3/29/20, Sunday.

8:23am.

Slept in a little.  As did kids.  Made them both breakfast downstairs, Jack some cereal and Emmie a bagel.  Then they back to play.  I get an idea for a novel, or story, or something.  I need time to write, I say to myself.  Start a new doc on lap—NO, don’t do that.  Reminding self of no new anything’s.  Use what you have.  So I tear off the yellow pages used on legal pad to left, and start jotting notes, world and life of a character in Redwood City.  Real Estate Agent, commercial mostly.  Very what you’d lament as successful.  In the business for over 20 years.  One night goes to a function at hotel, one side of floor, or one room on one side, a real estate gala for top producers and fancy glossy shiny characters showing off all their money and what they’ve done, their numbers and what not while on the other side is an event of over a hundred small family producers.  The character, Eric, buys a ticket on the spot to get into the wine event.  He sees all these small producers from Sonoma, Napa, Mendo, Carmel, Santa Barbara and the areas surrounding…. Lake County even, and sees the simplicity of it.  The family framing of it.  He’s always taken to wine, “collected” I guess you’d say, but never appreciated the love and family, the farming nature and step to wine.  He decides to take a step back, down… at first he wants to sell his business, or just quit and get out.  But no…. he wants use real estate to aid and abet and beget his wine sight. He wants that… may be too late in life for a family for him, single and 45-ish, but he wants the vineyard(s), the walks, he wants to be around family wineries, family people… THIS, whatever it is…..

Just an idea at this point, born in quarantine.  Raining outside, sipping my second cup.  Going to do some budgeting and more noting of this Eric’s echo and rush toward wine and being what he said.  Jack bounces a dying and deflating balloon around me… Jack calls to Emma, she yells down, “What you need me fo’?…. You call my name loud.” She says.  Jack tells her she’s hearing things, I laugh, ask what he wants… he tells me a PS4.  I say, “No dude, from Starbucks.  They don’t have PS4’s at Starbucks, bro..”

“Dada… hold on, don’t look yet…” Jack says behind me.  Me, a bit nervous, agree to wait.  “Say hi to my new friend…” he says, then showing me a face drawn with permanent on the balloon and a hat on the character’s head.  He has fangs and am told he’s 4 years-old, he loves watching baseball and loves the Angels, Jack furthers.  Jack reads what I just wrote, I edit from his reading noting slight flaws and exposures in the prose’s complexion.  I look out the window again, back to my Eric notes.  Finish a goddamn book, I remind myself… this quarantine is just what a writer needed to finish a book.  Not stopping this new journal, but noting that I’m noting new notes for another world and thesis, new voice and sight, climate and cause.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

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.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

Day’s end, and

Pinot is there to ease me, sing and educate, provoke meditation and new sight, exploration of prior hours. She instructs the writer to not work as hard, not feel so obligated to fill a page. See the room you’re in, she says. Walls sing alongside her and the floral scape of her animated way.

mikemadigan1 Comment

No nap, today, fought against pull and push to do so. Thanksgiving over, wife out shopping at one of those shopping special eve whatever’s. Me, home. Wine. Just finished glass of Claret. The night passed with such cruel progression. Indifference. Babies asleep upstairs. What movie do I watch, my dilemma. My life’s trouble. Think of how fortunate I am with my family and to have such family, to be sitting where I am, here on this we seek to shed, new one one the way… Day of giving thanks, I need to show more giving of thanks, being thankful.

Tonight, I do intend exploring more wine. No aim to wake at 4am or 4:10 like this day. No. I may actually just sleep in. I will. What do I mean, “may”? May have to punch out. Take the night as it approaches me, describe and translate it, or in such order reversed… then wake tomorrow with more thought. More story. More ME. Tired now, forgetting I’ve been up since 4-something. Think 4:10. Has it been that long? Yes. It has. Me, that writer. Now. Time to Self and I sip wine and be here, writing. A writer.

