from another ‘nother journal …

4/17/19

Writing in too many spots.

No more on this laptop.  Noting everything, this morning.  Have a schedule for self.  Desired time for “cruising altitude” as Dad would say…..

Lost in a thought, not sure how to write.  Running at lunch, what to write from there.  Need a break.  Need to toss backpack, or just use for running gear.  Yes, the latter.

Organized desk a bit, plugged in laptop wife gave me.  Time for break, some journal jots, or walk to car to get running gear.  Or both.  How to optimize day… how.  Grade papers when on campus, then home for quick dinner, bed.  And goddamnit, wake…. No, won’t promise.  Will only do.

All the loose paper pieces and swarms around me, distracting, dividing my concentration and enslaving each parcel.

10:07.  Break.  Just for a bit.  Sparkling water.  And what else… running stuff.  Do I want to run at lunch, or take self to lunch.  Here I go overthinking, again..

Running.  I’ve decided, finally.  Need a snack, hydrate, get gear.  I can just see someone reading this years after I’m gone and noting something in the margin like, “Goddamn, just do something already!!!” I agree, just so you know.  Huh, there’s an idea for a book, note to future reader.  And another from yesterday, the ‘argument for me’ idea.  Like a very much stretched out cover letter and CV.

Different route today, for run.  Out 3.5, back 3.5.

 

10:30 – Done with a 90 minute challenge to self for morning.  Schedule done.  Or a draft at least.  My first, composed.  Team arrives in about 20.  Should go to car, get running facets.  Where am I running?  Just get out there and run, Mike…..  note for Reps, time sheet-related.  Old journal taken from backpack, should go through those pages, what I wrote when first hired, all this information about the internet I NEVER knew.

Seeing now why I stress the habit and practice and maintained habit and practice of journal writing so much.  To know you, your NOW, the Nows that approach.  What you want, why you want it.  Today is different, as all todays are, but I note that there’s something more paralleling about today with my aims.  The office, travel, running all over the world and writing about it.  The journal is a beacon of YOU, a place that’s more than a place, but a stage and bibliotheque or understanding and exploration.  The desk messy, and I don’t mind.  It’s honest, it’s NOW, it’s ME.  Why am I capitalizing so much.  No need to analyze or even lightly understand.

The journal teaches not so much ‘me about me’ but to see more clearly and honestly.  Fearlessly.  To not fear, to not question, to just madly LIVE.

Working on attitude, perspective, how I contextualize matters and then react to them.  If someone says something, and I find it getting under my skin or into my thoughts, echoing in me in any way, then pause.  Find sense on the page.  Make sense of it, of everything, on page.  In this “journal”.  And, honestly, if I can accomplish something of that magnitude and altitude on a page, is it really just a one-dimension and as-it-appears tablet, or “journal”?

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Typing on laptop, but not. 

By a proxy, proxy of this keyboard I plugged in, if that’s a proxy.  Never much understood the proxy thing.  But, my laptop is functioning.  Conditionally.  Sipping the Sanglier Pinot I bought the other day, my day off, but not wanting to lay it down.  “I’m gonna lay it down for a while, uuuuuhhhhhh…” I hear so many say, like they know so much about wine, and and what wine wants to say and how it’s to be read, and tasted.

You know what, I much like this more, this keyboard— Have to stop addressing tech, writing about it.  May have saved self something like, I don’t know… $2000, something like that.  I definitely need celebrate tonight.  Not running on morning but hoping I wake to write, or do something literary, writing something of some sentence sowing, that I can sell and “market” or, I don’t know….

Company event tomorrow.  No idea what to expect or see.  I’ll take it all as it presents itself to my story, to me, the one narrating.  No music, I walk on eggshells with this goddamn device…. How many battles have I had with devices, with technology itself.  And why do I keep having them.  ‘Cause I put myself there, in that arena, gladiator me on the sand or whatever that terrain versus the lion with saliva portrait-style jaws, for me, the writer expecting it to work.  I’ve been had, I ‘got took’ as I was once told.  Yeah, so….Need another glass of that Sanglier Pinot.  Need stay closer to wine and paper.  The journal doesn’t need another journal plugged into it to work, that I know.  Feel like a wobbling jester typing on this fucking thing.  Not so much a fault, but a result.  A behavioral outcome that need be studied, clinically.

