetically.  We allow walls and ceilings to dictate sight.  Or, we don’t.  Or, we just don’t believe in them.  We express and live, and speak, wildly.  Create from such practice and habit, maintain in that manuscript.

8:37.  Rise time will be at 8:50.  Now what, I think to self.  Bottledaux, the name of the blog.  My blog, yes, but just a blog.  This morning and just now I said to self, “Pouring it all out.” We all should.  We should all be our own “platform”, or gate, or door, or bridge.  We decide the composition of the bridge convoying us from one scene to another.  But, how do we want to see ourselves?  All that matters, all mattering, ever.  This is the thesis to bottledaux, I’m understanding.  How do you want to see yourself… All mattering, ever.  YES.  Now, typing, sipping coffee when I can before diving into a list of tasks for day and enjoying my Literary lunch.

 

Deciding not to replace laptop, but use as I am now with external keyboard.  Will get own keyboard, own mouse, maybe a mousepad.  Little Kerouac not sure what he wants to do, stressed about the options, not wanting to go roller skating or go to kids’ museum, nor hang out with a friend… he’s restless, anxious, for reason in an ebb of indecision and defeatism.  Not much I can do but listen, don’t indulge nor provoke.  My own errands, soon.  Right now, the laptop works, with these external bits.  Strange.  I move on.  Don’t obsess, don’t fixate or stress over the actuality that is, here with this odd, outdated clunky keyboard.

Need my own office.  Will have by year’s end.  Well as zero debt.  Getting close with the latter.  Have to build project list for day, year, right now.

Haven’t been writing as much.  Blaming it on this laptop, the one wife brought home from her school.  Not used to its feel, the keys’ sounds.  Easy excuse, easy scape’.  Coffee and kids, Super Bowl Sunday, hoping to run as I did yesterday on treadmill putting up over 7.5 miles.  Marathon this Saturday.  Still don’t have motel booked.  Jury duty possibly tomorrow, this week.  Notice to left, going online to see if I have to “serve” or “perform” my “civic duty”.  Never understood that, still don’t.

Eased day, today.  Should have woken earlier, but that’s my consistent joke, isn’t it?

Don’t have to call in and check till tomorrow, I guess, around 4 or 5 or something.  After 5 it said.  Coffee, need more.  Jack lets out obnoxious stretch with roaring sound either to get my attention or provoke me.  I keep typing, learning poise and composition.  Happiness in what I do, where I am.  Not wishing for anything.  Class tomorrow, grade papers somehow—Had dream last night/this morning, and I include this morning as the end of it ran up to me waking ot sounds of kids playing upstairs.  Dream had me in classroom, first day, people filing in late when just before I thought I’d have a thin section and the department would cancel it.  Told students that were coming in announcing how great it’d be to work with me again to sit down and we can talk after class.  I even ordered the class to be quite so students could read what they just wrote during and in-class assignment, or prompt, something about Philosophy, or which thinkers, 2, did they find important and instrumental in their life.  I myself wrote Plato and MLK.  Explained a bit why, then woke.

When I teach Philosophy at Stanford or wherever, coming from teaching English at the CC level, of all levels of English, I plan to focus on Now, the magic of the meta, immediacy’s gravity and importance, first.  Before addressing selected texts and other exercises.  Definition, going back to my conversation with Bob Coleman in ’99, “Definitional Clarity” as he put it.  Defining Self, where you are and what you’re doing.  Does that presence make you happy… happy and health and the tie therein and of.

Today I feel like propelling joy and Equanimity into the world, in a multiplying and self-supporting stream.  I often voice and repeat “poz vibez” to people in my life near and everywhere I can.  This morning I embody it as I never have.  There’s no reason for stress or angst, or frustration…. Jackie just said something I’d rather him not say and I tell him that’s not nice, and he responds, “Hey, you be quiet, Michael…” Usually I enter into contest with my little Beat.  But not this morning.  I laughed quietly, smile, am still smiling typing this sentence.. told them both I’d go to Starbucks and get what we all deem “Daddy Breakfast”.  Some morning pound cake for little Kerouac and a chocolate milk for little Ms. Austen.  Speaking of Jane Austen, I wonder if I can order all her books online.  Want to lecture on her, or at least write essays on her work and read them.  But I’ll start with Ms. Plath… “…If I’ve killed on man, I’ve killed two….” Sad I’m not lecturing on her this term, but soon again.  Or maybe I can, print some copies of a poem, either “Daddy” or “Lazurus”.  Ideas in tow and I try to inventory and get what I Can to page but they swarm with more frazzle and roam than I can wrangle.  I go on with the morning, into it, and wait for the game.  Today’s, and mine own.

