1/25/20

Today, a day off one could say or see, but me wanting to further push into the AE story… starting with getting up earlier, the god hour of 4am, every day.  Abraham telling me yesterday that he wakes all seven day at 4-something and works out.   Last night, me staying up late, posting some story but mostly relaxing after a long day, or not so much a long one but one of production in many arenas and atmospheres.  Today’s aims, only production… a run at some point after Jack’s baseball tryouts which are in three hours.  Think I’ll launch after that… or, run on treadmill. Yes, the latter for speedwork intentions.  Feel stuck in these types and not sure why.  I’m thinking excessively.  No more writing aims, find that’s a curse.  When you put it there, it’s there to look you back in the face and taunt you, somewhat agitate you that you haven’t done it till now.  Only option is to plainly do, just do what you need do.

Will hit that study/course guide for the certification, for connectivity and telecom work.  Not that I want to be a Sales Engineer, but I want to get as close as I can.  Associating it with winemaking, oddly.  How I know enough to make win, e but not enough to be a professional winemaker.  Some won’t get this analogy or association.  A sensible note or corollary to me nonetheless.  Maybe I do want to be a Sales Engineer, but without the title.  An AE that’s more SE than AE.  Thinking…..

Need to get a run in at some point.  I’m anxious, not having woke when I wanted, not racking 8 or nine miles like I have a couple mornings in the past.  Production, the word dominating the semester for me at the JC, and here I am grappling with it.  A new blog project, ‘a productivity practice’, revolving in my thoughts driving back from San Rafael yesterday, methods of intensifying and amplifying, diversifying production and principle productivity.  One, don’t let anxiety envelop you.  If you can’t do something RIGHT NOW, because you have family to-do’s or some other appointment, push to side in your head knowing it’ll be later appeased.  Second, bed early wake early.  More and more I’m thinking this is the most obvious realization of production.  IF I’d shot from the sheets at 4, I’d have a sizeable run in by now as well as a thousand or so words.  And that’s my third point, no shoulds or woulds… only dids, or doing.

Studying production this morning in my own thinking and with my own narration…. Oh, another staple ideology is to travel light.  Always.  No heavy bag or collection of something under your arm.  Be FREE, and free of things.  Free of clutter and ancillary anything.  Production so often is impeded by what we collect, and in my study there should be less of the study itself and more of a directedness of the productive pulse.  Knowing all of this, in expanding and heightening production, your work accrual, is autodidact.

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Waking up with Jack, and not knowing what I’m thinking.

Where is my focus.  Is it wine, is it literature, writing about wine…. I feel scattered this morning, panicked a bit like I need to find a focus or time’s going to run out.  ‘work….FREED’ this blog professes.  How, when you feel like this.  I absolutely cannot write this morning.  This is not odd, but horrifying.  Painful.  Sad…. Infuriating.  Maybe it’s from not having dinner last night, me waiting for Melissa to come down as I thought we were eating together and she never did but rather went to bed.  I snacked a little but didn’t eat a “real” dinner.  My own folly.  I should have had that steak.  Oh well I say this morning in attempted shrug-off, and am frightened that I’m this old.  That I’m 41.  That I have two kids and live on this street with other families.  Something’s out of place…. Or much is.  How do I fix.  WHAT, do I fix?  This coffee isn’t helping, forcing jitters and more odd beats from me, heart not decided on its BPM or steadiness of rate and thump.

Kerouac started Road with Dean, another character that not only intrigued him but horrified him as well.  I have no such character in my Now, now, or really ever…. Well, I did.  Chris the “best man” at my wedding whom I haven’t talked to in over a decade, but now no one like that.  Not sure that would help.  So what would.  Bored with the present, so make one up.  And stop thinking so much.

I could switch to fiction, or something else.  A screenplay?  Am I really having this discussion with myself again, the whole ‘What do I write?’ tug of war?  STOP.  You’re too old for this.  To make writing your work, you need…. Forget what you need.  Just write.

Jack on couch watching some cartoon, now making a silly voice and singing.  Not sure if wants my attention.  More funny voices, then he stops.  Then Emma arrives…. “Hi baby.” I say.  She trots right past me not wanting to miss a single frame of whatever’s playing.  “Hi Jack.” She says to her brother, brother not responding.  Quiet again.

I need to get out of this lull, this lachrymose layer I’m under.  What to do today to make self write differently… what.  Think Emma and I have much of the day together.  Jack having a birthday party to go to, or something.  Time to write will be limited, so maybe I can… what.  Carry that voice recorder I bought at the JC bookstore years ago, that I’ve barely used?  Or write from memory as I’ve been trying to do lately.  Or neither… start writing novel, the pick up where you stop.  Write about what… a wine judge who doesn’t want to do it anymore(?).  A winemaker?  An adjunct professor at 40/41 who decides not to do it anymore and is panicked as to what he should do?  That sounds more aligned with capability, something that’s more ME, I think.  This semester, speaking of, has to be the last one.  Going to stress essay writing and write an essay, at least one, for each meeting.  And with that, who knows.

