Clocked back in.  Two minutes early. 

On speaking, you should be to-the-point, but not depriving audience of anything.  Tell them what they want to hear.  Have the words be kind and heaping with life.  So… don’t just say ‘I’m here and this is what I’m doing and this is what I have…’ Rather, speak more to the point of YOU, the person in the audience.  Use ‘you’ in your language, loud amounts of it…  This is for YOU… this is YOURS.. I’m here to tell you this, or invite you to this, and this is why it’s incredible…  Sales entails sales techniques, but not sales voice, not repeated repeats of something not interesting.  Entertain your audience…  Don’t sell, ever.  Sales is not selling, it’s speaking, it’s sincerity, earnest echoes sung in impassioned fastidiousness.

Just noting ideas passing through head, for sales team and next semester’s course.

Office a bit quieter.  Think some took a late lunch.

In office, today.  Getting things done and thinking of new ways to approach what I do.  I’m overthinking.  This is consequence of the inspiration I attain from just walking around this office as well as going from idea to idea.  Today I focus on speaking Sonic.  The language of this place.  If this is a conduit or bridge for what I want in my story, then I need throw self into the singularity of this Sonic story.  The office has you going over idea and another idea… speak what we do in as few words as possible, I say to myself.  At my desk not bored in even a microscopic morsel but ever active, animated in the possible ways to adjust and shape this business and how I speak about it.

Encouraged, exhausted from my own passion in this office.  This place that’s more than a place—like a parallel and utter juxtaposition to everything that we’re used to.  I call it an antithetical workplace, but maybe that’s wrong.  Maybe this is what the work place should be.  It is.  It is, that I know wholly and wildly, now.  This is a place for creativity and whim, and lucrative lunacy and revolution, but… more.  Something beyond denotation and connotation.  Talk about deconstruction and examining dichotomies and dualities, this is its own plain.  A text, a subject, a set of vocals that not only persuade but impassion beyond normal human norm.

This isn’t an office.  It’s not a colony.  It’s a language.  Its own speak.

So then halfway through my Friday, in office, not with my sales team, I have time to collect for sakes of being with them tomorrow in San Francisco, to bring what’s here to the Sunset District’s upper-40 avenues tomorrow.  I’m enriched, today, again.  Supplemented, turned around made more a voice of this place and what it speaks.

Looking through to-do list.  Everything done.  I know so.  I do.  Been through list, each item, 3 times.  So I give myself new items.  Prep for tomorrow.  Timeline for tomorrow.  Keep busy.  This new coffee cup has me especially energized and alive, written fire and fire to be written.

3:10.  Feel self getting tired, even with the coffee.  Yawn…. Phone interview/screening to prep for.  At 4, and I’m more or less ready, so time for exploratory thinking, let mind wander to whatever and wherever what—

3:18.  Coffee not working.  All work done.  Now what.  Not panic I feel but something in the same flavor isle.

May need a break.  Air that is fresh.  Break from desk.  Talking around me and my head’s in the car, on Road, in classroom, possibilities compounding in delirium-inducing shapes and plateaus.  I don’t know what to do, now.  I’m going mad, but a forming form of mad.  Nothing hindering, nothing detrimental, not at all.  This is a profuse health contract.  I’m rebuilt in my readiness as a writer.  This time in my story, where everything around me is me, for me, telling me to write something to myself that would benefit readers, somehow.

3:32.  Student life.  I’m a student here, as I am everywhere.  There never a non-learning place.  Every scene instructs.  Not sure I’m providing or depriving audience, writing this.  Work all around me, people working on what they work on, telling something to someone, educating and educating themselves whilst doing so, and me learning about what I do, here at this desk at which I everyday sit.  Back from lunch two minutes early but now I reach a point in the day where time is a self-voiding send.  So… look at clock, then at phone with its black screen, pen between forearms on desk.  ‘Nother sip of coffee, or get more coffee?  Don’t know.  Don’t think, I tell myself.  Just move.  Thinking, becoming a bit of a foe, one formidable and crippling.

