Monday.

Something like a day without a name and you only know it’s Monday ‘cause someone else said it.  Sending emails, looking for connections, contacts, the same.  Prepping for class tonight in a virtual sense virtually has me certain of certain things.  Like what… well, where I’m going. What I’m meant to do with my pages and words, this quarantine, the blog, the books, the books that come from blogs… can a blog come from a book?  I don’t know if there’s an order, or anything in this type of day.  Monday… the first of the week where I’ll run all days and wake up at 4 going forward.  How will I do that.  Bed earlier than I ever have.  And no matter how cold or chilly or whatever it is outside I’m getting out there, and running.  No excuses, no thinking about it, just running.

Writing in the quiet house with family gone… relieved, and already missing them.  Yes, this quarantine if that’s what it is has me wonderfully all types of all fucked up.  Should be prospecting, should be networking, should be should be SHOULD BE…..  Taking a break.  Already lined up one appointment, followed up on some email communication, and now what.

How much do I have in wallet.  Not sure why I’m wondering but I am.  Shit, okay, like six bucks.  Shutting down the spending.  Famous last words that I spoke as recently as I don’t know yesterday…?  The quiet forces me to consolidate, simplify, recognize what I’m taking with me when this period passes.  Quarantine indeed, from several attributes and realities, exposures, character voices and intrusions.

Monday in its metaphoric step and street assures what comes next.  And, frankly, it’s everything.  Everything I’ve written that I will and would do, see myself doing, presents itself to me and me to it when this quarantine’s over.  Frankly, I’m celebrating the quarantine, and you should be too.  And if not celebrating it then seeing it differently.  See the boon to it, the boost in its anatomy and what shape it takes in your day.

You need to stop thinking, completely.  And just start writing, creating, moving, changing what you want changed.  It’s Monday, so start in this sitting, where you are and what you see in front of you.  Looking at phone, don’t make calls.  Call to self… collect.  Where are you going… what do you see for yourself.  What story do you want to be read?

Education in the day, in what you’re doing, how you deal with this whole thing… by not “dealing” with it at all.  Living in it, creating through and out of it so that reality you see and have always seen for self finally lands.  Something landed, today.  A Monday.  Another but not another… the contract, the speak, the Newness to it, to you.  What will you do.  What new and renewed truths do you pursue?

Think it’s lunch.  What do I get, make, look for.  The indecisiveness in this quarantine has a rich and unexpected value-quality to it.  Need explore that more.  You, AND myself.

3/30/20

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Stay Moving Stay Busy Stay STARVED

3/22/20, Sunday.

8:42.

Kids up, and Emma and I back from getting Starbucks breakfast.  Store portion still closed.  Yesterday telling self that I need finish a book by the end of this.  And this may extend for a while I’m told, so if I don’t actually finish this new journal…  I’m failed as a writer.  Someone will say, Don’t be so hard on yourself!  Or, No you’re not, that’s not what that means.  Something like that.  But that’s what I’m putting on the line.

Kids on floor here in living room playing with that lite brite thing, both of them, each with their own.  Emma says, “I’m making a hot tub.”

WHAT?  I say.

Yeah, I’m making a hot tub, Dada!

I laugh a little as I didn’t even know Emma had any conception or awareness of hot tubs.  She shows me, and it looking nothing like a hot tub, I congratulate her on the illustration.

Sipping latte, clearing throat, Jackie mocking my hurumphing and acting crazy… wonder if this Day Whatever under this stay-the-fuck-in-your-house offer, or order, or suggestion.  Or option.

Jack tells me he’s bored, Emma says Sorry Jack, and I laugh again.  Maybe I’m losing it.  Reading a note one of the 1B students posted to the #professormikey blog, and I need to not only write more but differently, expect different results maybe but just to try different places and approaches to narration, capturing this pandemic panic and scene set.

Need to run today, and not in the Fountaingrove Hills again.  Only did five miles and felt failed after that outing.  Today, all flats.  All around here, and all result in 7 or 8 miles.  Have to, as now I’m getting bored, just like Jackie said he was a minute ago… use this to be a runner, a blogger with the monthly goal of $6000 a month, a number I calmly calculated walking back to the house yesterday on the walk/ride in Coffey Park with the wee beats, on Santiago to San Miguel.

Both beats on couch reading or looking at pictures in Emma’s posture and reading whatever she thinks she sees.  Jack then says, and I’m not sure why, “Art is Art.” I ask him to explain, and he couldn’t.  He just let it fly from his chords.  The covid thing reminds me of art in all scenes and from things you would think you should write about, or write at all, something you’d think wouldn’t be read.  Everything is Art, and Art is ART.