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12/16/18

Semester ending this week.  English 100 tomorrow.  End of weekend, and so what it doesn’t matter I’ve been working at, away at, some project Friday and yesterday anyway.  Now, before bed, I’m seeing my office as more than mandated and decreed now, since today on an errand with little Kerouac telling him that one day I’ll have—one day soon—my own office and he can come play video games and help daddy tell stories.  This is all a story, I’ve always known but today spending as much time with little Kerouac and Ms. Austen as I did I see my narrative in more fixed amenity.  Being taught by them and by the day.

On new couch, writing for first time, jazz, one more beer….  4am again targeted.  If I do rise and fly when alarm cries, go straight to the coffee I made… that’ll help the writer be brighter.

Home from Katie’s, only having a sip of a wine I’ve never had… not telling me much but the thoughts go everywhere with its everything.  Notes and random chord changes, like this track, “Big Paul” by Burrell and Coltrane.  Everything explained…

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12/10/18

img_9420.jpg

Downstairs after dinner and everyone in bed but me.  Long day, whole day in field and all I wanted was this.  Some Jazz, low-lit room, xmas tree providing most of my sight.  Walking up and down hills in SF makes me want there, the houses, I want just one of them… some impressive grander in my head bouncing forth and back and back to my senses which even I now question.  Outside, sky and air remind me of what time of year envelops my Now.

Music on me unexpectedly quits.  No mood to fight, quibble, scuffle.  So I leave it off.  Could turn it back on, with phone, but I’m composed in the composition of this room.  Could use another beer for session.  But I’ll wait a minute.  And the music comes back.  What is this devilish device doing to me?  To my writing.  Ignore it, I tell myself.  At lunch, which I told myself I wouldn’t do, dine out, I was in Harvey’s (think it was called) writing in the corner, before the omelet arrived and walked around Castro taking in everything— lights and cars, shops and the bars with their engaging names, street lights and the evidence of history.  Going back tomorrow, and making it more a point to write in “real time” as some say.  But I hate that utterance and word sequence.  “Real” “time”.  If you have to note that it’s “real”, or remind yourself or a reader or observer that it’s “real”, there’s an obvious incongruence.  To me, anyway.  So.. point, write in immediacy spree.  While people walk by, walking their dogs, as they answer the door to us knocking to tell them about what we’re doing for the community, put all to page.

Down here, in this room, family room while family upstairs swirls and swivels and swims in dream, I’m doing something, I think.  Missed class tonight, and I feel awful, but no choice was mine.  One of the sales leads out so I was the transporter man or whatever, taking team to and from between Noe Valley and Castro.  San Francisco, begging me for conversation the same way that Paris would let go of Hem.  I’m out there as a Field Sale Supervising, most presently and poignantly doing my job, but as well not letting the writing Me away gaze. 

This room, now, just what I need.  Tree luminous, piano notes and keys hit, and now me.  Thinking of how I want to be seen, read, this job I have at a tech company that’s making me more a writer than I ever would have forecasted.  Drive down with reps, talking about certain topics then re-focusing on what we were about to do with this new campaign, me the whole time thinking how with business if everything was this exciting, like in the wine world, businesses would more readily attain what they sought.  The room says more to me, like just enjoy the room, go get a beer and be Hemingway for a night.  Think about your city, SF, and how tomorrow will be definitively different than today.  This room, now, not so much what I need but what’s ME.  What I embody… composition, the page, me here on couch, in assembly.  Time, rather “real”.

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Again catching self in an overthinking maelstrom

I leave the house.  Come to downtown Santa Rosa, to Beer Baron.  A place I’ve only been once.  Ordered a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, one I’ve never had before and don’t think beyond that.  Just enjoying this whim, this sudden cruise downtown.  Not sure where the direction of the writing’s going, and I don’t need know.  To the characters I was thinking of in the tasting room.  Yes…. The two that are behind the bar and want to get out of the industry, starting their own wine gallery.  That’s what they call it at first…. I came here just for this, for new ideas and brainstorming, not be at the drawing board but to draw a board of ideas.