This office, Sonic, with all its sounds and quick movements and people writing notes to themselves and others and logging what someone says to reference in the future, notes on transactions and occurrences in their departments…  Mom was right, everything I need is right here.  As I’ve said in class but never myself appreciated adequately—Magic in the Meta.  I won’t lie… this place fascinates me.  On multiplying and befuddling levels.  Transfixed in my fixations on and in everything from the voices I hear, to my own desk.  From the conversations between people in the meeting room behind me when I can hear them, to the laughs that are distant, on the other side of the floor, in some distant department.

I pity my past self, honestly.  Working in a tasting room, or going from campus to campus to campus—a freeway falcon—as an adjunct, or even further back working at the store, or before that in the insurance office.  I’m not even “home” here I’m just me… how I wish be seen, a writer.

4:12.  Called, no answer for phone screening.  Now I close day, prep for tomorrow which I actually already did so now it’s just a countdown to my running life.  Wondering about ten miles.  If that’s even smart to do on a treadmill.  Maybe just do an hour, then an hour tomorrow, then longer one Sunday, then back to a shorter run on Monday.  Again, more thought than needed.  Just write, just run, do both, live madly… bottom from the bottomless, or bottomless from the bottom.  Can’t remember what Jack said.  I’m beatifically introspective at this desk, hearing everything, everyone celebrate their weekend, what they’re going to do, what wine they’re going to drink.

Me, to run.

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Taking this lunch to regroup

 

not that I need to, but more accelerate in the momentum that I’m in place put for self img_7477today.  Cruised through the to-do I composed, the list that is, on Saturday and a bit last week, and feeling alive this morning.  Just noted that I won’t let the semester stress me, and I have been.  Not sure why.  This is my last, and I will enjoy.  Talking to students, today.  Nothing to rush-grade, so that’s a relief.  Thought this morning on “writing the book on”, as it’s said with so many things, waking unusually early to get more a jump on the day, what I have to do.  What I have to write.  To do yoga and stretch, my pushups and planks.  To see the dark of the room, waking earlier than anyone I know and bringing to fruition more than anyone I know before they’d even have an option.  There’s definitely a competitive edge to this writer, today.

Going to talk to class today.  About the paper.  About writing.  About the day.  The essay… understanding what it is.  Understanding where we are and what we’re doing.  More a meta discussion and ideas exchange…. Seeing me here in this break room which is also a warehouse of sorts right now with a forklift moving about and boxes being moved to one side of the floor then other, driver honking that odd, meek and metallic-sounding horn.  Me smiling in love with where I work now, everything I can do with words in tech.  Tech.  TECH.  Yes, I’m in tech.  My tech revolution and reconstruction you could say for my literary life and being, practice.  Nearly done with lunch, or eating what I brought, but not my literary lunch.  More to write, more to reflect, reflect upon, the poetry of everything I see and hear, one of the guys to my right finding a pingpong ball, bouncing it a few times, walking to the other side of the lift to be sure the driver’s measured and aligned most optimally.  “Safety is the most important thing right now, safety is THE most important thing.” He says.  I note it of course and wonder what’s most important to me right now.  My kids, family, MY business, this business, my mission here.

Still over 40 minutes left in sitting, so I’m not concerned with time.  Not at all.  But running out of observations in this room.  So I go outside of it.  One Ginger Ale in fridge.  My eye on it.  Still a bit hungry after what I brought.  Not letting self buy anything.  Saving.  For business.  Other things.  Life, I guess.  Saving to save as a friend said to me years and years ago.  Not that hungry anymore.  Only for words.  For verses.  That poem I wrote the other night in class, with the 1A crew for an open mic activity.  Looking at the fork’ and the driver and wondering if I could do that.  Never did get certified while in wine’s industry.  Not sure I would have wanted to if I really had to.  In fact tI was pretty vocal that I didn’t want to get cleared to do that.  Could see myself puncturing a box, some pricey case or putting some oddly-shaped hole in a wall, or barrel.

In re-grouping, I’m everywhere in thought.  Eager for the semester to end then saddened by thoughts of not being in a classroom.  But this is where I am, this is what I want.  Wanting to sell the services of this company, speak its language.  Be fully present and learn from what it teaches me.  Thinking I might have to leave… the talking is getting to me.  I should leave, sit in one of those space-age-looking seats just outside the door.  In re-grouping, wanting creative discussion tonight, on writing, on self, on health, on work, on getting what you want, on making something your own.

