2:13pm

Moving around with no order then total order of compliment to my aims.

Need to make a call I don’t want to, in bit.  Putting it off when I know I shouldn’t.  Calling Sears regarding the bullshit fridge they delivered to our house. Talk about not just “bad business”, but just dumb business.

Sipping what’s left of the coffee, cold.  Found another target.  Feeling autopilot—or no, the Agency, MY Agency, getting closer.  More than close.

Found event in SF, that could be rich with not just potential but immediate propulsion to discussion and something bigger than what I can immediately see.  Being this writer at a tech/internet company is only sequencing in more revelation and growth.  Anything can be created in this world, this office, this technology-tied ride, something—a whole industry and profession—I used to dismiss, even after becoming a blogger.  Today tallies knowledge, humility, growth, curiosity and non-forecasted landings.

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8/1/19

Office getting quieter.  Many gone home.  Staying here to get head start on tomorrow.  Desk a little bit more organized than before.  Only a little.  Well, maybe more than a little.  Set three appointments today, which isn’t bad.  Was hoping for one more, but I have tomorrow and a new set of prospects to hit. My approach to my agency is connectedness, conversation, helping others convert and grow their business.  There will be a return, I know.  Thinking about how the day started with my late start and rush to a meeting, having a meeting after that with one chap in business and explaining what he does, me writing in my head ideas for my practice.  Mothing of mimic, but from the unintended encouragement of the conversation itself.

My P-O-Z Agency is all words.  That’s it.  All language, communication, the poetic hand in business.  Little over 20 minutes till I leave.  And before I do, more notes to self.  More notes for the meetings I have queued for tomorrow, one in morrow then one at lunch.  Keeping the motion not only constant but ravenous.  Hungry, a constantly present and pursuing atmosphere and phantasm.

As the office quiets, I want more.  I want to explore more of this—where I am and what I’m doing.  The decision to leave the wine industry and pursue something different, something new and an equation to solve, or play with, explore.  Just see what happens.  That Newness, the new experiences craved by writers.  And that’s what this is, do note, a writer, of wine, wandering in tech and the internet’s frame and dimension.  Not so much to find something, or maybe it is, but to observe and learn and keep observing and wandering.  I’m in a stage of my story where there’s more life in what’s around me, the seemingly plain and mundane, that I ever before estimated.  This office, this company and its collective voice and steps, its BEAT, its music, has done such.

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2/27/19

Second to last day of month.  See what today delivers.  New obstacle thrown in story, may have to cancel meetings and go to field.  I’ll see.

 

4:44.  What a day.  In such a gloriously luminous, loving and enigmatic way. Everything done.  Just finished lunch a bit ago.  Took it quite late as a result of consecutive meetings.  Not  much in writing today, I know.  But it couldn’t be helped.  I should be explaining it to self or apologizing.  Today could be written about, singularly, as a narrative or story or lesson, lecture, something for me. Like a longer note to self.

Today’s taught me to be more versatile, flexible, maneuvering in day-to-day, also to hold self to aims and visions.  To embody what the aim truly is in all its facets.  I’ll write about it, today, when on campus.  Won’t be keeping them long, note.  I need more time to write.  I mean really write.  Finish this goddamn book, Thought.  Thought… and what it is what it’s meant for why be in it, why have it be so integral in your functionality as a Human.

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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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12/10/18

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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As someone who obsesses over work,

and what work he has to do, what I have planned the next day and the remaining hours of this day, I am honestly with nothing.  But I make myself write.  One student tonight saying one of her goals is, was, is to wake at 2am to get ahead in her studies and I assume write a little as she does write poetry and write in short lines, short stanzas, pieces that span only a page.  And I say ‘only’ out of awe, that she does so much to a page in only a page’s pulse.

