Mike still feels the exhaustion, but not like earlier.

He has class tonight, and suddenly he’s more eager to teach than on days where he does get 6-7 hours of sleep night prior.  He notes what’s on his mind, exactly and not exactly what’s present in his thinking.

The office starts to calm.  The voices lower and fade in intensity, but his intensity can only compound and compound further in words and complexities, or what he thinks are complexities.  The essay idea forward and forward further in his chair, right where he is.  There’s no lack, of anything, at all.  Like he’s before thought and like his mother has so many times told him with his writing, everything he needs to write about is right in front of him.  “You have enough to right about right where you are.” Mom said.  She was referencing his life as a father, but Mike takes such sight and applies and threads it into other scenes, the one currently right now as he types at his desk.  He’s found an antibody, a compositional vaccine.

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1/23/19

5:35. Not 4 but still early. Last 4 days off. Will have to adjust or at the least, very least, pace self and connect to day. Meeting 2 with class, finally. Not sure how I’m going to get in 3000 words today but I’ll fit what I can into the day’s composition. Tempted to close eyes for a bit but won’t. Daddy mode nears… the struggle with both wee beats to be dressed and with teeth brushed. Nothing extraordinary. Same thing every parents goes through in the A.M. to some degree. Can hear them moving in their beds. Not moving, me. Need the meditation, the quiet. Sitting in dark and putting letters in some kind of order for day’s order has sight and thought everywhere. What to do with the day and where I’ll be in 12 hours. In classroom readying for class. Then after class. Go to bed early and hopefully wake to run or workout.

Mike sits in the room, the home office. No lights. Dark. Thinking. The day, what he has to do, first thing to do when in office’s do. How does time see him, how is he using the time he has right now, now…. what is he choosing to do and why that. This tells him something, again, again. He needs to do more. But what— Never mind that. Today everything would be for the classroom. What he’d teach. He’d be a teacher that’d be more than a simple community college teacher. He’d be something else. Him, but just in a classroom. He’d be in sync with the course outline or whatever, but only so much as he wanted. He wanted more, needed more, wanted and wanted more from his days. Anything that resembled a pattern or some repeated motion or obligation, some to-do he saw as poison. A toxin that would eat him whole and not even spit him out or digest him.

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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.

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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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from morning jot

I write whatever comes to head with this beat playing in my ears.  You, writer, and one reading if you write, need be always free.  Even if you’re focused on one character, create and type, write freely in him, her.  Kelly tells me to follow her, to her apartment, to her creative corner in her apartment, which is less than 500 square-feet in the city but more than she needs.  She’s a minimalist of sorts, but wants so much for her day, for her story.  She write in her journal, keeping track of everything she’s done creatively with the day, so she can see her actions, make sure sh’s doing something to get out of ‘the box’, as she calls the ad firm where she works.  She wants to see everything, the world and more than the world.  And me, just writing her, wondering about my character… where I am and what I’m doing.  Coffee spot before the day takes off… feeling my age, but only ‘cause I tell myself I am.  I’m not.  Write lecture notes for the day, like I do on days teaching.  One of my former students, one from the past semester, works here.  New to position, but I can tell she already has handle on everything, everything.  Quiet in class, not saying much but I see and feel the thought in her character, the way she views and surveys literature.

