project

9:09am.

Back from leads meeting.  Brought my own coffee, and did something I haven’t done in a while… got a fifty cent refill with an old gifted tumbler.  It was in no way a refill, just the kid behind the bar knows my name and I played to that card.  So I thought about selling, and recognition, brand recognition yes but just knowing something or someone, and the proximal response.

Do something different with my prospecting, something.  One, writing more letters.  Calling less.  Write about Sonic, more.  Study the story and identity of Sonic.  DO. NOT. GIVE. UP.  OR, slow down.  Keep the motion and conversation tireless and as I was told, nearly promised, “Good things will happen.” This morning told by a member, Gary, nice guy who does loans and does a lot of business, that it takes time.  Plant seeds, have conversations, go out…

Lunch today in Novato.  Meet as many people as possible.

Working as well on a couple side projects, that aren’t really side projects but to the side of Sonic, of course.  Great lecture last night.  The whole time talking to these high school kids and hearing them narrate their plans to transfer and travel, me standing their wanting to do the same.  “Fuck it, then why don’t you.” True.  Why don’t you, I, we?  More life in the day, more life in me and life through movement, through what I do.

A wine project…. Going to take a coffee break here in a minute and write some notes on it.  And, target wineries that I want to study, learn, possibly help move bottles.  All these notes to self to help lift self off ground, gain altitude.  Wine, bridging that stretch in my story and all the wine world people I know, bridging it here, or something.  Writing freely in this morning’s early locomotive intentions with paragraphs and narration.  All over the place with my ideas and writings so far.  The coffee very much doing its job, and doing what I need it to.  Wherever I am in the project, I’m getting close to what I want which is that autopilot feeling in this new position, yes, and of course more money, but more than that, any of that, a reaffirmed and confirmed purpose.  The other day thought some of my writing and speaking ability was lost from some perceived block or mock-reality.  But no.  NO.  It’s all a decision.  All of this is a decision.  To do what you want, and what will get you to your There.  You reach a point where you’re just tired of it, tired of feeling a certain way, and the only steps you’ll accept are ones of a new beat and clef.

Planning to break at ten.  Just sent first email.  And now…. Hearing people in a meeting.  Signed contract just came in through email.  Celebratory, me, but only for a second.  Want to replicate that, transact, over and over. And I will, through creative prospecting.  And I’m getting sick of that word, prospecting.  So what’s the next logical word?  Is that word needing to be logical?  I’m overthinking.

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8/26/19

Day WHATEVER.

Just facetious, it’s 24.  In an antagonist’s angle, this morning.  Feeling more in control of this AAE position than I have since accepting it.  For one, don’t do your job so much, I’m telling myself.  Make connections, and not the corny urgency of “It’s who you know”.  No.  I’m talking about connecting everything you do.  Everything you have in your story.  Everything that you already are and everything you’ve studied, and have some prowess in…. use that in your new position.  Make more self-notes.  Lose nothing, log everything.  Even how I’m starting the day, sharing my three aims of writing tomorrow’s lecture, having only ONE coffee after this latte if any at all, and running at lunch.  76 more days to go till autopilot is initiated and set.  Yesterday at winery working as quick and feverishly as I was, like I was full-time again in the industry and thank the Craft I’m not, but I felt in that character again, and it was telling me something about this, what I’m doing here, at this desk and in the Sonic office.

Have a meeting at 10.  More than ready for it.  Will showcase, or maybe just show, how I “sell”, and how I present.  Excited about it for reasons that are all over this blog, but learning about the character, their business, what they want.  Not so much that 80/20 rule or idea of listening when prospecting, but showing a genuine interest in what they want.  Connectedness, community, creativity.  Yesterday while in the tasting room, and walking back and forth from the cave with visitors, no matter how stressful (I wasn’t stressed, at all, please note.) it got, I never detached from the character and what they were saying.  They constituted the entirety of the Now, and the freedom was from any potential angst or worry of conversion.  I did sell wine, but I didn’t care.  I learned the story of the people, the couple that drove out from Sonoma to celebrate the man’s birthday.  He, with his wife.