All this before class.  All of it, of this, my new stories and wine thoughts, wines I’ve tasted recently, yesterday with the St. Francis Chardonnay then some Kobler Viognier when home.  Everything in the pages, on them, constituting them.

This place, a serious bar more than a restaurant or any wine bar I could see myself opening.  Earlier thinking of self as failed in some wine aims and dreams.  As the waitress just now puts down the glass, I find I’m not in any way “failed”.  Have I even really started?  What if this could be my office, everyday, I think.  Come here and work from noon to whenever.  Why not.

I stare at the Sauvignon Blanc for a bit before smelling it, and much before tasting.  I let it be a symbol, a reminder of wine’s life in my life, its presence and my past and present, all futures.  I won’t let self take a sip just yet, but rather draw my characters at their winery, at day’s end, having a glass of Pinot on the patio. They talk about just going for it.  Saving whatever they have saved and putting it into some wine business.  A brokerage, they think.

But then I as the writer put the idea on hold and think of how I’ll approach them, this story.  Their stories.  The wine story coupled with their stories and mine.  I stop everything and focus on them, Jane and Elly.  Jane out from somewhere in the midwest, always wanting to work in the wine industry, years ago and now here and tired of being tasting room locked.  Elly, from San Francisco leaving her corporate corner to be in wine’s everything.  She’s worked two harvests, then to tasting room as production for some reason just wasn’t her thing.  She knew why, and didn’t know why.  She loves the winemaking process of course and everything that goes into harvesting and fermentation, barreling-down lots and pressing, even the shoveling of tanks.  But the people in the tasting room and the words they’d say, the interactions with people, called to her and wouldn’t let her ignore.

I take my first sip of the SB and focus on me writing, what brought me here.  Then the two characters.  What we all have in common.  They of course, or maybe not so obviously younger than me.  I keep writing.  Till this is the ONLY thing I do.  Writing about writing and people and what they do for work. How work and our jobs, labor, determines so much of our character and how we estimate the world around us.

Think today is the day I finally killed overthought.  I’m not editing, or measuring, forecasting or worrying about how anything I write, type, is perceived.  I’m just moving and not allowing any stationary sets for this writer or any of his characters.  The two girls start a website, for anyone coming to wine country.  They see themselves as fashionable intel, something to make people more pleased with their choice to come to Sonoma County much the way I’m please with my election to come here and write.  Relax before class.  See me in business with son and daughter, eventually.  I quit the wine industry but am very much back in it on my own accord and set of terms, rules, and I guess some regulatory rattle.

Second sip.  Such real and truthful tropical body and bravado.  Nothing invasive or excessively aggressive.  This is a character that has me more into my characters and these new characters I’m writing.  I return to them and what they want, what would make them happy, what in wine they want to grow toward.  What do I want to be, grow toward.  Wine, travel, speaking on wine both metaphorically and immediately.  Tonight, open something new.  Study it. Let wine dictate my own fate, give me direction and more introspection.  Tempted to take the night off from class.  No.  Use it as speaking practice.  Not practice at all, the second sip says, and I sipped minutes ago.  Can still feel that tropical shock and rush, set of steps. 

I pick up the glass and nose what remains, which is a good two sips I’m guessing.  40 next year.  That’s where my head is.  And then what.  Maybe I’ve overthinking that as well.  Sure I am.  Look at the wine, focus on it… wine writer and journalist, one who actually writes and journals and doesn’t just take a blare of ridiculous shots of himself and other wine “experts” or “writers”.  Glass up again, sip….  Follow the stories, MY story.  Don’t think at all.  Just write.  What I tell the students, every semester.

Talking about writing, tonight. That’s it.  Beyond simple argument, or any attempt to persuade which was the chapter they had to read in that “Prose Reader”.  Or maybe that’s singularly what I should discuss.  I think about taking notes, but the wine says no.  Be in the moment.  Or be above the moment, flying and hovering above simple time and whatever that clock reads, dictates.

Finding that when you write down ideas, they speak back.  They instruct you on possibility and presence.  They talk back, love back, write back.  Thank fun to the Story, and everything, LIFE, for today.  For the embrace and blind subscription to whim.  To not sink into overthink.  To blog and jot against any overthought.