Does the writer want apple pie or Chardonnay? Both sound like they sound, their own precise appeal and connection. I’m not torn between both but urge to be curved by both, somehow. 9:08. Feel like bed but I won’t. I can’t. But more, I refuse. Why can’t I be a human, just have dessert or drink wine. Is it that complicated? Are my thoughts the hinderance, the block and or impediment? I think it may be just that. Not in any kind of a writing swoop, and I can’t figure anything of it out. How does pine figure. What type a figure be me, I, this writer.

I feel like I’m not doing a thing, while doing too much. A mess. Should have taken a nap.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

For me, working in tech is

far more dimensional and engaging than wine.  On a number of considerations but I’m tight on time so I’ll just cite one such light.  Knowledge.  Yes there are things to be learned in wine and the wine industry, but I’m just engaged by more here.  People, community, certain business practices and management strategies, creative, the office feel, the people, the company’s name and thesis.  I honestly don’t know where to start and end, really. If you must know I hope this NEVER ends.  I don’t see myself anywhere else.  And it only took me 39 years.  Why.  Stop with that topic, Mike.

I know.

So I move one, think about next year, just around the corner, how it’ll be that year.  Whatever that means.  Shit… just over 10 minutes left on break.  That’s okay.  I want to get back to desk, further own what I’m doing here.  Demonstrate my invaluable value and contribution consistency.  I’m ready for everything ahead.  From the tougher days, to those where I’m just overdosing on knowledge.  I’m home, I say to self in this corner, in this swiveling space age-looking seat.  Watch what I do know, watch where I go now, who I become and what I write.  A literary guy in tech.

I got it now.  I see everything.

5 minutes left.  Should get back to desk.  Start.  Enjoy how the time just by me flies while wishing it would wait for me, let me enjoy it a bit more.  Just for another ten minutes.  But time, like I, has its work.  I respect that.  I guess.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

Noting everything I learn in the tech scene,

world, language, behavior pattern and way.  I’m one with a little reluctance, but I’m using what I know how to do well, and from there amplify.  Guess that’s my new tone and talk, ‘amplify’, and amplification.  Think it’s safe to say I won’t learn how to code any time soon, nor design sights, install internet.  I speak, I write, I guess I sometimes entertain, I speak (already said that, sorry), and story-tell.  That’s what I do, what I know how to do.  13 minutes left in break and my eyes are still on that coffee drink.  But I’d have to use my debit card.  Don’t want to do that.  Just make yourself another cup of coffee and let it cool off, I say to self.  People play video games off to right, and again I take the energy here much more with a welcome write than how I felt at the winery in final days at Roth.  And I hate to say that and keep mentioning that in these entries because I love wine, I love even the industry, or at least what I knew the industry to be before I was devoured by it.  I swear, if I would’ve stayed…. I don’t want to think about it.  Wouldn’t have been healthy, or beneficial to me, and certainly not the writing.

I’m eager to speak to this new hire, and see what the girl I’m working very closely with to a blessing’s believability, T, says.  Questions, educating, me being educated while I’m more or less educating from the less than 12 full days of life here.  I’m going to teach from what I know.. sales, speaking, not just relating to customers but listening, seeing what they need and providing a certain narrative and depiction of what Sonic is.  Not sure why I call it “office new”, still.  Habit, or just being a funny, quirky, language tussling and fiddling pen bloke.  I don’t know.

Less than five minutes and I just made my coffee so I’m prep’d for the remaining hours in my day, here in tech’s step.  I shouldn’t say that, I think.  This office is much more than just a tech spot, place of business.  I see Sonic as a consumer advocacy group as I said to T a few days ago and earlier today, I think.  I’m learning how to do not just better business but more coherent business.  More creative, more life, more education… I don’t know where to start sometimes when it comes to this new office.  Sonic.. and me, the Lit and writing prof’, put into a new book and new storytelling  assemble and vocal.  Doing wha tI can in the breaths last, make them last, looking around the break room and feeding from everything from the video game sounds to the conversations right I listen to but don’t at all.  New job, new words and walls, chairs and tables, coffee and doors.  Everything a propellent, ascending action and atmosphere from one character to ‘nother.  The observations and written reactions and reflections, MY business.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

