2/11/19

Up from nap.  Tasting earlier at J, then KIN lunch.  Cancelled class for night.  Angry no sections in Fall for me but utterly elated.  So why in this mood.  Don’t know.  Now hot coffee.  Needed.  What to do for night, spend time with babies.  Trying to add paying projects, from wine to teaching…  Going to work late, tonight.  Committed to.

Thoughts go in one direction, then another.  Need to train them to be on singular path, singular straight, in singular yet compounding and varying effort.  Luckily Sonic encourages someone like me.  Tomorrow, heading into day like a bull, a hungry and tireless bull.  Wake early with wife as she will for her morning workout class.  The coffee pulls me from this cloud – Interrupted.  Man knocks on door I go to door somewhat agitated and defensive.  He sells cleaning services of rugs, carpets, interiors, something.  I take his car but by my disposition make it clear I’m not interested in services nor conversation.  He points out there’s a Hello Fresh on our stoop or patio I say thank you and hollowly thank him for coming by, pick up the Fresh box then return inside.  Put everything in fridge then back to types, coffee.

Wife leaves to get babies and I stay behind to plot, plot something.  What I don’t know.  Just keep thoughts in tow.  Like I wrote this morning being taught by the day and all decisions, everything around me.  Put on a beat, start writing, more, not hearing from certain contacts has me feeling nothing.  I need look and converse inwardly for more flight, more wholeness, completed character and beat.  MY beat now, NOW, is of harmonizes garrulousness. Each figment and frame around me begging to be written, put to page and sown to prose.  I feel stalled, not so much confused.  I solve the stall by just moving, just typing, inhaling the rest of the medium roast, or most of it.  Travel, right there, waiting for me.  The classes I’m to teach and the vehicles I’ll be in—planes, rented cars, buses, boats, ferries.  Everything is right there, here ahead of me.  Like Sal, Dean, Plath and all her aims and dreams poem’d and prose’d.  We think too much, far too much, rather than just rolling and being redolent in what’s already present, creating from there.

No new cup.  I pull a copy of Road from my home office, an office which has decided to form itself more as a landing for the babies and their toys, drawings and raincoats rather than a writer’s corner, the initial intention.  I start reading from a random spot, where Mary has an idea about hitchhiking.  I see Mike Madigan as one now hitchhiking, destiny’s the driver, or maybe Mike is the driver.  Either way, I’m going where the going’s going.  Writing everything, everything… tomorrow in the office, even before I get there, write the entire day.  What I want, what I want it to contribute to.. each thought scribbled then later spoken.  Known to self and the world I’m in, each character around me.  I’m Dean’s whim and Sal’s written method.

The man who knocked on the door in sales mode, much older than me.  I pity him then with anxiety and an overtaking eagerness seek to mimic him.  Selling, unafraid, just getting out there like the Field Sales Team I work with, doing what you have to for realities of building business.  Maintaining that business.  You ask yourself, at some point, some point—“What do I want to do?” I find myself there, again.  I’m not leaving Sonic, no way.  But there is more I want, as you know.  Work, what work should do, and Sonic has taught me that it should be an invitation to know Self more intimately, to understand what drives and decides your character.

5:07 and I write freely, refusing to be webbed in meditation and excess contemplation of character essence and my narrative.  Just write to this current beat, and see what self sees.  I know where I’m going, I see the hotel rooms, the views, me waking early and writing in the lobbies—what I want for work.  So I go get it.  My wine business….  Little of the blush I opened last night.  Decide on that rather than more coffee.  Want to again narrate wine as it’s a literary and beatific centricity essential to my functionality.  It’s natural for me, it’s ME—rhythmic and redolent, ready with song and eagerness.  Thoughts over more thoughts, the thought of me doing something for the rest of my life—one singular thing, act, practice and maintained habit.  Wine poured, and I see my shop, store, whatever you want it called.  I play with ideas of me showing earlier and writing from a desk before having to take inventory and do what’s not entirely the most enjoyable or fun facets of being a business owner.  New experiences, new characters, voices, sights, sight as imperative determiner.