With he glass done, I slow.  Thank of the walk yesterday with my son in the vineyard and showing him the remaining clusters on the canes.  I had him taste a couple….  I thought of us, in business, how our visions of our company will differ and will be surprisingly in some places identical.  All this from wine.  Thinking of wine, living wine, writing wine.  Wine writing me, since my first day in the St. Francis tasting room, 2006.

10/22/18

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Sonic Jot

Next day, the second where I feel like I’m on a rocket ship, just ascending and appreciating altitude.  Third day of victory, of production, producing, feeling my life and creative tide just going and rising and taking me with it.  On lunch now, peanuts and a ginger ale I bought from shop.  Stomach still a bit uneasy from that vegetarian burrito, yesterday.  Work today is more than enlivening and exhilarating.  I did feel this a couple times in the wine industry, but with no consistency.  Can’t remember the last time at Roth I had three consecutive days of pure life and topic ownership.  My story becomes its own storm, now.   Its own Now.  In this large warehouse-like quarter with Sonic everything all around me and everything that Sonic embodies, from the communicative facet to people just visibly enjoying what they do.  I’m definitely space-bound.  My work is no longer work but something that’s redefined and redrawn and re-purposed my literary purpose.

Walking someone through the office and into this break arena earlier, I could see the amazement and disbelief in her facial shape.  How the company encourages its people, how the “employees” are more so investors and partners, family members to the immediate and distant motions.  All motions overlap and intermingle, creating a creative concurrency.  Their own currency to be exchanged and interchanged…  I notice my own face change shape, sitting here.  Taking another sip, not needing any real lunch but just the snack I have and everything on either side— left and right, 12 and 6.  All these corners and visuals decide on magnifying my manuscript’s physiology, writing new one for this writer who anymore writes about work as he’s embedded and invested in work that binds to his moral and ethic etch.

I’m horribly saddened, honestly, when I hear of people going to places they hate for work. Of course someone could ask, “Why would anyone do that to themselves?” Yes, an easy question to ask, but not so easy to answer or attach any formula.  It’s not that they do anything to themselves, but haven’t found their pages, haven’t landed in their story.  What I recognize, appreciate and further analyze in my sitting here is that only now do I see.  Did I find not only a home, but a topic.  A book, and another one.  Me, a writer, literary guy, beatnik from the wine industry, now more fiery and eager and moved to words.  AT A TECH COMPANY.  But this isn’t some simple tech company, or start-up or wanna-be startup village.  This, here, the creative is basal, inherent.  Expected.  Sonic, like a university hopping around in exponent climates.  Here, you’ll hear people say how they write everything down.  You see other writers here, other thinkers, people seeking to enjoy where they work—  More than just “enjoy” it.  Live it.  Be it.  The IT, to it all.  What they do, yes, but more who they are. That’ how I see myself.

My story just arrived.  At 39.  Late?  No.  Lovely timing.  If anything, it’s more than punctual and optimal, just before 40.  This place has me forgetting I’m 39, if you should know, and you should know if I’m with your attention.  I just fixate on the day, whatever project to which I tend. The company’s name, Sonic, denoting and connoting sound, and speed, something audible, and then I think of course of music and being a literary bloke hear Kerouac reminding me that the only truth is music.  Here, in the break room and in the office proper, between enclaves and hamlets of encouragingly and electric and eclectically adorned cubes and desk, you hear it.  See, feel, then a sixth and eighth sense.  Someone you acknowledge or you think you do adequately but only know you’re there, in it all.

