Can feel the run, now.  Hours later.  Soreness in legs, exhaustion in general operating.  Planning on early run again, tomorrow.  Sipping no wine, tonight.  Only sparkling water wife bought at store for us, but mainly me.

Hoping to wake early tomorrow morning, and I mean early.  The god hour.  4am.  Have at least 2000 words in NaNo project.  Also start writing aims for the next 100-days project.  Clearly writing out all aims.  1, to have actual and documented steps toward my wine label.  Another, register for runs in Oregon and Colorado, both high elevation.  Have enough money for car, either have own offsite office or a membership at that ‘Lab’ place on Mendocino, significant income from independent instruction and speaking.  Going to start a massive and fanatically creative return to writing, literature, lecturing.  Won’t elaborate here, one I’m too tired and two don’t want to hex any potential.  And there is potential, a mammoth amount.

In class tomorrow, for the first time in well over a week.  Listening to Coltrane, at low volume, no TV, pushing me, telling me to be in more a jazz mood and mode in the class.  Just in the moment.  Not thinking, just creation.

For 1A tomorrow, going to speak from self, on destiny, on careers, on people in our lives.  What do we do with what we have, and once we know how often do we further consider what we’re doing.  How much do we leave to chance or destiny, and how much to we value and trust in self action?  Right now, I’m writing from making self do so, choosing to capture where I am and what I’m doing.  On couch, with Coltrane, seeing the day tomorrow, knowing a change and lovely, loving shift in my story is about to land.

All I, WE, have to do is write it.

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3:59pm

With Quarterly done, and me tired, having sent out two re-term contracts and nearly one for new business.  Just an updated version of contract, with an added stipulation, or condition, not sure what you’d call it.  Can’t send it out yet, wait for contact in office to be there, so put off till Monday.

Still full, and sluggish from lunch.  Will call this other prospect Monday as well.  He’s trying to dodge one part of what I’m going to offer him, but as someone earlier urged I do, show what he’s gaining rather than what he wants to take out.  Don’t fight him, or argue with him, just SHOW benefits, value.

Everyday in this creative corner is education beyond anything I’m used to.  Written that or something similar a dozen, hundred, times.

People around where I sit talking, ready for weekend.  I’m indifferent but not.  Tomorrow off, have to get dry cleaning, promised Jackie I’d do something fun with him, but what.  Bowling, batting cages… something creative.  Couldn’t get him a hot chocolate this morning, or actually I could have but didn’t ‘cause I thought he and Emma would have been off to school by time I’d be back.

Not in the mood to do anything else.  Should leave early, and I can with my autonomy here.  I’ll think about it.  Hmmmm……

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3:30

After a 5-miler in the heat, and now with some cold brew swimming in my circulation like released fish, I’m more than working, more than productive.  Found out that the territory I canvassed isn’t going live for a bit longer than I estimated.  In fact it’s not known.  But the visit wasn’t wasted.  Learning , learned, and contacts made and in sales you NEVER know how that potentially could material down the Road, distant or perfectly proximal.

EOD nears with no regard for me or my tell and interpretation of it.  Canvassing self for new sight and plausible spheres and plains.  Notes on post-its… refusing to stop in my movement, this newest manuscript. Haven’t written any verse in the last few days.  May treat self to a glass of that Albarino, or red blend, and write only verse.  Don’t walk in with my laptop.  People see me as a writer, and as EOD forwards its fangs toward my figure, I simple put more to page and think less.  A poem a day at the very bloody least.  Thinking is the problem.  If I were writing like I need be I wouldn’t notice the goddamn clock.

Three letters, short, before 5.  Have a target…  Got one.  Two…. Looking for third.  Letters, letters… 300 Sonic words a day and in many of those sessions you see LETTERS, in this creative colony on Apollo Way, West Santa Rosa. 

Slowing in sips of brew.  Where should I write before class.  Tired of S&H, so then my head goes to Whole Foods pub.  Still hungry, after pretzels and nuts.  Will need something a bit more substantial… do they still have that charcuterie plate?  They have wine, but can’t remember the list.

EOD, like a drug, a pill, a propellant and stimulant and calming composition of voices and variables.

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So tempted to go home.  See my babies.  What is this class doing for me.  Really.  A lot, Mike.  I need to play it better… idea… post more to the professor mikey blog.  Yes.  Today, all day in the BNI meeting people calling me Professor Mikey, saying “What’s up, Professor Mikey?”