First sip and my memory tussles with me.  The race on Saturday.  Registering for marathon and only completing half.  The rain that fell in the last mile ordered me to accept the narrative shift.  To not dismay or despair, but to more joyously blare and what I did run.  Up the rocks and steps, the inclines that were more than inclines but more geographic intentionality to challenge me.  When across the finish line, or not-so-finished line, I was given a medal of fake metal and went to tent for shelter and otherwise unappealing snacks.  Then had a beer.  Then just looked around me, thinking of what other shored there are on the planet.  What else I haven’t seen.  Where else can I write–  Interrupted again, now by former student seeking essay advice.  The Now of me orders more order.  To work.  Work more for ME, for my family. To speak and speak with fearless vessel and flight.  Rhythm, beat, beats, music.  I remove myself from my stall.  I’m on my Road, arguing from each thought.  Today, while tasting through those wines in the J Lounge with wife, I saw everything.  Felt everything.  This is more than Philosophy, and more than academics, more than life.  But, thought.  All thoughts.  Living in and from each.

 

Self Note:  Be appreciative of the Now—It gifts you with reason and questions, more Road and sequence than most estimate.  Love it all, write it all, see more Self in all beats.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

1/22/19

Morning Worship

img_8081

Morning air, metallic, not cold and not chilled, but still.  Somehow sweet and encouraging.  Helped start kids getting ready for their first day after long weekend.  Back at school, back to pattern and routine.  Son excited and into what needed to be needed and done but daughter not so.  To coffee spot on Hopper, mocha for wife, latte for moi.  All out door except me.  Here now, before my days starts its taxi to runway.  Jazz, latte, room with no sounds but typing on this leant laptop and Art Pepper, his saxophone.  Haven’t heard much of his work, if any considerable amount.  Unexpected and not in any way forecast, something like this.  Collecting before my first day back into routine, first day which isn’t much a first day at all.  Just a day, a day I don’t want to be “just a day” or jus another.

Mornings and I have had a shift a bit of late in our intersection and elemental overlap and principle placements.  Always wanting to wake earlier, studying the early hours, the earliest of earlier earlies and how I react to them on page.  Some just wake early ‘cause they have to, from a commute obligation or something of the type, and this is similar, this morning and the ones approaching, but a stern contrast in their composition.  How so, and what so, I know not yet and I may not for some time, but I’m here aware and conscious of my consciousness at this hour.

Was watching a philosophy professor from I believe Yale last night, on YouTube, lecturing on death.  Or, the first lecture of the semester.  Not sure what the course title was or what module specifically in their Philos’ program, but he sat on the desk, legs crossed, attempted hip or friendly, inviting visual—in fact, not attempted but quite believable and genuine this man seemed and sounded in his word arrangement and immediate tone—and spoke of death and its idea, significance.  Thought, “Why not do the like with the current, time, right now, what we have and what we see around WE?” What’s done this morning, or I think.  Jazz and caffeine, 7:35 and I have to be out that door and into my day because that’s what grown-ups do I guess. What this character need do, to support kids and family, buy next house and “advance career”.  Do I need help doing that?  Do I need the company at which I labor, a company I very much admire and respect and seek to emulate in a multitude of tunes, to see what I want to see?

Keep looking at the time.  Why.  Habit and obligation woven into one trove or planning and worry, of have-to’s.  Unplug laptop, stuff, device in backpack (like I’m a student, days I miss, I want to be a student—So why don’t you be?  Time will allow and then seem to not but you know the morning, you know the time around and present about you, NOW–), drive to office.  Keep same jazz station playing in car.  Let mind go wherever it wants, on some visual and self-encouraging gallivant and saunter through possibility enclaves.

Yesterday walking around Healdsburg, mid-ish afternoon, taught me about the Now, where I am in it and how mornings need be obsessively heeded, more carefully read.  Need wake earlier, and not just some day, Monday through Friday, but all days.  See what the morning says to me and what blessings if you would, should it or will it disclose, speak and teach to an eager and needy me.

 

8:14.  To make day even more interesting, I don’t work.  My team, Field Sales, not working, as yesterday was MLK Day and we need to observe it so we don’t work today, or something.  So now, at Aroma Roasters on Railroad Square, my favorite part of Santa Rosa which is imperative I visit or write here as I exponentially quick grow tired of this city.  Have noticed this feeling in the past few days, quite prominently yesterday when walking with family around Coffey Park.  Ordered decaf, not sipping yet as it’s blazes hot.  It doesn’t want me to sip or have her touch a single lip.

