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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Going through wine pictures, shots of vineyards

and a plastic stemless on the floor with red wine in it, the rocks on ground, sky, vines extending up into blue.  My whole life, according to this camera, is wine.  In the vineyards… the symmetrical and tireless expression of expressions, expressing to me to not move, not move at all. Stay right where I am.  In wine’s throw, and go… go with more sternly strict say in my pages.  The wine all around me, in the Zin bottle on the counter and whatever bottles I have in my “cellar” if you could even call it that.  Can a closet be a cellar.  

Nothing in wine’s story for me is happenstance or some stretched theory or hypothetical. But a certainty that I’ve always and ever needed.  Note I wrote the other day on receipt paper, after some people left, not buying a thing, not a single bottle, only asking questions about what shirt sizes we have and… anyway, “Wine teaches me to not sell.  Communicate, genuinely and creatively.  Course as a poet in wine’s time, timing.  I’m already such mode, begging and making possible a consolidation of all my laboring identities materializes and places itself in Now’s, Wine’s, stage.” Wine ever pulls me closer and nearer to travels of everywhere, seeing everything that my traveling wine friends, somms and other, now see.  Like my family in France, tasting in Burgundy and headed to Paris to tomorrow fly back to US.  I should go somewhere now, taste, pretend I’m a tourist, take notes, buy a couple bottles and bring them back to my hotel room.  These photos, from this year and years ago when I was gifted the cam’ from Mom and Dad, pictures of Jack when he was only a couple months old…. I’m in the vineyard, and needing to explore wine with more fervent direction and momentum… wine isn’t wine, it isn’t a business or industry, it’s time.  She’s a reminder that we have to envelope ourselves in the moment and the moment in our dreams, our aims, what will make us happy.

Time with family all day today except for now, kids showing me I need play more in wine’s business and any venture or project associated with her.  Play more.  Don’t stop, pause or halt.  You don’t have time.  Just play, take more pictures, of everything, everyone.  Every glass I fill and bottle I open.  That’s what wine is.  Travel and play with form and pattern, establishing my own creative pattern away from society’s expected professional and vocational patterns.  Clock in never again, only to be on terroir, taking pictures like these, writing to them, responding to each image with new imagist prose and verse.

I tell my students during in-class writing to not think, just write.  That’s what I do now, more than mere whimsy or freewrites, Mike Madigan’s fanciful form.  Entertaining going to sister’s winery.  I should.  I’ll leave the house in a bit, do some writing there, take pictures, walk the Wild Oak Vineyard, see more in what I see at a winery I’ve been to more than a thousand times, I’m sure.

6/24/18

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from this morning’s pages (no edits)

IMG_4511No distractions or tangential away from the poetic and metaphysical morsel that is Now. This Now and the ones before, after.  Reading more of Ms. Plath’s work, I see unintended metaphysical solicitation.  That is, going beyond what is one page and a statement larger.  Have to cook this idea a bit, but I’m onto something, I feel.  No such sensation is experienced in other parcels of my story, in other labored efforts.  Think I’ve reached precipice, one particular, where certain dimensions need not just be shed but cut.  Plath reminds me how poetry is everything, and all objects are there to push along verse, paragraph.  The large group to my left, the cord connecting this laptop to my ears for the writer to enjoy some Miles tracks.  Starting to arrive in the day.  Took me a while, this morning, woke early by little Kerouac then he and I going to the Hopper Starbucks for treats for he and his sister, his mommy.  Me not electing to get anything as I knew I’d be here later.

This re-positioning of my life is to the Literary, the educating of other and Self.  I tell myself, that if I put 3,000 words to page a day, and wake at four for those pages, then something has to happen.  Something has to.  I want more reading, more papers, more research.  Told a lady yesterday that I’m not teaching over the summer so I can research Sylvia Plath.  Startled myself when I said it, as I had nothing of the sort pre-docketed.  But I said it.  I love that I voiced such.  So.. my research starts.  Plath and metaphysics.  She’s not so distant, but not entirely accessible, or close.  Will have to note that in my semester journal.  The thought of writing Plath papers, sharing them with students across the country, even planet, has me with several internal blazes.  I feel meditative and composed.  Like Plath waking early to write her poems, before the children even thought of calling her.  Mimicking her patterns and practices.  I want to be as she was, write as honestly and thoroughly as she did.  I want to understand more her mode of writing, her selection of words and her exploration of being.