Feel like I’m on auto, already.  Like I not even need touch the yoke.  Like the switch has already been flipped.  Like I’m not working. Utter creative.  Thieved my own destiny.  You decide the words, you decide the story, you decide the YOU of it all.  I am on autopilot.  Enjoying the flight.  Enjoying the peripatetic sight and presence of everything.

Need to drink water, for run.  Be more than hydrated when in that 80 degree breeze, if there is a breeze.  Hoping there is.  This Account Executive story, in its I believe 40th day of duty, exactly like running.  I’m running, catching my own time, old time, and beating it.  Not even nine o’clock, and I have answers, questions, multiple theses, a new music.  Not stopping, can’t let self stop.  Notes for tomorrow’s lecture, now water.  People around me talking, not listening.  I’m in head of this new character and story.  Not selling, but listening, and at times speaking.  I’m finding that with work we complicate and over-oscillate and inwardly debate incessantly and that’s what compromises our fate, indefinitely.

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A Walk to the Front Door

Words, having conviction.  Conviction is not only what “sells”, but what proves memorable.  First sip of coffee, off. Off into the journal, on the Road.  Was thinking something yesterday, about travel and moving, movement.  But the specifics are lost on me this morning.  Plan for today is simple—Calls.  Speak on Sonic, speak on ideas, ideas for businesses, and writing–  THAT’S IT.  Yesterday someone messaging me, asking me if I want to go on a writing adventure with them.  They concerned about being a good writer, they don’t know writing well, they’ve been told for years that their writing isn’t mighty.  I tried my best to quell their concerns and anxieties.  I urged them to just write.  Then I told myself that I need do the same.  Today at lunch, writing and reading.  Writing about my reading.  After receiving the message last night while tasting some 2016 Landmark Pinot which surprised me with its attractive act and tap, I saw Jack upstairs in his room beginning his new Harry Potter book.  Can’t remember the title, which one it is in the series, but the thick one.  Or the most meaty, weighty page stack I’ve seen him bring home to day.  I thought the reading and writing adventure are, or should be, always in helix.

Not sure I was even walking to the front door of the building, after parking.  Felt like I was floating.  I nearly hovered past the door.  Why.  What’s causing this meditation about my character and in my inner voices.  There’s like, I don’t know, a student and professor chant about the morning. I’m learning, with a learning curve that doesn’t indicate any compromise or handicap.  Now that I’m through the door and in the building, I’m moving.  This Mike Madigan knows what he wants but doesn’t know too much about it.  Hence, I suppose, the nature to this project.  On this 6th step of it.  What now, and to where.

The wine last night put my visions and meditations in a number of noted tumbles, forcing more thought and words, conviction in wine.  Chardonnay and Pinot, and whatever else.  The conversation around me currently interrupts the inner recital.  Wish people would just be quiet, but they’re doing their job, and well at that, what I should be doing.  Okay, I say to self.  Note everything, like one of the people talking now that minces my concentration.  He showed me a photo log of sites that he’s inspected and where installs have been transpired.  I was daunted by his photos, not just by how many there were, but the variation and expanse of focus.  Am I aiming to be the top sales person in this division, I thought last night with the Pinot?  No.  Not necessarily.  But I will make an impression, or have my story read.  Not so much a story on sales, but doing something different.  Writer in a tech office.  Often I sense some quake in my character grieving, “I don’t want to write about that….” Or “Don’t write about Sonic.” But ever, that’s all I think about.  This new character, the new story.

A thousand words, Friday’s beginning.  Have to send flight plan, as I call it, to Mark.  Then, off into day.  Prospecting, yes, but building… story.  The story and how I write this new story is how “success” will be gripped.  Appetite for associate words and sentences, more pages in these business cards, this messy work area that I wish somehow I could find time to organize. May come in on Sunday, before winery. Shit… forgot to bring new journal.  Wonder if they have any here, like the ones I see Tasha with, or other people in Marketing.  Checked, and no.  No matter. There are legal pads, and I swear to not start as I have in the not so removed past where I begin penning on one and don’t reach the last page.  Remembering that movie, Crashing, where the writer only used legal sheets, writing on the couch of those two English students. Miss being a student, miss going to class and writing, having something to turn in. Then why not do it again?  Okay….  I’m a student.  Studying, well, THIS.  The Now.  Tasha told me those little journals were from a TedX event years ago, and they’re all being used or have been used.  I have legal sheets,   Elephantine plains that want my words, or I’m telling myself they do.