9am and the latte nearly dead.  That’s it for caffeine.  Trying to not have so much be  apart of my composition myriad or practiced anatomy.  Kids already getting restless and the day barely taxied to runway.  I’m with them, the beats, these little humans and they have and find fun and uniqueness, ART, in everything.

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Scoundrel Juror

3/20/20, Friday.  7:47am.

Day three of whatever-in-place.  Woke this morning with a bit of an attitude, but I want to capture more of this.  More of what this is like, to be kept n place as the result of an order.  A couple people posted to a prompt on one or both of the blogs, as I posted the same prompt on both, to narrate what’s happening.

Had some wine last night, a Grenache from Inspiration just up the Road.  Bought it when up there during their mock-barrel tasting the other day.  I, as many, just want to be able to do that.  THAT, just go out and do something.  Yesterday getting takeout with Jack and being able to have a beer and little Kerouac a lemonade made the day, make it more normal and literary… we were moving, we were doing something other than being locked in the house.

Just after waking and standing on soles, I thought how this thing has alone taken out all three income sources.  It hasn’t, since I’m sure the JC will issue a check, and I know Sonic is going to still pay, but not sure about FFW.  Even if it does as the other two do, this thing has prevented me from doing much if not all of my work, what I do for these bodies.  I can’t be in the tasting room or on-property, I can’t be in the classroom, and I can’t walk from business to business saying hello and letting them know I’m in the area.  This thing has taken out a monumental parcel of my production.

What this tells me…. Write more.  Rely on the writing, this blog, all the blogs… just put everything out onto the pages and into whatever sphere.  Forget about waiting, I tell myself, waiting for some book-type page collection to be collected.  Everything out, NOW.  There is no more waiting, there is only taking… taking what I want, what I need do.

Response from Director, saying I have a solid plan for the day.  Great.   Just hope it produces something.  A lead, a conversation, a response, or even some new knowledge, some new business facet or field to address.

I’m a bit becoming undone, but that’s when you write.  That’s when the true and enriching freewriting momentum materializes.  Have coffee, but still cold.  Laundry going upstairs…. Putting self on a fast for the day.  Nothing, all day.  No latte, either.  Only coffee straight.

Kids playing upstairs, giving self project atop project.  Now after 8am, and the day is off the runway.  In flight.  Alive.  Sipping whatever blend out of son’s coffee cup, the Spider-Man one.  Never could figure out why his name is hyphenated.  The cup I bought one night after or before getting takeout from KIN as I did last night.  Been using the cup for the past few days, definitely the whole time being told to create in place.  Something about the Spiderman face on the front, and the eyes, how my son at a younger age was obsessed with this character.  What he did with the webs being shot from hands and more or less flying from building to building.  Kind of how I see myself as a writer and blogger, going from topic to topic as some have noticed and felt the need to remind me but I’m still Mike Madigan.

Locked up, ordered to create a new reality in place, from this new reality.  How I interpret.  Hear kids playing upstairs, going a bit batty. Now I want to as well.  Why work when I could play.  Truly, it’s my incarceration, and MY day.  Write about that Inspiration bottle, that event, what brought me there.  Plenty of work on this third day in the capsule.

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Perception, in the kitchen.

Running in the morning.  Ahead on timeline.  IF you could call it that.  Great day in meetings, dinner with parents.  Still hungry but not eating anymore.  Writing novel on her… her… the one wanting more… the character changing jobs, going for creative and not the expected.  I should go to bed, she orders.  I resist knowing I shouldn’t.  In Kerouac beat mode, on beat time.  So what then… more story, more in this kitchen.  Cards for the babies, Valentine’s Day.  What is that.  I’ve never known.

Going to have capping of night, then to bed go… running in morning.  Have to write more on the run, the run is life, is love is reason, is the counter to the counter, the counterargument to anything pessimistic.

Sitting in this kitchen, at the parent’s house… some could judge, and that’s fine.  I’m so focused on my control and centeredness of things.  Some will argue, object and counter-cross-object and puff their legalistic language in so many climates and shapes, but I just don’t listen.  Right now, I’m righted in my Now.

More than simple perception or sight, I don’t know how to define it and I really don’t know how.  I don’t care to.  I think of the poets I study, and the diarists I admire, like Ms. Plath and Pac, Hem with his letters, and Mr. Sedaris, and I find so much funny.  I’m going to delight in life, knowing some will say something.

Distracted by messages.  Should go to bed.  And keep with my stance, keep with my keep, assert the sight and acknowledgement of everything around me.  The world is funny, Humans are funny and barely deserve that capital.  No one in this kitchen but me. Running when it’s dark. So.. go.  Light jazz in back, and me just going from thought to thought, possibility to new newness with this new movement.  Some would maintain a detriment in my narrative, but the peripatetic jabs are only a lucrative tell.  Somehow, they ought be.