New writer, new vision.  New understanding and embrace of purpose.  I am writing a book, about this place.  More than a place but a dimension, a warp of time, timing.  Forgot about the ginger ale, peanuts.  Hearing co-workers talk of their projects and ideas while on lunch.  They don’t talk about any TV show, who’s dating who, where they’re going this weekend. But work.  WORK.  It’s not work. It’s more than passion.  It’s creative escalation and an impassioned saddle of axioms and projects.  Seeing each day as its own book, not just a chapter.  This is not a new chapter in my life but a new life, a new armada of books I’m about to write.  This day— what would it be about?  Learning, something new.  Spreadsheet.  Yes, me doing spreadsheets.  I was deathly afraid of them, before coming here, and up until yesterday still quite unnerved at the thought of toying with rows, columns, cells, formulae.  No longer, though.  My self-certain, assurance and general fortitude eclipse any anxiety.  Moving at a speed I’d deem supersonic, frankly.  And I don’t see myself working, I don’t.  I see the growth and the metaphysical and ontological model re-write itself over and over, from this company’s thesis. New song, everyday.  New chords.  New opus offerings and new interpretations of everything around me.  And, again, spreadsheets are part of this paragraph, part of this elasticized praise for where I now sit, in this lunching province. 

Stomach, solved.  Today did so.  Cured me of whatever that restaurants plate did.  And I forget it, universally.  I’m made more healthy and assembled as a writer in tech’s clef and step.  Anything past workplaces instilled, left, far in days behind me. Today’s book, then tomorrow’s, where I’ll be at Month 6, and yes I have a specific aim and tangible destination for such.  Never did that with wine’s world. I didn’t need to, as no such thought was ever invited or encouraged. The culture of not only writing and taking notes here, but education both from self but colleagues makes me feel like I’ve discovered some cryptozoological wonder, asking myself What is THIS? and Where am I?  Imagine that, being not merely in love with where you are, what you do, where one works, but seeing yourself as healthier, happier, more composed as an immediate consequence. 
10/3/18

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The Glass

img_7604Late, and wine and music, thinking about the day and week ahead.  Day off tomorrow from office new but class later.  Going to put thinking in mode of close, already for semester.  The writing daddy thinking, thinks now, bigger than in past sittings.  Tonight, Pinot Noir.  Went to winery he just in the last month left, yesterday.  He misses it, wine, the industry.  Would he ever go back?  Fuck no, he says to himself.  He says it loud so he can hear himself think it and say it, and feel it more before the next sip.  He’ll have his own winery one day, something small.  That small little tasting studio and room where people, anyone, can just taste wine and talk.

He closes all the other docs on his laptop.  Focuses on his memoir or note or memoir-ish novel piece, he throws more Pinot into his circuitry.  And I’m tired already, even though I did manage a nap earlier, and after having some coffee.  Guess the writer needed it.  Mike looks at the wine, remembers his last days at that Chalk Hill spot, going into the vineyard his last day with the TR manager to do his exit and she saying this is how it should be done as he’d always talk about the vineyard and everything in it, how he’d walk it everyday.

He’d write it.  That tell-all.  Or something like a tell-all.  He wasn’t trying to expose anyone or call anyone out, or do any tabloid shit on his blog, he just wanted to write the wine industry, the bar the glass the towels the inventory.  Each turn, jot on a paper clipped by a spreadsheet metal clip-y thing.  He looks again at the glass and writes more notes about it, what he thinks someone from, maybe somewhere like, Indiana would say.  Some small town Indiana person, now a rich oil or farm behemoth.  “That’s nice, that’s like one of those Pinots that tells you what Pinot is, what it’s all about… I’ve had Pinots like this before, I’ve had a lot of them…” He’d heard lines like this, so many times before, someone trying to sound like something, some wine something, an expert or “connoisseur” or “aficionado”, or just a fucking EXPERT.  But it’s in his head.  He knows he has to write this down.  All of it.  He sipped the Pinot faster, pour another glass or sip right from neck. It’d changed, 

Wine speaking to him in octaves applauded, in his thoughts.  Empty glass, full head of wine visions, walking a vineyard again like he did at every wine he’d ever worked at.  He doesn’t know where he is in this session, and he doesn’t care.  The mocha, maple, cherry and milk chocolate from the wine speaking even several minutes after sipped.  He sees himself light up after writing about glass’ occupant, even after gone, even before letting it sing through a bottle’s neck like he were Kerouac.  Much to tell, more now later.  As a writing daddy ought do.  Much anew do.