Reading Road again, as I noted the other day.  And already it strikes me differently.  Not just with Dean in how he’s presented, but the narration and how it always returns to Dean.  That is the singularity.  He is Sal’s Road, even when he’s not on page, or at all in a chapter.  Reading now as my son does his Potter manuscripts.  Just thought, while reading a bit of Road that I should use the blog as my notebook. I don’t need another legal pad.  Already have one on desk, to right next to elbow under a little notepad.  Need more coffee. Already.

Projects beginning to surface.  Wondering how much more writing I’d have to page if I ceased using paper.  Apart from the legal pad.  Or, what if I decommissioned that, too?  More space on desk…. Post-it’s under forearms.  One of them reading, “Before you write—Where are you and what are you doing?  In one word, and ideally one syllable.” Think.  See.  I’m seeing where I want to go in this AE walk.  Keep everything simple.  Say less, listen more.  One project, one word, Sales.  How it should never be sales, how what so many want to do is convert before contributing to a conversation, a new association and relationship.  Right after I walked through the door this morning, I told myself, “Today, no selling.” When I call down these lists, I notice myself getting at times unsettled, or anxious.  And I’m not even on the call yet much less through the door talking about what we can do for them.  No selling.  Just call and say HI.  That’s it.

8/9/19

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Not a matter of correcting,

but designing. And if you’ve stayed or parted from the design, you put yourself back in it. Don’t scold yourself. At all, much less excessively. Go back to your sight and self-promise, actuating your fire and story. Collect, breathe, calm. There’s another scene soon to start.

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Brought self here, music.  Beats.  Playing over and over and taking me with them.  In directions I didn’t see, foresee, forecast.  The pages filling in this journal and I credit this, here, where I am, at Sonic.  Have to keep writing new ideas for me, my team, but just the ideas for the ideas themselves.  This coming year I will take what I want wherever I want.

Choices, decisions, destiny blended.  I don’t know what this is.. where I am, what I’m doing.  Consequence of choices or destiny, happenstance, intersection of all.  I do, though, acknowledge where I am and what I’m doing.  And from that there is love.  There is wander and wonder, aimless exploration, stories and new stories.  Feel like I’m dry, drought-stricken, out of words to put to page, but then I see the words are the act, are the subject— we need to write our thoughts.  Yes it takes work and time, but that’s what confirms life. What confirms where we are, who we are, and why this character we’re given does what he and she does.

Place— coffee, the table, the self.  The music I listen to, with electronic components, atmospheric beats with light hip-hop influence, easing my disposition and pace at which keys are hit.  Belle musique, I say to self knowing I need more of my study, more of my exploration of French.  Coupled with music, more, wine and travel, running… everything I seek will be no longer sought before 19’s close.  New year reminding me of life’s cruel curtness.  What can I do, what can WE do, but write.  Write it all.

Two sneezes.  Not getting sick, I order self.  I not only can’t afford it but it will disrupt my writing for the coming year… lectures and essays, no “I” in any of them.  Just the ideas.  Not much “you” or “we”, either.  Just the ideas.  Ideas are what propel life, intensify and color it, make it Art.

12/29/18

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Technology not cooperating.

Laptop not cooperating.  Keyboard not responding.  Tried using this computer in office, the word processing doc program, and its cooperation was shit.  So I’m typing directly to blog.  Which I never do.  But, these blogs I’ve made my home and soon my sole career and composition, so I type here.  I know where to find these words.  And frankly, I like this bigger screen.  Need a break from that laptop monster and this occurrence gives me just the warrant and excuse to use this actual computer.  I’m using the office, the desk, the chair, the room, imagining it my eventual office in downtown SR or Healdsburg.

Kids play upstairs, agreeing to let me work.  This is definitely a morning of a writing father, a jotting daddy who needs things to work when they don’t, and they continue to defy, so I find ways to write.  I’m a writer and if I have to the pen and paper are my most reliable and ready ally in any tech scuffle.