This morning’s freewrite, fighting off exhaustion.  And I think it’s gone.  Hate feeling like that, first thing in the day.  Woke this morning, before 4, with wife and babies, to help them get ready for the balloon fair, wherever it was.  Colors and music, food and other toys and treats for kids (intended audience).  After they left, I felt awake, saying to self, “Stay awake.  Don’t you dare fall….. fall……..” And, to sleep.  Back into dreams.  Woke, only to go back, till just after 7 when I went upstairs and threw this lazy writer into shower.  I’m fascinated by that early hour, around 04:00.  I took a couple wine bottles outside, and the to-go boxes from KIN, to recycling bin.  I remember stopping, looking around, listening to feeling more of the wind, the street.  I wanted more of it.  Why did I go back into dreams like a surrendering slug?  Ugh… can’t let self be in that frame, thinking or meditative, anything.  All over my brain and circulation, my story, this morning with more to say and think than I know how to productively put to page.  I need this book done, the next one, the next….  The other day winemakers insisting I taste from two potential blends, two final blends of a wine disturbed all over the country and I think a bit of international presence as well.  I was looking for character, and a pure, honest prose to its progression.  In the wine industry, I’ve learned so much about myself that I don’t think I’m me, sometimes.  The tasting room has re-written me.  And, for manuscript’s boon, to be sure.  No detraction or erosion of self.  But, I do know, now, this morning and for some span, I’m a writer.  That’s what I will die doing.  No doubt in this writer’s mind.  If the industry wanted to get rid of me altogether, I’d be fine with it.  I’d thank them.  When let go from the Sonoma Valley winery, the TR manager, a character I for the most part deplored, urged I seize this as an invitation to do what I “really want to do” as he put it. I agreed, agree.

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One of my lunch breaks, where I write, but

img_4747it’s more than that today.  Today, odd.  Making calls to invite club members to some party in 10 days, the biggest party of the year, and some would argue in all of wine country all year.  But I’m needing something else… forcing self to be creative with moments, sipping the SB, then Pinot Gris, then stainless Chard, then Cab, writing notes in little pages and they today take different shape.  More freed, more poetic and musical, more careless and separatist.  Me.. wild wine writer, needing more from this blog and my writing, from life and career, and I have everything I need to have what this bloody writer envisions.  No one in office with me, and this office bringing again those memories of the job I had in ’11/’12, at ‘the box’.  The box, the box… fuck that bloody box.  What did I learn there?  Well, I guess some selling approaches and facets, but not much more than that, if need you now know.

Forgot to pack a lunch as I always do so I snack on unsalted almonds, some crackers, a little cheese, and more almonds.  Could use some chocolate, some chocolate to pair with the single-vineyard Cabernet I was tasting earlier.  Working at a winery, me, and writing everything down… every goddamn thing, and finding humor in it all, as well as educating dimensions, and telling enrichment for my blog and pages, eventual and near projects.

This is more than a lunch, more than a break, this is me using the time as it’s mine, entirely mine, making wherever I am part of my manuscript… where I am and what I’m doing in this office is collection, in wine and from wine, but far, far beyond it.  A break, sans lunch, no lunching, just me and an empty room and a new life.

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Hermetic Glass

img_3291Later in day, I’m more into my new reality, less than 365 days till 40.  This is a joke, right?  I’m going to wake before wife does for her little bootcamp or mommy workout cult, or body fit.. form… whatever it’s called.  Today in the tasting room, taking shipping to base across the street then later counting inventory, not at all my favorite thing to do, has me in a mood.  Not so much a mood but how I’m going to get to where I want to be.  The same as these winemakers having their dreams of starting their own beat.

Some Cabernet from tasting room, a ’15, home with me and making me think more of wine and life and the possibility of touching what’s only to some a vision, some delusion, something to which they’d say, “Maybe you want to aim for something more realistic.” Too lazy and cranky to get up and sip more of her, so I sit here and … just sit.  Be bitter.  An old man.  39.  Then I say, “Remember what the DMV guy said.” True.  The wine industry, testing me… and quite boldly.  With no apology.  I accept.  And more motion from me such begets.

Ready for another glass… and to meditate a bit in current thought bluster and climate.  Hear the wind outside and it reminds me of the fires then I think fuck it I don’t want to think about that so I force myself to stop, and ready for next pour.  Getting messages from friend at work, whose last day is tomorrow.  Not sure how I’ll manage without him, but I will I just have to get into a more fighter sense of a writer turn.  It’s my turn, to advance in career and in my writing, books and general reality.  Day’s close, and this writer’s mind opens to stars…

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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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