Nine minute left.  I keep my thoughts in revolution, in their separatism of certain immediacy and present containment.  Focusing on my first paper…. Plath, Being.  How she recognized the existence of things around her and the gravity they hold and deliver to her story.   She writes, “Our hammers, our rams,” insisting on acknowledgement, on might and demand for further consideration, interaction.  The short lines, like jabs to senses and our being there, reading the work.  My thoughts collect.  I know I’m on a path, a Plath path, where she speaks in her own math.  I’m changed, moving away but concurrently closer.  How she puts her words in a certain codified and self-decoding order, has me more than merely engaged.  I’m changed.  I knew she would help, at this point in my life, a week and a month before turning 39.  Thirty-fucking-nine.  Nine years past the extent of hers, my sweet poetess, priestess, seraph.  I have to pay her back.  I can start with a submission of life.

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At winery,

Day 3.  08:47.  Thinking about my shop, posting Elyse piece, finally.  Who else do I want to sell?  Everyone, in a word.  Everyone has a customer, every winery had a voice and an audience.  The obvious selection is St. Francis, with my and my family’s history with them, with my sister as their winemaker.  But I want to think outside boxes, far outside boxes… Arista.  Kaz.  Whatever I want.  I don’t need permission to love the wineries I do.  So… I select one at a time.  Remain not only demand-driven but discover-driven.  I discover, as the consummate consumer, then the customer discovers something through me, my site, my shop.

On this third day, I see the why to wine.  It’s the people around you.  The occasion.  The life emphasis, the stories, the literature and recital to it all.  As I get closer to 09:00, I anticipate the day.  Who I’ll see and what they’ll say, what they’ll buy, then tell self to stop anticipating.  Take the day as it delivers itself to this writer’s self.  Wine is an entity of spontaneity.  Zut!  Why didn’t I wake self earlier, get downstairs and writer my daily 3000 wine words.  Today, it I hit.  The feel of the winery now, contrasted to yesterday’s frenzy, t he day before… teaching me.  This peace with my Coltrane tracks in the office of unoccupied cubicles and desks.

Tasting from barrel yesterday, my newly primed and titular wine hone and tone, seeing each character shifted from the day prior.  The Pinot, taking a back-step and not as communicative and voltage-intended as Friday.  Then the Zin taking my focus from my beloved AV Cab.  But, when I went back and tasted both the Zin and Cab, on lunch break, the Cab retook my posture and movement, senses.  Wine continues to teach me, situate me in this new morality and philosophy, thinking of my life and everything I’ve done and how the very event of barrel tasting reminds us to live, that time doesn’t wait—  Not only does it not wait, it wants to push us aside and keep with the sprint.  That’s why I don’t stress when the crowd spill into the tasting room, wanting one more tasting, and another, and another.  One day I’ll be so old I won’t be able to stand all day.  Huh… even now, me a runner and in fairly fit condition, I’m tested with an all day post on legs behind that counter pouring.

Have to visit the barrels again.  See what they want from me.  See what precisely they have to say.  They could say anything.  They change.  They wanted to sing different songs these last two chapters.  The quixotic envelopment of barrel tasting provokes a writer, at least a writer like me.  Wine… each of them.  New notes, new intersections, new dimensions and lessons. Wine’s embodies so much more than anything I’m discussing.  It’s a reminding symbol.  We’re here, and not for long.  So, capture everything.  Be so into the moment you don’t regard it as a moment, but something else.  Something part of you.  Didn’t expect such proficient theory from Barrel Tasting.

(3/4/18)

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a thousand wines project

8

A universal style of Zinfandel. More communicative and with composition, and no shock from this bastion of a wine temple. Herbal stomps fixed within the voltage-readied berry vortex… in sip, and I just try not to think, honestly. End of day, perfect Zin interpretation with which I just collect and relax and think only about the moment itself. Right now. This is a bottle of pronounced literary quality and whimsy. As she intones more quixotic vocal I lean into chair and think further into this character’s air.

On floor, thinking of what she’s saying now to me. I have no idea, frankly, other than into a Zin as I am. This was the only bottle of a Zinfandel in my vault. And she decides my scope, senses and sitting. More mint and damp deep-forest stone make more visible and connected to message and thesis. There’s nothing left to interpret. Her pages in sips transcend clarity and sensory pulse.

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