Kids upstairs, playing.  They don’t have these worries, or any.  Jack asks projecting his voice what I’m doing down here.  Think he’s up to something.  I know he is after asking what he’s doing and he throws down the stairwell, “NOTHINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG…..” I’ll trust him, or seem like I do even though I anything but do.  Don’t hear any thumping or falling of any objects.  Emma’s not crying so all much be composed, right?

Checked on laptop and it has no interest in cooperating, communicating, anything for me.  I come back to actual computer, the blog, the only anything I can use.  Day off but me self work.  There’s no such thing as “a day off” for writers.  I’ve forgotten about the laptop and now fixate on the day, later, a run I know I have to do but already dread, and if not dread than just want to think of anything to do so I don’t have to do THAT.

If I didn’t have this coffee, I’d be far more mentally disheveled and scattered, wrecked than I am now.  Kids play quietly upstairs.  The quiet is near unnerving– And there’s a funny noise.  Like a toy breaking, falling then shattering.  But I hear no vocal reaction.  This desk, the laptop, the morning, teaching me.  Lessons compounded and turned, around and in other directions for my story.  This writing pops.

Voices outside.  Neighbors starting their day.  “What are you guys doing?” My voices flies up the stairs from my office seat.  “Emma’s reading.” Jack says.

“What is she reading?”

“The puppy book.” Jack offers back, soft and in eased tone.

What are you reading, buddy?” I say.

“I’m reading the shark book then, um, I’m going…I’m going to read the dinosaur book.”

“Good!  Enjoy your reading!” I say to him as I say to my students before they read each other’s work in a class essay workshop.

Sip coffee and look down, under chin and see post-it, with note.  “Dear dad […] w  e love   yo     u”.  I smile then am interrupted in my enjoyment of a post-it with more life on it than I’ve ever seen by message from neighbor saying she needs her table back, the one she leant us for Thanksgiving.  I say sure and open the garage door and let her take it, return inside and ask upstairs how the reading’s preceding.  “We’re just doing a lot of reading, okay Dada?”

Back at desk, and the morning couldn’t be more for me if I had written it this way, or any way.  Neighbors wheeling stuff around.  Think there’s a collaborative garage sale sale going on.  Something like that.  What are they reading?  I hear Emma explain something to Jack and then he clarify what she’s attempting to elucidate.  Thinking I should go up there and read with them.

But, they come downstairs.  Slowly.  Emma saying, “Hey, Dada… what’s up?” I laugh and ask her same.  She then say something I can’t understand and don’t need to.  She says she needs to do something.  “I need get dressed.” The morning and its story cooperate where tech doesn’t want to.  And again, this shift in habit and writing practice teaches and reiterates dimensions to which I was already privy.

Writing my life, at this point in my life, to understand the story and my character and my writing, or anything, questions form.  Inquiries that will not halt.  I follow them, to more solutions then more puzzles to solve and codes to decode and deconstruct.

Jackie calls me up, I say I need five minutes.  Which I do and don’t.  I surrender the path that is the morning and day and just the sequence of songs in each set of numbers the clock reads play.  We wish for a lot, we Humans.  We focus on what’s absent rather than celebrating what’s present.  This morning reminds me to celebrate, to forget about whatever the laptop’s doing and just move, be mobile, be writing, be loving.  The babies upstairs losing their littleness and I age and we all age, so I capture everything.  Jack singing some song I can’t understand or identify.  Think it’s a Christmas  song, I don’t know.

Jack again demands I come upstairs and I agree.  Hear them playing and him trying to teach Emma about the functionality of some toy.  “Emma, turn it off!” I ask him to please be nice to her, he rationalizes “She doesn’t follow my rules…” Smile, back to writing more.  Love how they think, how they talk, argue and respond and in a micro-nanosecond turn their thoughts into something so convenient and obscure that only they can see connected dots.  That amazes me, their language.  Their thoughts and how they create and respond, occupy their time.  They never obsess over what’s not, only what is.  That, if anything this morning, more than that fucking laptop, teaches me.  I’m a student and they’re the collective professor.

Wonder how I’m doing in class.  My grade.  Do they like my blog, this after-laptop piece?

He calls again, little Kerouac.  This time, he doesn’t accept my excuse.  Up…..

12/2/18

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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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