Just did budget.  Still healthy, but want more money to come from me. Need more bookings… more speaking engagements.  Not that I’ve had any ones that pay, ever.  Will soon.  Feeling ornery, this evening.  Ordered a glass of some red blend.  They don’t have the Grenache…. Goddamnit.  I’m NEVER coming here again.  Stomach not hurting anymore, and feeling a fine note of famine.  So…. Don’t want those fries… too much, too crumby and salty.  At end of night, I want to have …. Shit, a poem.  A verse.  Have to do that, first.

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Where did poetry go in my story. No where.

Bring it back.  Needed this.  My regular spot at S&H, wine on the way.  That Albarino….  No way am I finishing that novel this month.  A month extension warranted.  I always have been my favorite professor…..  This place, I could write about it over and over… the people, the umbrellas outside blown one side to the other by today’s sudden bluster.  Fall…. And the wind really wants me to see it.  She puts down water, the waitress, says “It’s not quite wine, but….”

“Aw goddamnit…” I say.

She laughs, I smile.  Back to writing.  So tempted to call class tonight, but I want to speak.  Not entirely please with my talk, this morning, on Sonic but really Narrative, and how narrative brought me to Sonic.  Which is more or less the truth.  It sounded good, to me, when I gave the speech or talk, or part of it in my head.  5:02, plenty of time here.  One poem, my aim before leaving.  First sip of wine, more texture, touch and flesh than I remember.  Keep thinking I’m 40 and how I’m 40, I’M FUCKING FORTY… is this where I should be?  No I’m not in some mood, or funk, or depressed.  Definitely not depressed.  I don’t think.–  AM I?  No… just wanting more.  What I told the director of Consumer Sales at Sonic when he asked what I wanted at the company.  I said, “I want the same thing as everyone else.  More.”

Even after the first sip, I feel more composed, more whole and vocal.  She’s leaving me to think about her while remaining here in the seat.  Thinking next I’ll get a Grenache, if they still have it.  Pretty sure they do.  Didn’t look like the menu changed.  I should finish a book here…. Start one first, then finish it.  OR, stop focusing so much on a fucking book.  Fuck a book.  Write… put it out into the collective people presence as soon as done.  That’s the beauty of a blog, right?  Maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe…

Couple sits next to me.  Were sitting right in front of me, square table, but I think a bigger party’s coming, or already here waiting to be seated.  Always wondered if I could wait tables.  A friend of mine used to work here, and in a more financially-tentacle-wrapped time for me, showed on social media how many tips she tallied one night, easily over $150.  I was tempted.  I did ask her about availability, and she responded with a contact name I believe but it went no where.  Glad I didn’t pursue, or push, but I still wonder what it’d be like.  I partially have a conception from being in the wine world and walking out to tables with pours, flights, to talk to guests tableside.  But it’s not the same thing.  Actually, I know I’d hate it. Especially now.  Fuck, really?  I’m 40.  I think about it, that’s it.  Story ideas.  That’s it.

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too day-y

10/17/10

Taking a break from NaNo project for a bit.  Just want to write, in a free spree of me.  Will have it done by November, the ACTUAL NaNo month.  Tired, I think both from early wake, that I didn’t sleep well last night and having run over eight miles yesterday on lunch.  Today has been nonproductive yet incredibly frenzied…. BNI meeting this morning then rushing down to Petaluma for training my first client on new phone systems. Which, I don’t know, makes me smile and giggle a little, for some reason.  I didn’t do the training.  The person who did, Will, was incredible.  Really into his material and instruction, and I thought he did great.  What makes me laugh is that this company is so bizarrely generous and wonderful that we offer a complimentary training session, which can last as long as the client wants.  I’m not an evangelist, per se, but no other telecom company does that, or does like we do to my knowledge. 

4:02pm.  Should leave.  Need to get here early tomorrow morning, get caught up on stuff.  Have a lunch tomorrow at noon, then the rest of the day is the rest of the day.  Still haven’t sold shit this week, but have held appointments.  I am setting calendar dates with more regularity, which is a correct and promising step.

Can’t shake this tired.  Need to write more poetry, like that one student in my 1A section, Frankie….  One piece at Steel & Hops.  OR more.  So much shit to grade.  Just need to relax, have time for me.  Poetry, wine, my usual seat at S&H.  Be Hemingway, be Kerouac, Sedaris, Plath, Hughes.  Going to get another legal pad, and I said I wouldn’t do that.  But I will.  Just this one last time.  Heard one of the trainers say, “I need to get out of here.” She does?  What about me?  Sending EOD to Mark, and I’m bouncing out of here like an astronaut in even less gravity than the moon.