Tired of repetition.

Tired of waking mornings feeling like this.

Writing… not a blessing, not a curse, but an addiction.  Why can’t I just stop… why do I have to be writing right now instead of on the couch cuddling with my babies, or scrolling through some social media feed like every other idiot in Sonoma County and counties all?  I need to be doing this… this… Even when I worked at that grocery store in Belmont, my first job, just after my Hospital Time, I just wanted to be writing.  Nothing else.  I told myself that the stories I’d write would make it so I would never have to work… and now, dozens (literally) jobs later, I still with self skirmish as to what I write about, what form, how many words, paragraph breaks and I see it all BULLSHIT. 

Just write.  Isn’t that what I tell students to do?  Am I phony, as a teacher?  Yes… but it pays.  And not that badly.  But this semester I have two 3 unit classes and obviously they don’t pay as much as 4’s.  Nothing I can do, all they had.  The adjunct woe.. why would anyone do that to themselves?  No answer… I’m done after this term, I hope.  Just writing and traveling.. writing about what and traveling for what?  WRITING.  Showing others ways of writing and how to get past some block, as I think I have this morning, and writing for sakes of acquiring peace, and some type of equilibrium about yourself.  So you’re not stressing and thinking to the point of doing nothing or going in circles with yourself.

7:07.  Hmmm…. Today, writing about wine when I have a chance.  And not as a critic.  I hate their writing.  Much why I never buy Wine Spectator, I can’t stand the writing.  Quite literally, or not literally … It’s just painful to read.  And how wineries brag about so-and-so’s score, and how their bottle is on the cover with the fucking score next to it.  NO.  I’m writing wine then I’m writing about wine and my relationship with it.  How I see wine, feel, react.  What I wish have in my glass.

No telling.  The day is blank.  It’s not even fully or partially day, yet.  Sun still trying to come up, looking left out the glass of door, dark.  Adjuncting… what I blame for the rotation of the wine industry, me going from winery to winery.  But I can’t blame, or I could, but what would that do.  Writing, listening to more funny sounds from Jack, Emma sitting there quiet and fascinated with what’s in the cartoon’s composition.  

Writing this semester… teach it differently.  Teach essays differently, if at all.  How about not at all, keep the cash coming in from the JC, that’s it.  No I don’t want to be like that.  It’s just this morning mood, this downward push from some unknown and non-existent palm.

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Going in, but at 11.

After a morning of some of the most intense sibling skirmishes I’ve seen since having two littles and both could actually altercate with the other, I have time to self.  At the old Windsor coffee spot.  Last night, Hitching Post Pinot.  Can’t remember the last bottle of HP I had.  Was a while ago…. WAIT—After or actually during the fires when staying at Uncle Mike’s house in El Dorado Hills.  HP of course reminds so many of Sideways, that movie… you know… Pinot Pinot PINOT, but for me it’s not that.  Not anything bad being associated with fires, but just something different.  The not-knowing… the something of something having to do with life.  Wine is the unpredictable and the whim, both dangerous and delightful.

Had to move seats.  Only one open was the little table by the napkins and shakers and other shit bar.  So I came to the seats I used to hate writing in.  I can tell, I’m thinking too much about what I’m writing.  Second-guessing self and getting uncomfortable in seat, feeling a mood approaching, already disrupting my work.  Writing about wine, and how again I don’t see a wine bar or shop for self, but some resource for wine drinkers, no matter their “level”….  But then I back-pedal on that as well.  Just write wine, same as when my sister told me that if you’re going to make wine then just make wine.  Don’t think about it.  She said, as I’ve written so many times before, and quoted conveniently, that if you second-guess yourself you’re never going to make wine.

Another quote, from my grandmother, only days before she left, “It’s YOUR life… you have YOUR choice.” So what do I want, I’m this morning asking.  How should I know… I do, a bit.  Don’t I?  After submitting grades yesterday, or the night before, I very much am convinced that the adjunct thing has run its course.  I still want to teach, I guess—or not “teach” but offer ideas.  By way of essay.  Like this one, this piece, this article, whatever the fuck this is… going in later so I can have some fucking time to self.  To collect, think about my mission, and how much life I have left.  You never know.  So where you are and what you’re doing has to be defining and absolutely declarative in its progressions and steps.