Mike feels anxious and undone, untied, of unusual vibe at day’s beginning.  He arrives in office and gets coffee, sets lunch in fridge across the floor, dives headfirst into everything.  He turns his back to the anxiety, to what stresses him, quite simply.

Mike notices himself writing in several locations, different journals, post-it’s, other straying pieces of paper.  STOP! He tells himself, angrily and yes angrily, like a tyrannical manager or high school gym or math teacher.

He puts one of the journals back in his bag.  Thinks about a bite of the cereal he brought, getting more coffee.  He reasons spending nothing till he’s paid, on Friday.

Keeping self busy and ahead of schedule.  Moving.  Present.  More than aware, simply in some trite and too often marketed mode of “self-awareness”, but present and confirmed in your identity.

Going all in on Self, thought while walking to get coffee.  Not aiming to be any kind of keynote, but writer.  Essayist.  Standalone pieces of writing, ideas built and composed and put to page for generating more ideas and character growth in whomever reads.  Or, ideas for character growth and story accumulation.

Latest coffee has thoughts in rapid revolution and movement.  Promising nothing, questioning nothing.  Only motion, only growth.  Knowing Now more than any before period.  FREED, as stated in blog’s log line or introduction, title bar… whatever it’s called.

 

10:36.  A few moments to collect.  More than a few.  Time abides and indulges the writer, if the writer allows.  How to allow…. Acceptance, embrace of the Now.  Study your Now, be a scholar of the Now.  Seeing all surrounding and not so much assessing it, but rather adoring it, adorning yourself with all elements on either side.  Each sight is significant, all voices compound and collect to contribute to your composition.  To be a scholar of self and your Self in your Now isn’t to matriculate at an institution but to study your own movements and moods, and modes.  Write everything down.  Try everything.

Equation in all day.  How to solve, what to multiple, to what do I just a bit add, what to subtract.  Thinking such right now, at this desk.  And what for lunch.  Can’t do Texanita, again.  Shouldn’t go out, period.  I won’t.  I’ll eat at desk.  Get pasta from breakroom across floor, eat quick then clock out to write in one of those thinking pods.  Or not.  Not sure what to do.  On lunch now.  Just clocked out.  Why.  Don’t spend any money I tell myself.  Just ate pasta, but still hungry.  What to do, what to do… Why am I giving this the thought that I am?  Leadership, so many are into leadership… “LEADERSHIP”.  Leading Self, that’s what really holds, that’s what rewards and gets you closer to your There.  Leading Self out of this lunch stall, this ‘what do I do’ drain.

Thinking of driving to Starbucks.  Get out of office for a tick.  Get a latte.  But that would break the no-spend mandate for day.  Not if I use change… and there I go, again.

Went to sbux and bought a latte, with change.  Carried with me $6 in change but only used about $4-something, as I only asked for three shots, not the morning 4 recipe.  Training new-hire, later.

 

I’m turning around this day.  Well, I already have but doing it more now with this three-shot mocha–  mean latte.  In my vehicle, of my Self, teaching self from day and every conversation transpiring in the hours of the day.  Sleuthing more knowledge, more information and understanding of where I am and what I’m doing, the prose of the meta, the story of it, this IT.  At a desk, whereas just last July I was pouring wine at that winery.  Which had its gems, don’t misunderstand.  But, here I am.  I’m here.  More than present and “aware”.  Even more than in a umbrage of understanding.  I’m provoked and taught, enlivened by Now.

Not at all what I was this morning, not a single sliver of that uneasiness.  Writing down points to hit in tonight’s meeting, tonight’s session and ideas back and forth and deconstruction.  Not at all a foray, this form, me in this form, forming a new Now.

1:34, and I’m closer to training.  Interesting, training someone.  Feel like I’m training self.  To be a stronger speaker, teacher, person, father, worker, business owner, thinker, runner, one knowing their Now, one wanting to travel, be free, fully FREE.  The latte speaks to me like Hutcherson’s mallets, Coltrane’s sax, Miles…  Notes, everything, now 1:36.  I’m instantaneously and with no awareness seeing time as something else, each minute need be written.  Each minute a book, a bridge, a voice, student and teacher me more free.

 

Santa Rosa, CA.