9/23/18

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Noting everything I learn in the tech scene,

world, language, behavior pattern and way.  I’m one with a little reluctance, but I’m using what I know how to do well, and from there amplify.  Guess that’s my new tone and talk, ‘amplify’, and amplification.  Think it’s safe to say I won’t learn how to code any time soon, nor design sights, install internet.  I speak, I write, I guess I sometimes entertain, I speak (already said that, sorry), and story-tell.  That’s what I do, what I know how to do.  13 minutes left in break and my eyes are still on that coffee drink.  But I’d have to use my debit card.  Don’t want to do that.  Just make yourself another cup of coffee and let it cool off, I say to self.  People play video games off to right, and again I take the energy here much more with a welcome write than how I felt at the winery in final days at Roth.  And I hate to say that and keep mentioning that in these entries because I love wine, I love even the industry, or at least what I knew the industry to be before I was devoured by it.  I swear, if I would’ve stayed…. I don’t want to think about it.  Wouldn’t have been healthy, or beneficial to me, and certainly not the writing.

I’m eager to speak to this new hire, and see what the girl I’m working very closely with to a blessing’s believability, T, says.  Questions, educating, me being educated while I’m more or less educating from the less than 12 full days of life here.  I’m going to teach from what I know.. sales, speaking, not just relating to customers but listening, seeing what they need and providing a certain narrative and depiction of what Sonic is.  Not sure why I call it “office new”, still.  Habit, or just being a funny, quirky, language tussling and fiddling pen bloke.  I don’t know.

Less than five minutes and I just made my coffee so I’m prep’d for the remaining hours in my day, here in tech’s step.  I shouldn’t say that, I think.  This office is much more than just a tech spot, place of business.  I see Sonic as a consumer advocacy group as I said to T a few days ago and earlier today, I think.  I’m learning how to do not just better business but more coherent business.  More creative, more life, more education… I don’t know where to start sometimes when it comes to this new office.  Sonic.. and me, the Lit and writing prof’, put into a new book and new storytelling  assemble and vocal.  Doing wha tI can in the breaths last, make them last, looking around the break room and feeding from everything from the video game sounds to the conversations right I listen to but don’t at all.  New job, new words and walls, chairs and tables, coffee and doors.  Everything a propellent, ascending action and atmosphere from one character to ‘nother.  The observations and written reactions and reflections, MY business.

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9/9/18—

Photo on 9-9-18 at 9.08 AM #2.jpg

Son tells me this morning that he wants to be an author—  “I want to write books when I grow up, Daddy.  Like my workbook [that he was yesterday working on], I love writing.” I smiled and thought more about writing and how I write, or try, blog it all and while last night sipping the last of that Napa blend, now dead, I thought off the meta of writing, of writing about writing.  Why we write, why right now instead of taking a shower or doing budgetary shit, or driving up to Healdsburg early to do whatever, or doing anything around the house like most “real men” would on their day off, I write.  Think in poetic pulses, or try.  Listen to the dishwasher that I just put on, and think about notes, what I tell students about writing.  Or not tell, but share.

Harvest starting, or in some spots well into its due, friends of mine waking at 0400, then I wonder if I did the same what I could get done.  I can’t think about it or write it anymore, what I’d write and how I’d reach 3000 or more words if I just set my alarm and did it.  It’s not setting the alarm that’s the issue.  That’s more than easy, it’s effortless.  What if I rolled out of, from sheets and pillow and dove into prose.  This morning, a mocha.  4 shots which I haven’t in some time done, and saying to self, “Amplify, amplify… teaching, writing, the classroom, tech…” What do I want, what do you want, what do you want to amplify?  It’s literally that simple, as I see it.  Whatever you want, attainable.  You choose to subscribe to antithetical mind, if you’re not moving.  “Why don’t I have what I want?” or “…what I’m after?” Draw all thoughts.  Be more than AT the drawing board.  BE the drawing board.  Be moving.  Be in constant actuation and deliberation, forward and with your creative fire.