In one of the space seats with just over 28 minutes left on my time, time for me and if I am regrouping figurine out its objective.  Whatever that means.  I have no idea.  I’m just delighting in the day and the cup of coffee I just made on floor to my left, smelling it but not yet sipping.  Could write forever about this chair, or pod, open-egg seat.  I want to swivel and move around in it, play, but don’t want to look funny.  Had a thought for tonight, on feeling funny about writing, feeling odd when reading your work, the odd relationship even the most practiced writer has with writing.  Finding out more about self in my writing life, my writing practice, why I’m spending my entire lunch break, essentially, and ACTUALLY, working.  Yes on a project for self, but still working.  Find out more about ME as a character and writer here in the first 3-4 weeks at an ISP than I did in the 12+ circular, repetitive, terminally lateral life in wine’s business.  If you could call it a business.  Told T the other day, and a week before that I think that wine isn’t a business, it’s bullshit.  THIS, is a business.  The office, was citing.

In love with this chair, how it feels to sip coffee in it.  Just took first sip.  Not too hot, thankful.  Rest of day, more note taking.  Been scribbling since I git here, everything from thoughts to the time, to what exactly I was doing, to… well, everything.  I write about happiness now, how I find it, or thinking I did.  I left wine’s industry.  That was meteoric in movement significance.  Co-workers walk by, ones I’ve never spoken to, smiling and comfortable, no stress or at least visible.  And me, here, feeling comfortable and eased enough to post in one of their Jettson-y chairs.  There’s something here, for me.  Something.  Everything.  The remainder of my life.  No more jobs, no more applications, no more waiting, no more interim.  I’m home.  Just getting started, at 39.  I have a life to write, that’s why I write about. And everything assembled to resemble and radiate, read from and for happiness.  There… I’m more than “re-grouped”.

9/17/18

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8/23/18

img_6960Noticed a typo in last night’s entry, to the ATLAS Peak Merlot I was sipping, but I’m not going to change it.  On property.  Last day in the industry, at this winery, working with this company, and onward to the new office, the new assignment… Working in “tech”, I guess you could say, but I see it as building community and contributing to an already-astonishingly impressive client relations and customer service culture, at Sonic.

Not sure how long they’ll keep me here today, as my final check’s already been cut and overnighted to the TR.  This is it.  I’m leaving.  Tomorrow at Sonic, and I only want to learn, meet other creatives, and expand my story, learn more about myself and business, people, and what the community wants.

09:19.  Should be packing up, but I’ll give myself a couple extra minutes.  In a cubicle, in cubicle-ville, villa.  How many writing sessions and sittings have I had in here stretched backward into 13 months or so.  I feel… I don’t know.  Amazing, yes.  But a bit in disbelief of my reality.  12 years in the wine industry, over.  It’s time.  I’m not excessively reflective, just in study.  And I, in now way, failed.  In no respect AM I failed, in having so much of my life in story in this industry, behind those counters, in all those tasting rooms.  Truth… that’s what I accumulated, pocketed, appreciated.  Finding that I don’t anymore need be here.  Even Stephanie, the new Tasting Room Manager here at Roth, someone I’ve very much if you must know grown to admire, inferred that I’ve graduated.  Coherence, cosmic.  The Story is speaking directly to me, offering new directives and dimensions, telling me to write, capture everything today, your last day, and purpose it all for tomorrow, the new story.  The new people, the new assignments, new KNOWLEDGE.

Hear someone coming up those loud steel stairs.  Mick, the Cellar Master.  He and I talk about all the barrels that still have to arrive before harvest.  Think he said like 300 more?  How are they going to fit all of them in the warehouse?  How will they survive this harvest, which is schedule to be I don’t know how many more hundred tons than last vintage…. See?  I still care.  I still love wine, and even the industry. But now, I just write it.  My heart and attention, my cognitive epicenter, is at Sonic, with what technology and the internet, what information can do for a home, a business, a person… a community.  COMMUNITY.  Now, I’m always with sight, and never a lowered lid.