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Knowing Now, FREED

Starbucks down the Road from Sonic’s HQ.  I feel more Zen in all molecules and movements than I have in some time.  From being honest with Self.  You have to be, finally… about certain things.  If you deny, or interpret it conveniently, then only more trouble compiles.  I’m not going into specifics, and I don’t have to…. The specifics aren’t the intention of such a note… it’s the pattern, the habit, and practice.  Diving into Zen practice, Zen ideology, and habit, mind, more than just some trendy mention of mindfulness, more than even me being here physically acknowledging certain realities, and behaviors.  Knowing your Now entails so much beyond the Now itself… but what brought you here, to where you are, where you’ve been… why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’ve done certain things and traveled in particular directions.

This morning, waking around 5:30 and heading here, to this same Starbucks where I’m not sitting and working and thinking about the past couple days….  Here I am, like this, in this sense and mind.  A mind and way I love, where the Zen envelops me and teaches me about the directness of life, directions in one’s story…. There are choices, then there are circumstance possible given from some other being or force, or collective individualized intent.

Not sure what I’m writing, or even why I’m writing, but I know there’s a trajectory I want to avoid.  For all sakes, for all pages.  So, honesty.  This Monday has tested me in certain arenas, then encouraged me in others.  Realizing that there need be a shift with the ship.  One step, I guess…. Sales Meeting in 1 hour, 11 min.  Then class later.  Then home.

One jolt in my world, anxiety… separation anxiety from my kids.  Writing it makes me tear, but I know fortitude is the only electable echo and forward.  Eating carrots with ranch, part of some lunch box that came with a sandwich, and a sparkling water.  Collect, I tell myself.  Wait for more connectedness from the day.. more instruction.  Think about your kids… how you want them to see you, study your actions.  Be deserving of study.

My age, and having these realizations.  What does that mean.  Where am I going.  What more can I do.  Well, I finally know.  So no attaching self to past.  No more in-place holes or ruts, stalls or cells.  I’m here, I’m doing it… re-writing the character.  Writing the entire story.  Me, where I am and what I’m doing… knowing my Now and its entire composition.  Sonic provides more composition, more than a platform but specific composition of a bridge to get me from one reality to another.   What I put into circulation, how I treat my bones, veins, brain.  Staying on the page, the first motion to line dividing sky and sea.  Music.. all of it.  I’ll make it all music, musical, a healing composition.  No matter what happens next.  Unafraid, eager, writing more, clear images and steps… a renewed beat and beauty in my promised truth-speak.

2/3/20

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Leftover pizza and prospecting thoughts.  What do I do now, to change approach, modify practice and perspective.  When I first started this position the director told me it’s like dating, and to go on hundreds of dates.  Agreed.  Need more dates, and I need more than just dates.  Much of me feels I need propel and speak the brand on my own, but then I think I need even more than that, even.  And if not more than that, something in addition to, or address some quality within what’s already present.  Possibly overthinking, in fact I know I am.  Just keep the conversation alive.  Going to return to certain commerce chambers, and people I’ve met.  In office today, but get out more.  Be mobile, be seen, be instrumental in awareness.

Other thoughts…. My next sale, how to speak this brand, and a removal of all stresses and self-set blocks.  How to liven the day.  Any thoughts?  Not really.  Not at the moment, with this pizza and ice water.  Grade papers, quickly.  Then write letters to prospects, to connections, people I know.  Maybe I should do that, just make a list of every fucking person I know.  Not practical, I know.

Pizza done, little time left in break.  Wondering how to approach rest of day, other than maybe one more cup of coffee, some scheduling of events or some meets somewhere, something.  Needing to get my energy level to more altitude.  Only reason for its depletion is from overthought.  That’s it… easily.  Just overthinking the fuck out of everything.  Going back to desk….  People walking in and out of this break area distracting me and pulling me from more purposeful prose.

Back at desk.  Voices around me but it gets me more into character, and thinking of how to speak Sonic to prospects… what’s in here, this creative and varied form of identity, present in our interactions.  Forgetting about it, for a minute.  All of this—sales and prospecting, emailing and canvassing.  Remember what one of my sales Leads, when supervising the Field Sales Team, said when offering insight to one of his Reps.  He said, “What do YOU love about Sonic?….What kind of person are YOU?” That’s what should be in the conversation.  I’m not one for scripts, at all, yet I somehow find self longing for a script, or some template.

Detaching self for a bit, so I can refocus myself with more sense and vocal.

19 minutes more left in break.  And what do I do…  Fill calendar.  Live in calendar.  Stare, at calendar.  What have I spent money on, today?  Starbucks in morning for wife and I.  And that’s it.  Didn’t get a sparkling water at lunch as I was tempted to do.  Good.  I can tell this entry conveys my mood, but I’m re-writing.  NOW.

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