Want the location to change.  Need to make it change.  Self-publish everything.  Spend no money.  Save.  Share all content. Charge nothing, nothing.  Kamikaze of composition.  The motion says enough, words nearly not necessary.

Want the location to soon read ‘Paris, France’, and ‘London, England’… ‘Madrid, Spain’.  Everywhere, Everywhere…

 

Mike takes a second to stand, stretch, look around the office.  He feels dominant, moved closer to his There, more apart and in control of his Now.  He snacks on some almonds, then one of some healthy bar he packed for himself a week ago but forgot was in drawer.  No more need for caffeine, the clock was enough.  Each minute and set of numbers that presented themselves to him, more than adequate, more than what he needed to move it all forward.  Everything.  He’d go wherever he wanted.  Where thoughts were, where they landed and flew from.

Papers everywhere, no cares.  Mike sees it all as opportunity, an opportunity he created and vows to each day approaching have replicated.  By his perspective and perception, Personhood and valuation of Now.

Sentence.  Ones to self.  Wrote more, another and another, till something was said to end day in some mythical sequence, scribble set.  Jots compile and Mike reads them but only for a micro-blink and eyelash movement.  There’s something else being said, right to side.

8:49.

Busy.  Busier than busy.  Love it.  Addicted to the project accumulation and beat, this morning.  This beat, this one, I’ll keep.

 

Mike reminds self of victory this morning in not getting a latte, saving both time and money.  He feels a cold coming on but refuses to give it any acknowledgement or time.

Mike decides to know his Now as thoroughly and intimately as he can, and however long he stays in class tonight that will be much of his thesis.  Knowing Now, the Now, the Now you’re in and need write.

 

The way we do notes here at Sonic truly has me writing differently.  To myself, about self, about what I want for self, and the principles I institute in the moment.  In the present, where there’s the most life— Present Tense is the only tense that makes sense.  Capitalization is justified as it’s a capital idea, capitalizing on the Now begets and breeds more life, more ideas and insight.  Decide the day, the way, YOUR way, the new way of YOU.

Work is the intoxicant.  Stay trapped in its act and math.  Write and read You, not as you.  Value in objective consideration of your movements and sight, actuations and possibilities.

Former student messages me for some “wisdom”. I ask if she’s okay and she says yes but struggles with the decision concerning career.  Wrote her, “Don’t focus on the career, or selecting one.  Give your ideas to inward exploration and aims you want to see materialized.  Rather than pressure yourself, deconstruct your curiosities.  Have to laugh a bit, or not so much laugh but collect self and meditate in where I am in life.  Was where she is, now.  I remember it, but even deciding I wanted to pursue English and Literature, changed.  With wine, and now with Sonic.  Hate to see her pressure herself.  She’ll be fine.  She’s smart, and tireless in her scholastic efforts and habits.  Her message lifted my morning, and now the cold symptoms or whatever that was I woke with, not present.  Like a ghost that stay a bit for a haunt, then lost interest in pestering me.

 

Mike writes notes to himself.  On post-it’s.  Litters the surface of his work area with them.  Mike jokingly told someone in another department, the recruiter that actually recruited Mike, that one day Mike will own Sonic, and that Dane can retire early.  A joke yes but as Mike walked to the coffee spot, not so much a joke.  That was his aim… the platform to the platform itself.  Dane advised, “Use this as a platform to get what you want.” Mike promised self that he would save to one day invest heavily in the company.  A new goal… this day, giving him a goal, much like the career goal markers he had along his story… wanting to be a paleontologist when a kid from his love of all the dinosaur types and species, their teeth and tails.  Then a pro baseball player, a goal that lasted from about 10 or 11 till about 16 just before his surgery.  Then, to be an English Professor.  Those goals, the only definitive ones that would comprise his aspiration pattern.  And now, to own Sonic.  How to do so….  Mike takes more notes than he can write, in head then some to paper, distracted by a vision then a post-it again.  Mike had no true aims in the wine industry, partially why he left.  Mike retired, in his mind.  Now, he’s a consumer, and not much one at that as now he wishes to cut back, immensely on consumption.  Maybe one day he’d own a small label, but why.

 

10:45, looking at notes from tablet I use in Field—

 

Berkeley, beyond beautiful today.

Fee like it’s too hot for this hoodie. Or warm.

1/23

Deciding I’m taking lunch. By self. To write.

In the Field, you see everything differently. As part of a map, as part of a plan, but not one rigid or suffocating.