Morning continues to show me something about where I am and what I’m doing.  Class tomorrow night.  What do I talk about.  Don’t think about it now I tell myself but I can quite literally feel self lose the ability to wait for tomorrow night. Lecturing—No, not “lecturing” but sharing ideas.  People around me in this coffee house which has much more a genuine feel and literary integrity than a Starbucks I’ll say.  The morning, still cold.  A few degrees up, but not much.  Can hear the people around me even with the jazz in my ears.  Imagining self as a student, a student in my class.  Having short reactions to type then longer essays, having to keep a journal (though this semester I advocated for THREE, one for class, one for self I think I specified on syllabus, then one for wherever whenever whatever).  I’m a student but not but entirely so, learning from the morning and its holy contour of an hour, the divine direction of where this day goes.

Email notification on phone.  Old instructor friend I met I think at Napa Valley College, when I taught there a seeming galaxy and a half ago.  Ella.  Now a high school English teacher, full-time, ‘cause you can get FT teaching high school, or teaching high as I often joke, not at any college court.  She writes, “Do you have any suggestions for teaching narrative at the high school level?” Not sure what to say back, so I say, write, nothing.  I don’t want my studies disrupted.  The study of this morning, the odd and just dropped-in-my-lap present of not having to work.  And that I ordered decaf.  That I’m at Aroma Roasters when usually I’d be adjusting a formula in a spreadsheet, or taking notes for week, or…. Something.  I’m here.  In my praising pose, loving everything around me and what happened.  I shouldn’t just not answer, so I do.  “Sedaris”.

“Is that appropriate?” She writes.

Again from me, nothing.  I don’t know what to say and I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to spend the morning messaging back and forth.  With anyone.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

Three days left in year.  Today counted.  Coffee in nook at work.  Break before work, or work before work depending on how it’s looked at.  As I noted yesterday, again I caved, having lunch at a nice spot actually on I believe 4th and Balboa— sorry, 5th and Balboa.  Don’t regret the chicken sandwich and fries I had with co-workers, friends.  But I should have gone to café.  Of course today I set out for same, but I dismiss the dilemma and set self in now where I’m set in this nook, at this new table and chair, writing spot for a writer going into a new year, on his second cup, made in the back office where you proceed down a somewhat sizable hall with glass offices on either side, then that one magical room with the coffee.

Phone, journal on desk, or table, right now it’s my desk or that’s what I have self convinced of.  Writing meditation, the morning, Saturday, next three days off with the new year cartwheeling toward my pages.  Not only learning, I always say that— but instructed by the intersection of one year, then another.  Me growing in story and character… we all grow, or don’t.  That’s a decision.  Yesterday at California and 7th, “Not everyday’s a treasure chest but work feverishly to get what you get.” Jotted before crossing street to next block where reps were speaking to people at their doors, remembering Plath’s words in Bell Jar chanting ‘I am I am I am’ in every street pavement square and at every stoplight. 

Music in everything.  If we don’t see IT that way, then we’re only living, going to work then coming home and sleeping.  The worker shouldn’t see work as work— they shouldn’t work, they should be passion explorers, and if they don’t like their job, their “work”, make it something’s that not only liked but layered in love, loved.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

from a journal

12/3/18

So this morning my devilish laptop decides to work.  Part of me incensed and the other joyous.  I’ll take the joyous.  Going to take it in, anyhow.  Then to bank, then, by THEN, I should be run-ready.  Not sure where I am in the marathon countdown, but I’m sure close enough to frighten me or at least get me a bit edgy.  Jazz on, music the whole way here from Starbucks, getting a 4-shot mocha (that kind of morrow) and blueberry scone which they were slow to give me and when I brought it up to the ponytailed barista after she asked me a bit drained and feigned what my name was and what I was waiting for, was told there are a lot of food items that were ordered and had to be heated.  “That’s why.” She made a point to say.  I nodded.  When the scone was handed to me, unheated.  I left, not so much laughing on my way back to the over-mileage’d Prius but thinking I need intensify what I’m putting into this day, this Monday.  Music, much of what I do and how I see things.  “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, a track featuring Coltrane and shoving me this way, then that, and I’m present, very much present at this counter, 08:50.  Should get going to the laptop repair joint.  So if he, Phil, nice guy whom I always seek when it comes to fixing this goddamn thing for whatever reason, takes the monster from me, how will I type?  Oh… use the office computer as I did yester’.  Sometimes when life changes the Road’s contour, you have to follow and drive as it instructs, implementing your own creative code and composition while along.