With wine, as metaphor or no, I’m told to respond to conditions around me, favorable or not.  The fires, 2017’s, obviously not hoped-for but still present.  Winemakers had to deal with them.  Work with and around them.  More with than around.  The defined the wine of that year, much.  Even if the clusters were pulled before the blazes initiated and flew and grew as they did.  Wine… definition-prone and aided and slated by everything not-controlled.  I start to see…. Something…. Defining wine.  Or characterizing her.  No, something… not sure.  Wine and character.  What everyone keeps telling me to do.  So why do I ever stray from what everyone hopes I write, DO?  Frustrated with my handle of my own pages so I convince self to challenge the same self in writing ONE world.  One character, language.

Wine wants us to be puzzled, wants us to have to contemplate next directions, just as she did.  She demands we listen, be more observant, more connective and connected, composed and by the moment towed.  Today I’ll taste through the flight, a couple times I’m sure.  Write everything she says to me… make it personal, and wine should be personal.  At times moody, confusing, a myriad of varying and unpredictable echoes and dialects.  The Pinot last night speaking differently than the first HP bottle I had years prior.  That’s the music to it all, in wine or anything else entailing life and promise, some dream, some chance and happenstance, a reactive and spontaneous dance.  If I do open a wine shop, it has to speak in this language of spontaneity, of artful reaction, of a lick of luck.  Traveling to other countries and streets far away to gather bottles for the shop…. Ideas, from her, wine. In the convex consideration of my reflective armament.  What am I doing but walking with her, in the step of steps, not so much divine or even delicious, but decided.

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Feeling the past two runs.

Tempted to do another today.  Only 4 miles or so.  More than likely I won’t, needing to recover.  What work do I tend to this morning and the day… writing.  I need to finish the goddamn book.  HST mentality and discipline today.  Intensify everything in my written way going into this new semester.  Jackie waking early and devoting all energies to one project, a Harry Potter Lego set.  And he worked in silence for well over an hour.  Emmie and I coming downstairs, she requesting to watch a movie, and me expecting to find Jackie with one already on.  But no.  In fact Jackie requested quiet as he “needs to concentrate” he affirm.  Emma of course protested and I told Jackie we’d put on with little volume.  Now they both watch something, quiet, and giving me time to write.

So many people that have kids talk about it being so much work… that it’s so hard, that it’s draining and infuriating, that it makes you tired and sick and….. not sure I agree.  I mean yes I’ve caught something, something they’ve brought home from school and there are times where you have to do the work.  But, isn’t that expected?  Why do so many parents complain about being parents?  No judgement, or maybe there is, but I don’t understand the mentality of bitterness rather than learning from this small humans.  Jack’s discipline and his conviction, and devotion to projects be it Legos or reading, or coloring, whatever he chooses he always wakes early and flies to his work and curiosities.

My book on work… nearing an end.  All my projects, interests, forming and joining today.  So what do I do in the couple hours I’ll have to errands… thinking, while in Healdsburg getting haircut gather information or anything for this new blog idea, the vinovinevin project.  Realizing that in order to have a more sized dwelling that fits everything accrued and acquired by these wee beats, we need a bigger house.  And lately my interest in homes and architecture has widely intensified.  Not sure what it means and it doesn’t have to mean anything, again like the parent analogy you know you’re a parent and you have to be one so why are you grieving so much.  Not that I’m grieving about my real estate inner-flirtation, I’m just not going to do much but enjoy my curiosity and see where it takes the writer.  MY book on work, much about this… the ideas, the work that starts as something not work but just an idea, something you don’t know how to categorize or qualify.

Writing about work… thought about on my run yesterday getting closer to Sonic’s HQ, and the run before that as well, all the jobs I’ve had.  Why I settled for something far beneath my capabilities and even present abilities.  Every place taught me something though, from the first job of a grocery store where I was fired for no reason (honestly), and then the insurance office in San Leandro where I learned that if he can have his own agency then I can do anything, literally anything, I want with my life, professionally.  Looking at both little poets on couch, wanting to one day work with them in some throw, see the focus has to be there, with them.  Always.  They will teach me how to get to my office, my agency….  How to run better.  Everything.

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project

12/26/19

Day after xmas and starting the new year, TODAY.  Everything aimed for.

First, email leads… do light touches, organize the follow-up grid I designed for self.

Yesterday on way to El Dorado Hills writing verse.. touch those words a bit more.

Run at 12, and planning to do only 5 or so and hit below 8/mile.  Hoping my recent pains and injuries have completely subsided and there are NO aches.  And if there are, I stretch them out.

A few victories already for me in day… One, no distractions this morning… was out early and to work on clock before 8.  TWO, no Starbucks… fuck that place, and the suck it is to any and all budgets—Now that I think about it, it had thoroughly impeded me having my own office among other realms.  THREE, no breaking of now-fast with any snacks or morning munches.