Since I started fiddling with writing, I’ve found it to be an exploration of my own thinking, how I generate thoughts and what I want from the act of writing.  Again, I could be doing anything right now, anything.  I chose to come here, to the island counter, sit, sip mocha, get to page.  My son telling me he wants to write, I need to write faster.  When he’s in middle school, or high school at the latest, I need be touring with these words.  Officially clocked into Day 3 of this challenge, or sprint.  A measure for when I’m forty.  Jazz in the room with me, and my thoughts go everywhere while still contained in looking at my son and high bright eager motioned expression when telling me of his book-borne ambitions.  Writing, seeing the association you have with words, and what they will do for you, to you, what story you want to tell.  I think.  Of this.  Everyday.  Me, writing father, adjunct for over 12 years, finally freed from wine’s industry to extend my written and poetic identity in tech.  Can’t say that’s ever been done, has it?  Just have to see, where all this will take me.  What knowledge I’ll pocket.  Quiet house, not used tot his so early on a Sunday.  Not even 0845.  Will be in 1 minute.  I feel rush, a rush in me to get things done, to finish a book, to put it out there— about journaling, writing everything down, blogging, seeing everything as material.  Even this plastic baggie of change that I’ve collected over the past couple months.  What do I do with it?

Setting budget for day, week.  For the first time in a while, since leaving the wine world, I’m quite comfortable.  Thank the craft.  Setting up the other blog so readers won’t see adds or other garbage to the sides.  I’m revolving and cartwheeling in thought and thorough thoroughness of my Personhood.  The Healdsburg Square will see me today.  WILL.  I’ll precipitate with my written will in whatever room I write.  The bakery?  The grocery?  Can’t stand those flies, though, at Oakville’s patio zone.  Every time I try to write through them, I am shoed away, like I were the fly in their annex.  Where else in HB is there to write, I think.  Flying Goat, I guess.  Find a spot there, though, is time arduous.  So I think somewhere else, possibly.  SHED?  Yes.  It’s indoors.  And their espresso is some sexy fuel-quake love I’ve never tasted, or haven’t since Paris.  And, if feeling well into my Beatnik notes, the beers on tap are all those that speak to a Madigan, one like me who writes.

Back hurts from run yesterday, the 10 miles which was a war to do.  So I stretch while sitting and writing, breath in this kitchen air, look left and see crumbs from the little breakfast treat I took for the baby Beats.  So much around me, so much to tell me, tell me where to whim, where and how to write.  This semester, possibly and more than likely my last conventional term, I invest every cell.  All tables and chairs, with this poem I just started writing, new Newness and pages, streams of collection and meditation.

Yesterday I wrote, “Enjoy and use your scene.” Mine, now, in this kitchen next to the bag of coins and my depleting mocha, the poetry journal, my wallet and the cash I was counting to my left, reminds me I’m alive, so alive and into this year, summer ending, that amplification is the only remaining route.  Winemaker friend of mine, yesterday, saying how he was at a wine tasting and the wines spoke to him newly, in some different or hip way, calling them hipster wines.  Didn’t ask for elaboration, but was put in assertion, asseveration in my wined story.  I always come back to wine and what she says to me, what my fictive figure, Kelly, does her first week in a tasting room.  This scene, room, page, more than fanciful and enjoyable.  Back to poem…

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Telling the kids we have to go up and get dressed, brush teeth, get ready for day, but I give in and let them have more time.  And I could use more time on the day’s story, this second day of a thirty-day measurer.  What will I be at the end.  Who cares.  Have some time to self today, and I’m thinking after the run go somewhere, to some coffee shop, locally, and write.  I do want to take some vineyard pics as well if I can.  But Saturdays are busy, no matter where you are in the season, so that could prove problematic.  Maybe just down the road, to Hook & Ladder, or De Loach.  Don’t want to do too much driving.  So remain close to this writing studio… needing to take a break, now, go cuddle with my babies, there on the couch and before they’re so grown they’ll avoid writing-daddy at whatever turn they see.  I laugh to self, looking at them.  I’m a dad.  ME.  40 next year.  So now I see the inner-shove for this 30-day project.  Get self as close to what I want for self at 40 as possible.  My office… travel… more wine notes and tastings, blogging and… yes, I need to go tasting today, somewhere just down the road.  I’m thinking De Loach is my spot.  Little Pinot, or Chard, think they make a Syrah of some shape.  But, after a run.  After a run, no buts.  How far will I go.. how far can I go, what distance I can produce, better question.  Haven’t been running as much as the running writer’d like.

