Kids dressed and breakfast’d, relax and calm. Another rhythmic morning. Badge in car so not to have even option or possibility to forget. Waiting for mother-in-law, ‘ML’, to show. Get moving, I tell myself. But in a lovely pause, holding pattern for now, for now’s talk. Learning from them, their faces, how they eat what I put out for them. Bagel. Just… watching. Fascinated. Them. Them…. my babies.
07:11
Kids ready, completely.
Easy morning, so far.
Long day, class after work.
Ready for each scene and thought block.
#professormikey, thinking…..
I’m not stopping.
Just so you know.
And ‘you’, is ME.
Wine telling me
that tomorrow morning I will wake early.
This is my glass last.
There will be several pages propelled before kids and wife wake.
First tilt of the little plastic, more impassioned harmony than night prior. I’m with the wine, multiplied ways over, manuscript coupled and unmuzzled. No stop or pause or lull in its voice, step, song.
Scribbling like the Hatter mad, or Jack on the Road with Dean. Me tasting wine through valleys with one of my vino brothers…thinking, now. On this floor, all these notes, another still shot… 
Convinced. Ever, forever, and never a never, with wine. She reads me and sees my eve to more ease. Leaving pleased…
At the car wash.
Washing thoughts, looking at the smoke-wound sky, learning more from my sitting and surroundings.
I’m alive, thankful, and knowing all better.
A wined stop, flight.
Starting the day
waiting on some appointment. While here, I figure write. Why not. Haven’t hit 3000 words in a while and I know that I have to write every chance I get if I’m to make that kind of progress, but that mark. Tired of thinking, tired of promissory statements to self and to readers of this blog. So I just act, start seriously on the Kelly novel. While getting ready this morning I thought about her, her last day in the ad office in the Marina, her drive back up to her new apartment in Santa Rosa, what she must be thinking, before her first day in the wine industry. She doesn’t know what to anticipate, if she should be nervous or not…
Tired of writing the same thing, and that’s what I feel I’ve been doing. I write where I am, what I’m doing, but that often is much of a repeat. So what do I do but go outside myself. To someone else. Another character. Writing has always just been something I’ve done with not much anxiety or holdup. But lately I’ve been held up. Why. Bored. I guess, no? Bored with the same workday, the same drive, the same sameness of everything around me. Thank the Craft for this new job, new office, new best, new people. Even this office is something to write … me merely here for some physical or something for my new role, but others here for something more pressing, serious or even threatening. Reminds me of how delicate this all is. How fragile I am, my life is. Someone’s name called, but not mine. Goddamnit– Wait though, what am I worried about? My last day in the wine industry is in 9 day’s. NINE. If they fired me, lovely. That’d be something to write.. something new.
Pinot last night, Failla. Didn’t do much to me, really. Surely didn’t inspire me to write about it. It was just another wine. Now I’m certain, more than I was before, that the wine industry and world, possibly even wine itself to some extent, and I need break. I think of my babies and how they see me, how I want them to see me. Last time they visited me in that bloody tasting room I cringed, felt momentous lay embarrassed and queer, them seeing me pour and having to ask that new twigg-twit if I could spend a little time with them. Well that’s fine. And I’m DONE. And never going back. This new “job” will be my last ever. Same feeling as going into your senior year of high school.
Ugh…. when will they call my name? Hate waiting. In a waiting room. Not where I want to be. But I’m here. May as well make use of the writer’s time and write. Right? Another name called. Guy two seats down from me. Will surely be late to winery. Oh well. Relieved I can afford that feeling. And I can. Last step in this whole pre-first day around-tower circle.
Clifford….
NO! Mike!
8/14/18