Today the new year starts.  Sending letters to prospects, may even walk around territory, somewhere.  Maybe.  Drive to Marin, some of the—NO, stay connected to letters, notes to prospects.  Ones brief, gentle and honest.

Feel self getting a little anxious with all the leads on desk, but then I quickly re-steer that to eagerness, a voluminous patch of hunger.  Finishing coffee, and possibly needing another.  Many people not in office today.  Capitalize on quiet.

Just under 11 hours left in fast.  Not thinking about food, or lunch, or anything.  Only words, letters, emails I need to write and what the writing in this AE post is going to do for me.  And, how much I need my own office.  And, not at home.  Again measuring getting a membership at one of those co-work spaces, or coLABS on Mendocino.  Becoming increasingly more difficult to work in this Sonic office when so many are around me chatting and discussing approaches to whatever’s happening with what client at what property.  And at home, forget it.  All the clutter and having to maneuver around everything, especially now post-xmas with all the new gifts and toys and wrapping papers and remnants from cardboard boxes… no.  My own space. 

New business idea…. Something for those that need to prospect.  To make it easier, more manageable, or cleaner, less stressful or anxiety-actuating… something.  Notes in my AE journal with the Native American proverb or saying on front.  Keeping track of everything I do for prospecting purposes….  Make it literary, make it a story.  Anyone in sales who has to hunt or “farm” for new business will get it.  Be patient, but you’re not.  Keep going, but you’re not getting ahold of any decision-makers or anyone that can point you in any direction or hint of a direction.  You have to make it your own, you have to note every name and where you met them, what they do (even if they gave you a business card)…

I’m happy having to come in today, but with what I want is there any other option?  Why would you take off today, the day after a day of giving gifts?  Go into work, make it more than just “your own”…. Gift yourself new freedom, new creative, new story, new atmosphere and narrative.

Coffee almost done.  9:09am.  Heard that more people are not here, today.  Doesn’t affect me.  Going to test my productivity, today.  With letters.  Communication… the follow-up grid yes but more than that.

Keeping run to an hour, at lunch.  Was going to do just 5 and shoot for sub-8, but let’s try for sub-8 for an hour.  OR, a record time for hour.  Going to do usual coarse, or some augmentation there of..  Yes, do it differently.  Run to Corporate and take left, then right on Stony, then down the John Benz Trail (route I named after a close friend here at Sonic after showing the path to him).

Going through business cards… giving me idea for this, writer about this more, this AE and prospecting life.  Each step of it is literary, each business card is a character and story, something to be “sold”.  Another lead… a winery in Napa.  Hearing people around me laugh and happy to be back and off it I feed and am propelled with voltage and fire, blaze and new ways, a productive and conducive stray.

Feel hunger a bit, but refuse to break fast.  Not sure I’ll make it the full 18 hours, but I’ll try.  That’ll put me at 7-something I think.  Indeed, not sure.

Will stop this entry and have it posted before 930… write letters and notes by email for a solid 3 hours.  That WILL produce something, I say to myself.  The old ‘Sales 101’ principle or tenet of If you throw enough shit against the wall something has to stick…

Looking forward to run.  Garmin charged, and now I just write these notes and emails, have each one be not so much tailored, but earned.  Honest.  Honestly heartfelt.  Have one card next to me….  5 minutes till start.  This is more than work, this is much more than a productivity tag.  This is life, this is education and knowing you can hit and touch and grip and up something.  Elevate and escalate the reality.

Here I go…. Today, first of this new year.  To the office, and … yes, getting a membership at coLAB.  Cancel 24 Hour Fitness, something I haven’t used in who knows how the fuck long… rather run outside anyway.

Notice I’m knocking the 1000 word door.  So I decide to keep writing, imagine myself a student in my own class which I very much am.  Sections next semester, taught from and with and for more madness in student writing, and reading.  Taking today as an assignment… write about the office, the company, the people I overhear talking, what they’re talking about, the people I’m about to contact, day after xmas.  Feel a bit odd doing so, so… keep it short.  If I’m to write about sales I need address .  Craft email draft before hand and just fill in name, but make sure it doesn’t sound like you just crafted what you just crafted.  Makes me laugh, being a sales person that doesn’t want to sound like a sales person but concurrently making it known I want to chat.  What for… of course.

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Whenever you have something blocking your writing, or thoughts, keep writing and thinking anyway.

Write about the block, think more about it.  Write about thinking about it.  Don’t think there’s so much to it.  In writing, you sit, you react, to what’s around you, to what’s in the text.  And why not blend the two.  Reality in the room, then on the page.  That’s all you need to have keys pushed, or ink lined.

Blocks have to be acknowledged in order to exist.  You decide what’s true and part of your thoughtful truth and what need be dismissed and to the side pushed.

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