Telling the kids we have to go up and get dressed, brush teeth, get ready for day, but I give in and let them have more time.  And I could use more time on the day’s story, this second day of a thirty-day measurer.  What will I be at the end.  Who cares.  Have some time to self today, and I’m thinking after the run go somewhere, to some coffee shop, locally, and write.  I do want to take some vineyard pics as well if I can.  But Saturdays are busy, no matter where you are in the season, so that could prove problematic.  Maybe just down the road, to Hook & Ladder, or De Loach.  Don’t want to do too much driving.  So remain close to this writing studio… needing to take a break, now, go cuddle with my babies, there on the couch and before they’re so grown they’ll avoid writing-daddy at whatever turn they see.  I laugh to self, looking at them.  I’m a dad.  ME.  40 next year.  So now I see the inner-shove for this 30-day project.  Get self as close to what I want for self at 40 as possible.  My office… travel… more wine notes and tastings, blogging and… yes, I need to go tasting today, somewhere just down the road.  I’m thinking De Loach is my spot.  Little Pinot, or Chard, think they make a Syrah of some shape.  But, after a run.  After a run, no buts.  How far will I go.. how far can I go, what distance I can produce, better question.  Haven’t been running as much as the running writer’d like.

After kids are dressed and with teeth cleaned, they draw.  I’m back standing and typing.  Wife on way home from workout and I need to put self in runner’s head.  Will do normal route, then something added.—  Jack harasses Emma by drawing on her sheet, Emma growls and I laugh which doesn’t help.  Ready to run…. Between 5 and 10 miles.  That’d be lovely.  Lovely.  Get some healthy mile count and come home and shower and head out to write more.  Make as much use of the day, this “day off”, as writer and new techie can.  Am I a techie?  I’ve learned more new worlds and specifics, more Newness, at the office new than I ever did in the wine industry’s joke of an industry and business.  I’m a wanna-be techie, I think.  I have a blog, but that doesn’t make me a techie, tech, technically savvy strut. 

Hours after run, 10 miles, then nearly 3 miles of walking, I’m tired.  Kids back from pool and I write as I did this morning.  Jack continues to contribute to his math workbook that he created and designed himself, this morning.  Emma, little Ms. Austen herself on the couch with her laptop.  Would be outside but too hot.  And I don’t object.  Walking around Bottle Barn I imagined my eventual wines, that I’ll make with sister, there.  Just one bottle.  Not too many.  I’m very anti-inventory, since leaving Roth.  Too many SKUs, too many blues.  And, the counting is just a pain.  More than a pain, like a relentless sickness.  That just returns and returns.  Tomorrow helping friend at Idlewild off the square.  Don’t have to be there till noon.  Wife heads out to Train Town with friend and her daughter, so I’m heading to my day and creative missions early.  Take pictures of vineyards and walk around blocks, catch views of harvest if I can.  Definitely heading to Roth, maybe Foley Sonoma, or something outside the Foley book.  Just want to be in wine’s world and valley to do just that.  BE there.  Not working, just being, creating, writing.  I’ll be Kerouac as well tomorrow, but a Madigan model and chronicle.  Writing everything down…

Daughter slides off couch and walks around, dazed.  Can tell she’s tired.  “Emma, you wanna play with Dada?” She doesn’t answer, and I head back to these keys, hear train passing outside, Jack still very much in his authoring actuation.  I ask Emma again, she lazily and with extended annunciation, “No.” Okay, so I don’t feel too bad about typing as I am.  Again feel the depletion from the ten mile run.  Wanted 13.1, but the heat stopped me.  Surprised I got as far as I did.  While walking around Spring Lake, I thought to myself about stress and how so often it coms from trying to control something and not being able to.  So my new resolve, resolution and trenchant view involves just dong what I want and if something blocks me or impedes then loudly amplify ( a word I much prefer to “scale”) demiurgic movements.  All of them.  I watch both babies, Emma now visibly drained, trying to fall asleep on the couch.  I offered to take her upstairs to nap with her mother, and then she revives with no notice.