Bite of scone.  Tempted to heat it, but why.  Surprised the laptop cooperates this morning.  Last night Jackie grabbing my phone and pushing the blog shortcut on the home screen, trying to read what he could, saying “Daddy you’re a really good writer.” How he sees me.  Intensify, amplify, self-codify in this blogger way and practice, habit, maintains the habit and practice, my Craft each morning.  Day young, crumbling scone, mocha not losing a significant level of its temperature level.

Yesterday wine tasting on Olivet Road, looking at the vineyards and in the tasting room tasting through what I did, wine speaking to me.  Take a closer more analytical lean and approach, approach then lean to life and the wines in front of you that ONLY speak life’s language.  Thought in what’s present, what’s caught, what is not what’s not. 

I’m writing for my life, just before 40.  I’m going into 40 with more thought than I ever have, certainly more urgency but more command of Day, this day and the ones in succession.  Wine has always done that, even when I had no idea what the hell I was sipping in my San Ramon apartment.  Just buying that Merlot, 2000 from Blackstone, California AVA tag, and feeling something.  Not a buzz.  In fact that first night with the friend over I think I only had a glass and a half, if I remember right.  IT was the form of the wine, the voices inside, the music.  It was all music.  I wasn’t into jazz then as I am now, but there was immediate jazz in the introduction to the light Bordeaux’s vocals.

Scone nearly gone and continues to crumble to that little paper bag they put it.  I’m not a breakfast bloke.  At all.  But this morning it just sounded good.  I’m operating madly today, on whim more than pragmatics or forecasting, any prediction or plan for the day.  I’m more mad in this paragraph stray, wanting adventure of some latitude in this way, day.  This day, mine, in all its chords and chimes.  Telling Self this is my only job.  Writing.  Capturing where I am and what I’m doing, here in kitchen with a finally-quiet house, writing daddy enjoying his caffeine and dreams.  Models presented in head, of our next house, runs on coast, flight to Germany or Austria to taste wines and write about the towns I visit.  How to do….  There is no “how to”.  There’s just the DO.  As I see it now, this morning.  I’m quiet frankly tired of dreaming and thinking, envisioning, seeing, painting some illustration or convenient scene in cognition.  Now, actuation’s my only deliberation.  And I don’t deliberate excessively.  I’m moving, moving is the opiate.  Should go soon, to Phil, find out why this goddamn device keeps giving me that keyboard warning, or stall, saying it can’t find a keyboard through the bluetooth function but there’s a fucking keyboard RIGHT HERE.  Attached to the bloody device.  Can’t you see that, monster?  Feel like yelling that here in the ditch but what would that do.

Wife texts me “Hi”.  Should reply.  But I can’t stop typing.  Feels more than good.  Writing for me isn’t writing, it’s not fucking “therapy” as some say, and I hate when people just pin writing as a therapeutic act, like that’s all it is….  It’s something, something.  I don’t know what.  Wine again speaking to me… those DeLoach Pinots, and the two Chardonnays.  I need to travel, I need write about, out, everywhere to understand wine and Self, this, life, why I’m here and where and what the writer’s meant to do with where he is.

New track.  JM’s Dream Doll by Mal Waldron.  Moody, slow, atmospheric and curiously haunting.  I’m in its notes and in line with the track’s progression.  I need produce a track a day, I said to myself while on San Miguel.  Will record when this note’s done.  Is it done, now?  Maybe this is the track, my track for the morning and the day, Monday, the week and for whatever I need.  Taking a break from the mocha as this writer already feels its gnarl and snarl.  Slowing with the sips.  Where’s my copy of Road?  Wanted to re-read it, on my own onus and timeline.  Just me on my Road, what I observe in Kerouac’s work and others.  Make time for reading today, I order Self.  Done.  Decreed.  Now, I for errands flee.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

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

mikemadiganLeave a comment