Was nearly too lazy to write anything tonight.  Told self, “Just a hundred words, per blog.” But I can’t hold self to that.  Should I do what this student plans on doing?  Should I set alarm for 2?  Isn’t that the time of the artist, the writer and poet?  Didn’t I read that somewhere?  On my lunch today grading papers and writing in the Sonic journal as this goddamn laptop didn’t want to let me use it.  Of course, now, I do push the buttons and have a note in my writing normalcy.

Finish the fucking book, I tell myself.  Like my son said tonight as I poised to make his bed with new sheets, “GET TO WORK.” I am.  I say the same to self.  

Sip the Barbera I popped last night. It, she, more calm.  Me the opposite of anything tranquil at the moment.  Working in the home office which isn’t as common as I’d love to tell you it is.  But, WORK.  Work.  What I write about.  Force self to write when I don’t want to.  I do write about wine, but that’s not my only onus and thought light.

Now, I’m like a train with this, these writing thoughts.  I, not failed.  Not failing in my aims.  I won’t allow that.  No one should.  Why would you.  You are here, once.  And I’m not addressing the fact one only lives once…. I’m speaking to myself and you, that where you are, right now, the opportunity and life invitation to bring a project to completion is singular.  You see it once.

You are a train, if you wish be.  Some unknown animal of fruition, bringing works to an offering stage.  There are only stops that persist acknowledged.  So acknowledge none of them.  I see so many of these speakers and motivational-who-be’s profess all this counsel but don’t consider the most apparent reality… the audience member has to decide.  They only elect to act if they bring themselves to movement.  Tonight I could have just as easily poured this red from El Dorado, sat on the floor of this home study, went on phone and scrolled through some photo pour.  No.  We decide to draw, paint new plausible for our Personhood.  Decide to move, be alive, mentally, alive, wildly alive in all movements of your steps and actuating saunter. 

What work does for and to the character is animated in divinely lucrative chant.  Dodge the task, never.  Distractions and suitable sanctions to project-dodge are terminal.  The panacea, always, is preemptive production.  Never, labor deduction. 

10/15/18

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On break.

Got through small stack of papers.

This semester and I are now officially feuding. I will be sure there is not a single paper to evaluate.

All papers, graded when handed in.

My assault plan is to halt all before there is any assault, on either end.

Wake earlier. 4am, or face failure.

Sunday will be the grading day for me. Learning learning. More knowledge, more knowledge on knowledge itself.

Week 9…. oh week 9. Today’s lecture, on semester consideration. Noting your progress. I’m doing the exact.

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A Meeting

Now home.  Today, sent me.  Somewhere.  Not sure where.  This is more than work.  This is more than a job, Sonic.  The place where people walk around smiling and talking with each other, where they smile and greet each other and fall into a joyous back and forth about everything.  I won’t get comparative, promised I wouldn’t do that in this sitting at day’s end.  But today, did something.  After my EOD meeting, on several worlds and ancillary topics, a conversation which I was more than merely invested in, I hurried on into the rest of the day and onto campus to give my most kaleidoscopic and axiomatic lecture yet, I think.

Sipping from a bottle Thomas gave me, and I direct further toward and into this meeting with self, me here having an inward conversation, hoping to come to some sort of useful singularity but maybe I won’t.  Maybe this is just for the sake of exploration, for setting sail into some new thought stream. Where I’ll land.  Not sure.  And why do so many focus on destination?  I know I do from time to time but even still sometimes we just need to relish and have internal dialogue and mediation on the trek itself… the voyage, the journey.

If I do manage to wake as early as I’ve drawn, tomorrow, I’ll work out while writing.  Down here, downstairs, living room, in dark.  And if one of the babies wake then I guess I’ll deal with it, I have to.  A 90 minute workout, all core-honed, what I’m hoping for.  I still feel Sonic’s office around my senses, all five, and the eighth, ninth.  This Italian red proposes something different, as it’s something different in my usual sip pattern.

So I keep with kaleidoscope’s shades and telling.  Don’t need to be yet privy to destination.  I’ll get there…. I will.

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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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