On Monterey Avenue, looking at houses. I want houses in several points on map… Monterey, Bend, New York. Write books at each.

Thinking about writing and teaching tonight, more than lunch, for once.

1/24/19

1227– Warm. Changing mood and attitude and the day follows suit.

So nice to be able to be outside, on a day like this, in Berkeley, for work… for this… the stories.. my story in the street.

122– Thought is trapped in something, but I think it’s the mulch or fertilizer or soil behind me I smell. Lady riding her bike up Marin Avenue. Have to run, tonight.

135… today, spring octave and feel… sun and how the birds sound. They’re not speaking winter today.

1:55… can only think about running.

2:08 each word said by anyone near me, teaching me. More animation in everything, from class to page.

210– Field Sales, I now see, only now, this day, on whatever street this is in Albany… Tulare Avenue. Walking and speaking and noting and observing, learning… model for me and my story, only today do I adequately grasp.

 

10:49

The Field, a place of not only education and growth, but dreaming, seeing, speaking.  More than a “platform”.  It, this, is a window and door, gate and bridge.

11:27 and feeling tired.  May go straight to bed after class.  What do I do for lunch.  Should get out of the office, work at the coffee spot down the street.  Not in the mood for the new breakroom, that nook.

 

Mike slows down.  Takes a breath.  Refuses to let the cold or whatever it is grip him too thoroughly.  He coughs twice, thinks about tomorrow, being in the Field, in SF, Richmond district where it’s cold and a bit unforgiving in conditions.

Mike looks left and sees his journal, the one he’s jotted in and used for his inward jots since being hired by Sonic.  He opens it.  Writes.  Anything coming to and staying in mind, taking loving residency.

Mike decides he’ll post at day’s end.  Make practice of this, day’s he’s in office.  And ones he’s not.  He’d post everything, everything.  Study it all, deconstruct his curiosities as he urged Keila, earlier.

Sonic is more than a simple platform.  A divine dais, for him, his story.  For anyone, really.  Not just the technology or consumer advocacy and ideology, or even how desirable a place it is to work, or even the story of how it came to be.  Its present, identity, the voice and coherence of its music…  Sonic is music.  Tracks Mike becomes addicted to and can’t turn off as he’s unable to, thoughts will quite literally not allow such.

 

Need to set a goal for lunch.  What.  What do I set for self?  Do I go out? Do I stay in…  Stop overthinking.  In fact, stop thinking.  Thinking that cafe right down the street, on Sebastopol Road past that main entrance to the condos or apartments, whatever they are.  Done.  Decided.  Can’t remember what I had there last time, but it wasn’t bad.

 

Mike looks at clock, 11:50, at peace with his decision to eat at the little deli or café down the road.

 

1:26.  Back from lunch.  Texanita, what was chosen.  Had water with shrimp quesa’.  Now, readying for training of new-hire.

What’s my happiness “hack”?  No hack.  Just decision, and actuation.  Desk a bit disheveled but I’m not at all bothered by it.  The “real time” ideology and practice tickling me, enticing me into new idea rooms, walking though new truisms, and with them.

 

Mike waits for 2pm.  He’s ready.  Feeling better.  More awake from this newest coffee he just grabbed from the machine across the floor.  He vows to self to not force pace, to be objective, consider him as someone else, an observe.  He will deconstruct his curiosities.  Mike tells self again how ready he is.

The day tells Mike to propel more wildly and creatively, be more free in his Now.  The philosophy of Now, the Now itself and its composition….  Something to bring up tonight in class, he thinks.

Mike wants to track his self-education and guidance, much the same way the Field Sales Leads do with their Reps, and how Mike does so with the Leads.  Mike refuses to obsess over pace, and/or anything quantitative.

 

4:54.  Couple more obligations then leave for school.  Dreaming about bed, right now.  I’m tired and don’t think any more coffee would necessarily help, to be honest.

Class… getting in mode, and mood, even though I’d love to just post it and go home and get into bed.  Forcing self to teach.  Let the pace dictate itself, don’t force it or anything about it.

The contour presents itself, materializes in worded form and not.  Insinuation of the demands of the stage and characters, me being one of them seeing all of it, feeling each step in getting to my There.

Sipping sparkling water now.  My character knows its plan, the mission of tonight and the week’s remainder.  Inventorying each effort, or re-writing them.  Keep writing, keep the narration aloft and moving, for me and every incremental musing.