Just told Emma she’s cute and she took such as an insult.  “ I not cute, Dada… I big guuu’!” I laughed and went back to these keys.  Like I’m in college, writing something just before deadline.  Not editing a thing jus typing and using everything around me to get to demanded word or page tally..  Or a wine journalist and blogger, notetaker, feverish jotter, scribbling more on the wines I last night had, the Italian white then red blend, not Italian like other character, providing contrast valuable.  Both said something to me about my relationship with wine, and how wine’s provided a platform for everything, everything, even getting into tech… the office new.  Wine and I, together out of the tasting room.  And what now… write something.  Wine, writing, running in Sonoma County in view of vineyards, sometimes.  Not today unfortunately.  Just wasn’t in the story for day.  15:39, and I still have a lot to do.  Stating and staying busy, working on this writer’s projects and everything in his writing ways.  Just charged camera for tomorrow.  Not sure why I’m so set on doing photography, tomorrow.  Why not.  See what happens.  One of my secret aspirations is to be somewhat, I guess, a photog.  Never sacrificing the prose, but more pictures.

Kids unusually calm, and me getting tired.  Hope they don’t get frenzied and decide to confederate against the running writing daddy.  Or, I hope they do.  There’s more story and AMPLIFICATION in that.

9/8/18

mikemadiganLeave a comment

9/5/18—

Opened one of my favorite bottles from Roth, guess I had one more, had no idea.  The ’15 single-vineyard Cabernet, Alexander Valley.  So then of course I think of the wine industry and all the years I spent in it, all the people I met and the wines fro Roth.  Where I am now in my relationship with wine, now in tech, sipping wine just to sip it and occasionally write about it.  The bottle tonight speaking to me in a way it never has.  Tell me to find my freedom, shed any anxiety or suppression, oppression, any muffle or mute.  I’ll have another glass in a minute, but first I’m set on starting this sitting… getting my thoughts in some revolution, some momentum.  Technology, the internet, where I am.  With this bottle and the last glass celebrating my first couple days of this second week.  A wine guy in tech, teaching his last semest—  Different approach.  I need quiet, after today.  First day teaching after a long weekend.  I need stillness, peace, no sound.  Need me, these keys, an early rise if I can but more than likely won’t.  Today though, waking at 06:00 on the dot, after hearing son upstairs walking around, to and from our room, saying how he’s going to get dressed so the writer accepted the challenge and shot from under the sheets, got in the shower and made the day start itself.  I thought of what I’m to do right when I walk through the doors after scanning my badge.  What I’ll say, what I want accomplished, what I want from coworkers, what I want to say to them. This office new has me riled and antagonized in a way the wine industry was definitely unable to do.  So I don’t know if it’s irony or paradox that I’m celebrating with the Roth bottle, but I am.  I’m sipping to sip.  Not overanalyzing, seeing more in how I interact and intersect with wine, what she wants to say to me in this occasion and what I’m to do with the next glass poured when wife goes upstairs, finally.

Sorry.  Just need time to self.  No one around me.  The day took a toll.  Not one terminal, or damaging by any means, but I certainly seek solitude this nuit.  No one around me.  May put on some Coltrane.  Or not.  Maybe just write to the sound of the dryer upstairs.  Breathing, thinking about tomorrow in the office, already ideas quake and bubble like eager thought lava. I calm it.  Mediate and meditate in everything in my reality, 39, now.  What will I think in a few years.  What should I care.  I’m here now.  And I need to put more into this project, this blog, this story, the wine/literary/techie.  I’m a techie?  OR, a literary wine guy in the tech world.  Why do I need a title?  Why do I need anything but a page?  I don’t….  Wie upstairs, finally, time for another glass of the Meola.  She waits, that red, for my reaction and my reasoning in response to her tide and vibe.

Coltrane on.  Couldn’t resist.  As I wrote earlier the bottle shows more aggression than the last time I saw her.  Less restraint, a principle-driven grace to her setting and postmodern dialogue.  I let her sit a while, next to me in the stemless bowl.  I look at the color, more than depth-void, like an opaque rhythm and beat which I only associate with the unknowns in human consistencies. When you don’t know something, you should feel encouragement and intrigues. Push to explore and wander.  That’s what she does, tonight.  She has in past, but the Now contrasts.  With intensity and new rhythm.  Her voice is familiar but with a new bewitching beat.  I’m the one in the corner listening to her sing, wanting to write down some reaction, some emotion from what I see and taste, experience, but she’s away orbited. And I collapse in my speak-lapse.  I can’t write a thing, but only experience and not react or live or to page anything give. What I am is a sheet with only lines unoccupied, ashes, but then in next sip I’m new tint, new chromatic habit, sporadic, a her-fanatic.