EOD sent.  Post-it’s fucking everywhere on this desk.  Why is it always messy here.  Also, makes me laugh.  And at my SELF.  Will get legal pad on way out. Don’t put it in backpack, Mike… you’re notebooks always get battered when in there.  Need more music in my story, and the music I write, verse, has to be on clean, non-crumbled sheets.

Starting to wake up.  Wait, am I?  Breakfast burrito at a nice little café in Berkeley, with the prospect I met.  He owns a printing shop, where he does prints of any size of client photog.  The café at which we at shares a wall with his shop.  We ate there, but didn’t.  He, Rob, took a small patio table from his studio, two chairs, and set it right in front of his doors.  We went in and ordered, walked fifteen feet or so back to the table, and our plates were delivered. First time I’ve ever seen that.  See my office having the same nearness to a café, wine bar, or both. Where I’d always write.  So then what the fuck do I need an office, or studio, or blogger shop for?

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9/29/19

We learn through our moods, which ones we want to keep, and which we which simply shed.  Just get rid of.  Of course you’re expecting me to say “Write it down.” Well, yes, but not right away.  Take your time, just for a second.  Slow the approach to page, think of where you want to be when the entry is done.  Right now before class I don’t think about class.  I enjoy the movement across the keys, this entry, this Now right here at this table in one of my most frequent writing spots. Didn’t want to come here, to tell truth.  But I thought why not, go with what you know.  With writing it’s sometimes the beauty of Newness but as well sticking to the beat you’ve kept.

I share ideas that encourage freeness and essential lawlessness in writing. To shed convention and get out of the curriculum coffin, but as well know where you want to be.  Envision your arrival spot, the state you want to paginate.  Writing is form, but it’s form that you form, that your prescribe.

Write the mood down.  Whether it be awesomely optimistic, of a little downtrodden.  What do you want to retain, what do you wish release?  Trust yourself and fear nothing, create and compose in crazed ways.  I do teach English, but I don’t.  I’d rather not.  I’d rather just emphasize and punctuate my simple aim of, ‘just write, and write more freely than any teacher has let you’.  Writing can’t be taught, and that fact that some of these “teachers” think it can, puts me in a mood.  Just move the hands across the page, enjoy your sitting, enjoy your movement and your words.  They are yours, no one else’s.  They can’t be, even if plagiarized.  Chase Newness, embrace your Beat and re-write when you wish.

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Signs and Water

When thinking about writing, the first place my vision or any part of my principle activity goes is to where I am, what I’m doing.  What’s happening around me.  I once had an idea for a book, just called ‘Those Around’, literally writing about people around me.  It was no more elaborate than that.  What happened to the idea, I don’t know.  Or I do know.  Distraction, distracted from it, for something, from something.  I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older that I’m thinking more, that I’m more susceptible to what’s around.  Sounds self-defeating and maybe not so much because IT is, but I allow the interference, the obstruction.  When we think, we throw ourselves into more thought.  Writing should be not only free and freeing, but freed from what’s around the act.  Where you are and what you’re doing is certainly a topic or place to start, but don’t allow the immediate elements to topple the topic or sever your start.

Where I am now, after being in office and fitting in a quick haircut, with a beer at a small rectangular table, enjoying time before class.  Planning yes but as well training self again to just write and not think.  Like the industry I’m in, at the company where its CEO reassures his employees that everything in front of them in the building can be utilized to get them to where they want to be, wherever that is, even if outside the company.

I’m writing this to write about writing, and directly challenge any impediment to writing.  What did you do this morning, how did you get to where you are now, in the day and in life.  And don’t think, just let your hands buzz back and forth as if drunk or buzzed across the keyboard.  When I think about writing, I do NOT think about thinking.  “What do I write about?…What am I going to write?” This is permitted impediment to expression.  Write about where you are.. the table, the people walking by, what you want by day’s end, what you demand from tomorrow….  And don’t think, don’t analyze, don’t dive into intense perception.

Of late, one of my consistently elected writing spots.  Something about the tables, bar area, outside patio, food even though I didn’t order anything in fears in will more than likely make the writer more sleepy and observationally incongruent.  Sip water, look at sign on table in front of mine, about some trivia night.  Just noticed the same sign’s on my table, just couldn’t see it behind the raised screen.  So.. writing just has to happen.  I’m wondering why I ever started teaching English, to be honest.  ‘If you follow these RULES, you’ll write better.’ Fuck… what?  So it’s that simple, I’ve missed something for however many years.  No.  Writing doesn’t work that way.  As Kerouac urged, you need be a crazy dumbsaint of your own mind…you’re a genius all the time…and this is all for YOUR own joy. So just write.  Be bewildered in your own page bliss.

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