After kids are dressed and with teeth cleaned, they draw.  I’m back standing and typing.  Wife on way home from workout and I need to put self in runner’s head.  Will do normal route, then something added.—  Jack harasses Emma by drawing on her sheet, Emma growls and I laugh which doesn’t help.  Ready to run…. Between 5 and 10 miles.  That’d be lovely.  Lovely.  Get some healthy mile count and come home and shower and head out to write more.  Make as much use of the day, this “day off”, as writer and new techie can.  Am I a techie?  I’ve learned more new worlds and specifics, more Newness, at the office new than I ever did in the wine industry’s joke of an industry and business.  I’m a wanna-be techie, I think.  I have a blog, but that doesn’t make me a techie, tech, technically savvy strut. 

Hours after run, 10 miles, then nearly 3 miles of walking, I’m tired.  Kids back from pool and I write as I did this morning.  Jack continues to contribute to his math workbook that he created and designed himself, this morning.  Emma, little Ms. Austen herself on the couch with her laptop.  Would be outside but too hot.  And I don’t object.  Walking around Bottle Barn I imagined my eventual wines, that I’ll make with sister, there.  Just one bottle.  Not too many.  I’m very anti-inventory, since leaving Roth.  Too many SKUs, too many blues.  And, the counting is just a pain.  More than a pain, like a relentless sickness.  That just returns and returns.  Tomorrow helping friend at Idlewild off the square.  Don’t have to be there till noon.  Wife heads out to Train Town with friend and her daughter, so I’m heading to my day and creative missions early.  Take pictures of vineyards and walk around blocks, catch views of harvest if I can.  Definitely heading to Roth, maybe Foley Sonoma, or something outside the Foley book.  Just want to be in wine’s world and valley to do just that.  BE there.  Not working, just being, creating, writing.  I’ll be Kerouac as well tomorrow, but a Madigan model and chronicle.  Writing everything down…

Daughter slides off couch and walks around, dazed.  Can tell she’s tired.  “Emma, you wanna play with Dada?” She doesn’t answer, and I head back to these keys, hear train passing outside, Jack still very much in his authoring actuation.  I ask Emma again, she lazily and with extended annunciation, “No.” Okay, so I don’t feel too bad about typing as I am.  Again feel the depletion from the ten mile run.  Wanted 13.1, but the heat stopped me.  Surprised I got as far as I did.  While walking around Spring Lake, I thought to myself about stress and how so often it coms from trying to control something and not being able to.  So my new resolve, resolution and trenchant view involves just dong what I want and if something blocks me or impedes then loudly amplify ( a word I much prefer to “scale”) demiurgic movements.  All of them.  I watch both babies, Emma now visibly drained, trying to fall asleep on the couch.  I offered to take her upstairs to nap with her mother, and then she revives with no notice.

Just told Emma she’s cute and she took such as an insult.  “ I not cute, Dada… I big guuu’!” I laughed and went back to these keys.  Like I’m in college, writing something just before deadline.  Not editing a thing jus typing and using everything around me to get to demanded word or page tally..  Or a wine journalist and blogger, notetaker, feverish jotter, scribbling more on the wines I last night had, the Italian white then red blend, not Italian like other character, providing contrast valuable.  Both said something to me about my relationship with wine, and how wine’s provided a platform for everything, everything, even getting into tech… the office new.  Wine and I, together out of the tasting room.  And what now… write something.  Wine, writing, running in Sonoma County in view of vineyards, sometimes.  Not today unfortunately.  Just wasn’t in the story for day.  15:39, and I still have a lot to do.  Stating and staying busy, working on this writer’s projects and everything in his writing ways.  Just charged camera for tomorrow.  Not sure why I’m so set on doing photography, tomorrow.  Why not.  See what happens.  One of my secret aspirations is to be somewhat, I guess, a photog.  Never sacrificing the prose, but more pictures.

Kids unusually calm, and me getting tired.  Hope they don’t get frenzied and decide to confederate against the running writing daddy.  Or, I hope they do.  There’s more story and AMPLIFICATION in that.

9/8/18

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