Before getting too fustian in my sentences, of her, this wine, I think of the Roth tasting room.  Sitting there at that table, the long polished wood surface either intentionally or by-chance in California’s shape.  Never got an answer on that.  But how I’d show early, on weekends, to write, in the quiet of that room, the tasting room, doing more for me and my writing than the others did, for sure.  I wait for my next sip, think of literature, tech, wine, me, Sonoma County.  Not sure why, but here I am. There I am.  I’m everywhere in this ride of thinking, this paragraph to paragraph jab and meditative lab, here on the floor of my living room with wife and babies upstairs.  I’m closer to 40, when I’m to write a thorough, loud and ostensible self-assessment of where I am in this story, my story.  Where do I want to be?  Well, There.  My, THERE.  I know what that is, but anymore I’m fearful of paginating it. I wont.  I see it. You’ll see it, my There.  Readers all, will.  The wine, she massages the worry and any self-doubt from my cloud, my Now.

One shoe on the wood part of this floor, feet from where I situate. My daughter’s, the left.  I think about the last step she took in that shoe, what she thought while taking it, where I was when she stepped that step.  Don’t think she wore that pari today, so it must have been yesterday.  The Cabernet reminds, time, it doesn’t care.  I have to keep writing, wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, like when in the field the other day and sneaking a couple minutes to write some short poetic impressions.  One foot, literarily, in front of the other.  Situate, meditate, on the words and my Now fixate.  Wth wine’s loving shove.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

Today… bit by wine bug, working an event at Idlewild

pouring Italian wines, all quite rare, friend from company I worked at expressing how happy she is for me now, now that I get to enjoy wine as I should as a writer and blogger.  “Are you still writing about wine?” I told her yes even though I haven’t been, much, in days recent, but after today all I want to do is hop around Italian wines, and Italy, explore the entire fucking planet as much s I can and taste as much wine as I can, in any tasting room or villa, or terrace, wherever I can.  Was in the ‘IW’ TR from about 12-8:15, listening to my friend Thomas speak on Italian varietals in the Mount Etna area. I’ll admit—well I don’t actually have to admit, but…-I don’t know Italian wines that much.  Really not at all, till I started helping out at IW.  Now I get to have fun, as I should with wine, as anyone loving wine should.

Now that I’m home, I can actually have a full glass.  Was quite cautious sipping in the tasting room, Labor Day and all, and the CHP was out like the Panzer Divisions in Warsaw.  I was sipping a bit, spitting, but more so listening, thinking of where I am in my wined story and how now I finally get a wined story.  Me, now in tech, and I have not even a microscopic regret, will some day I swear have my own little label.  I’ve written about this so many times that I’m now actually annoyed I wrote it again, another vow, another promise, but today told me… give everything to the office new, to tech, so I can play in wine.  And not just for that, but my wine life is a gift from other work.  How can I blend wine and tech, and beyond some silly rating app?  That’s obviously too much the obvious approach.  My thinking goes to discussion, to conversation, sharing of information yes but more informing other consumers.

Wine is calling me back, but not in any professional capacity.  Like Bekah said, enjoy it as you want to.  I will, starting with this Rosé.  Blend of Nebb’, Dolcetto, Barbera, and I see some cove, the Mediterranean, me not having anything to do but write. The wine bug has bitten me several times today, warned me to stay away from the industry and if I go back it’s for my own tasting room which will be invitation-only.  Friends, family, or friends or family, and family, of either.  I see after today what wine should be.  Not a competition, not a status-anything. Nothing the industry promotes, certainly not some corporate blob-glob pretending to be family-formed.  I’m sipping wine, seeing myself somewhere, knowing that what I’ve seen in wine and wha tI now appreciate and feel is what I’m to do in the tech world.  Much now answered, much now seen, a gem trove told and gleamed.

mikemadiganLeave a comment