09:27.  Ugh… need more time to write.  Left late, a bit, this morning with babies taking them to school, in Bennett Valley across town.  They teach me more than I can ever write or inventory.  They are my knowledge suppliers, those that go to throw me the sagacity fix, feed my beggar’s call for lesson, for new thoughts and gems, philosophy, life, all of it.  There, now I’m ready to walk down the stairs to the tasting room from this villa of cubes.  One final flash.

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Methodology in the Creative 

IMG_0102.jpgIt could be asserted that there is personal, and business, or occupational.  For sakes of this paper, we’ll speak both.  But, both are unified by exploratory urge, finding what works and doesn’t.  What contributes to a project most optimally.  What communicates the identity of the brand, yes, but as well the intention of both brand and product, or service.  In promulgating creative reality, there should be a unifying truth, identity.  Whether you’re creating for self or a client, which should be considered mirroring, the creator ought always seek.  Not just new truth and method, but for the act itself.  I’ve always seen creative as a reflection of where you are, what you’re doing and what you see.  You become a Seer of creative and translator of its denotative and connotative.  I too often hear writers and other creatives grieve that they’re blocked, that they don’t know what direction to take their work.  Again, for both concave and convex intention, you use what you have.  Where you are, what you’re doing, the energies that immediately surround you.  That’s the methodology.  In the Now.

Clients, in my experience, want candor.  The communication and relationship perpetuated and effectuated with honest creative compulsion.  Trying new momentums and new sights, arrangements of words and images, recording, the lively manuscript.  For a project to be alive and enlivening to attract business, there need be a certain wildness of energy.  I’m not arguing you need to immediately know where you’re going with your creative shift, but the energy needs to be recognized and appreciated.  I’m being not just truthful and transparent, but eagerly candid.  Disclose your character as a creator.  Your creative reality.

Whether personal, form you… Business and occupational, the creative is YOU.  Where you are, what your doing, a compositional climate speaking who you are.  Connectedness… mirroring, your place.  In business, creating for clients and customer bases, the creator should not only “empathize” with audience as so many know-everything speakers spout, but see their audience’s reality as they see their own.  The client’s reality is yours, and creating for you is creating for them.

One idea… Write everything down.  Remind yourself of your methodology, your reason for creating… your truth, your candor, who you are and where you are, why you create.  Narrate everything, each facet should be a stage presence.  My methodology, ideology and empirical philosophy self-begets in the creative act.  Sitting down to write, taking the picture, designing the blog, the very conversation with a prospect.  There’s no need to embellish any movement or parcel, morsel of what’s done.

Creative always starts in singularity, one idea or word.  From there communication precipitates.  On the creator’s part this takes practice and discipline, of course, staying honed in the singularity of it all.  And as a reward for discipline, the creation, fruition, see and feeling the tangible of creative act, be it for a personal project or a client’s campaign.

Identity and creative pulse are two personifications form a vision helix.  That is, how you create punctuates your identity as a creator and Seer.  You see creating, translate the act through your projects and devotion.  In creating, you perpetually re-create the act of creating.  For pieces personal, or for client… you’re creating.  The creation creates more of you and your understanding and met-methods in the creative.

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from this morning’s inward jot

“Do I have a career?” He wonders.  He does.  He does starting today, the new him, the new of Newness around him and in his innermost inner voice.  No more settling, no more of anything that unsettles him.  Only elevation, only elation, only the forward and no more settling, settlement.  Advance, advancement, what he promised himself.

This morning, I don’t blog about wine, or write about it, but what it embodies… freedom, aspirations realized and made tangible.  No more settling, no more nay-saying ebbs about my story, around me, distant or right in front of me.  If eel musical this morning, freer than free.  I see each of my babies, looking up at me and proud of their daddy, proud of what he does and what he writes, eager to hear new stories.  I’m free this morning—  NO, liberated, basking in this liberation and enlivened vibration, and climbing primal pulse, my own proverb, curve and verve.

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Mike goes back and forth in narration, seeing his story at a crossroad, intersection, point of decision where indecision is death, worse than death.  He sees a vineyard in behind his house, it being harvested and he up early with the crew, helping them toss bin loads into the gondolas, even riding on the side of the tractor.  It’s time for dreams, he says to himself this morning.. no more expected, no more pattern, no more saying “I’m going outside the box”.  Life isn’t forever, life isn’t even life… life is curt, gone well before it can be appreciated.  He thinks of his childhood friend that dropped dead walking to his car after work.  Mike knows that could happen to him after writing in the coffee shop, now, walking to his car to drive to work to give eight hours of his life to a company.  Yes, a company he believes in, that he enjoys and for which he’s grateful for all tis motivation and story, inspiration and narrative, vineyard scenes and vineyard walks, wines and new characters.  But he wants more.  He demands more.  Of himself, of the opportunities he creates for himself.

Woman next to me with her daughter, and I’m guessing parents on the other side of the table, on my side sitting on the long couch-like seat with rectangular mock-leather pillows or cushions.  Three generations.. there, right here next to me reminding me of time, my time, here on the planet in my story and that I don’t know, I don’t know when I’m on my last page.  More opportunities, more Roads, more pieces and essays, and create— WAKE UP EARLIER.  Yes, I was up early this morning, well before wife and babies, but I could have been writing earlier, I could be at, should be at, 3000 words already.  But here I am.. different this morning.  Anxious a bit.. eager to be defiant today, to blast my way outside of normality and others’ expectations of me.. radicalized writer, tireless… seeing self get older and I won’t have my babies have anything less than a page warrior, knowledge addict, as a father.  Like my Dad, always seeing more, doing, doing, doing it.  IT.

He has about 20 minutes left to write, collect himself before his big day, the day that marks the death of the workplace for him.  Today he begins his official war to get to his office, to be free.  Again, no spite his company.  He just wants something different.  The difference of life, what so many say they’ll do and he’ll just do.  He was one of them.  WAS. 

(5/11/18)

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Today at winery….

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Slow start, take lunch at 11:44-abouts, to collect here in writing, look through pictures taken on vineyard walk this morning.  Today’s teaching me about my wine story, what I’m to do with and in wine… making the day my own in all ways I can.  Had an idea from a writing friend, to do something with my meek photography efforts, and another business friend of mine, woman photographer building her photog shop in Headlsburg and recently self-publishing a book her mother wrote.  Love the tasting room, and all the magic in its walls, but seeing more magic outside, in the vineyards and with the people tasting wine on the patio, while they snack on what they brought and overhearing what they talk about.  The writer need be mobile, and look at past entries, think about past winery jobs— from Dry Creek to Sonoma Valley, “the box” in Napa, to helping a friend out in his tasting room in Kenwood just down the road from St. Francis.  The tasting room itself encourages me to find more poetry and purpose, principles, out the door.

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In the office, so quiet and easing with my beats, listening to drum hits and high-hats… just want to travel.  How do I get there.  I’m already there, here.  Working and living, writing where people from all over this globe visit, save for years to see what I can on a lunchtime walk, or getting away from the tasting room for some air.

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Tasted through a couple of the red… Pinot, Cab and another Cab.  Nothing saying anything new to me, today, at the winery, which is more than fine.  I situate in my realized and wined singularity, looking for new notes and beats in what I’m so used to sipping.  The 2015 Alexander Valley Cabernet… talking in more spoken word narrative, having me bob my head and explore inward with jot and hurried notes, profuse chocolate terrain and oak-prone tones that not at all muffle or mute fruit but teach it to be more connecting, communicated, more eager to recite.  Thinking of tomorrow, teaching, but I can’t stray too far with too much fray.  Stay here, at winery, listen to what people say in response to wines and what my brains speaks right after a red lands on tongue.  Wine holds… recites, wants to work with me, write a book with me… me and vino composing what we chose, from that first blog entry years ago to the conversation with my sister-in-law that ignited this whole forward.

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At the winery, not so much an employee or even a writer but just one in admiration of all transactions here.  And I’m not talking about bottle purchases…. I mean the lives, the reactions, the way the light hits the little clusters in the Sauvignon Blanc lot— this beat gets more than just gently lost in thought, but enveloped in Newness and his own beat-time.  One minute before noon, not wanting to do anything but have these wine syllables and letters dance about my growls and questions, looking to sky out window knowing a vineyard is under it, somewhere close and distant.  In the building while throwing thoughts out of it then back to this page… my own collective bay, say.

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