Trellis Step Travel

And ’11 white, and ’16 red.  From Spain, bot.  In the quiet kitchen consistent with my vinified vision, speaking in poetic tongues and abetted stuns.  Character compiled in this sole presence and thought lot, caught in wine’s promise and spell, she tells me to stay, be still but keep in my truest move.

Haven’t touched the red.  Letting her wake as she wishes.  Shouldn’t say let, rather inviting her, hoping she wants to me as I her, after the week, this day, the introduction to a new story at work, learning a new style of business in a new way.  All narrated and keeping self in that vineyard block, the one I now see, the 337 Lancaster block right by the parking lot.  As the clock moves in its knotted ticks and tocks, me here with more sight.  Tomorrow in Napa which I haven’t done in too long.  On drive, notes hopes, talk to friend Chris while he kindly drives.  Expect nothing.  Plan nothing.  Write little Paginate the experience and story when it’s done.  Feel the early wake, just before 4 technically, speak to me.  Urging bed, urging rest, urging early wake for a run prior to drive over the mountain.

This could be one of the more agreeable and interesting, seductive and capturing white wines I’ve had in some time.  Why am I just writing about her, why am I not penning, noting the notes.  Don’t want to be like Parker and whatever that one guy’s name is, and then the other twit I always see posting about his attendance at events hoping to be taking seriously or as something of a wine something.  I don’t want to be a clown.  Am I calling them clowns, no.  Or maybe.  I just don’t want to resemble anything they do.  I’m present for the pages in the puddle, what’s transposed from and to the character by the alchemical atmosphere, right here, what I just sipped.

See clusters in a bin, in Spain in certain corners of this contemplative vein.  A light, airy beat of sea and cliff, some sort of sand and trees by a boulder.  Never seen it, but it’s on my out-of-body shoulder.  Letting the glass be, the wine, she, with a freeing frolic of echoing chords and singular notes.  Each, its own anecdote.  I’m not the writer du vin I was when I started.  I know that.  I’m older.  Shit, some days I just feel old.  But she assures me I’m fine, encourages more recital, more music… Only write music, musically, she pleas.  This ’16.

Now for the ’11, reckon.  Last couple sips of the Albarino.   Technically misspelled but this goddamn laptop won’t let me insert the symbol.  Fighting the tired, telling it to be gone or face a fight.  Nearly done, the red over there looking at me and reciting poetry I can’t hear till I sip, fully engage and stay embraced.  Wine, educating me as she knows I need new Newness in this Now.  8:44, just minutes before bed possibly.  No way to know.  And that’s what wine is, not knowing.  Letting time find you, and you drawing from the confines of the presented page.  Sip, scribble, learn, live.

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6/25/19

At work, feeling more than invigorated and fiery with this promotion.  Sales, selling, speaking… now everything culminates, much I hate that word.  Getting done starting tasks, committing to 3000 observational words for and from day.  Idea for day, Knowledge.  Get to know the person in front of you, even if you already know them.  Listen, listen more…. Study, again, observational.

At my desk, ready for the day in a way I’ve never been.  But I calm, compose, collect, settle and assemble attitude and sight for what’s next, in next hour.  Want to work in slowing down in idea delivery.

9:08.  Writing notes to self and even more in exploratory mode, mood, mold.  Drive down to SF, thinking, speaking into recorder.  Envelope to tasting room, or just studio.  Where I write and self-publish, blog and develop what I develop, bring more to life.  Creative Room….  Just got a call from a scammer, claiming to be from the Social Security Administration.  The recording claimed my number had been suspended due to suspicious activity.  Wouldn’t a live person want to tell me that?  I pressed one to speak to the next available “officer”.  A gentleman came to the phone and asked for my name.  I asked Shouldn’t you know that already?  He said no.  I said I’d wait for something in the mail.  The guy then said he’d inform the sheriff and the arrest warrant would be issued have a nice day hang up.  I turned off phone, and laughed my way back to my desk.  I thought and am still thinking about it, from a writer’s perspective.  Shouldn’t you write a better plan than that, a better script, story?  And all due respect to scams stretching from other countries, don’t you think the accent kiiiiiiiiiiiiiind of gives it away?  They’d benefit from my instruction, a small or larger writing seminar, creative writing effort and intensive for scammers.  I wasn’t sold.

Then thinking came back to here, Sonic, selling and what I’m about to sell for the B2B division.  Still laughing, and if I’m not arrested in the next couple hours, I’ll keep jotting jots on sales approach and tone, word selection and deployment.

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Laptop again giving me grief.

So I open the bottle of Monterey Grenache I bought at Bottle Barn a bit ago. Not letting it sour or soil the soul of this sequence of time I have to Self. First sip, and I’m spoken to by subtlety’s illustrative principles.

It’s still not speaking to me, doing what it’s supposed to do. This it. An it. Not capitalizing, not surrounding in any quote marks, even the singular. It’s a thing. A monster. A devil. Guess I have to buy a new laptop.

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As someone who obsesses over work,

and what work he has to do, what I have planned the next day and the remaining hours of this day, I am honestly with nothing.  But I make myself write.  One student tonight saying one of her goals is, was, is to wake at 2am to get ahead in her studies and I assume write a little as she does write poetry and write in short lines, short stanzas, pieces that span only a page.  And I say ‘only’ out of awe, that she does so much to a page in only a page’s pulse.

Was nearly too lazy to write anything tonight.  Told self, “Just a hundred words, per blog.” But I can’t hold self to that.  Should I do what this student plans on doing?  Should I set alarm for 2?  Isn’t that the time of the artist, the writer and poet?  Didn’t I read that somewhere?  On my lunch today grading papers and writing in the Sonic journal as this goddamn laptop didn’t want to let me use it.  Of course, now, I do push the buttons and have a note in my writing normalcy.

Finish the fucking book, I tell myself.  Like my son said tonight as I poised to make his bed with new sheets, “GET TO WORK.” I am.  I say the same to self.  

Sip the Barbera I popped last night. It, she, more calm.  Me the opposite of anything tranquil at the moment.  Working in the home office which isn’t as common as I’d love to tell you it is.  But, WORK.  Work.  What I write about.  Force self to write when I don’t want to.  I do write about wine, but that’s not my only onus and thought light.

Now, I’m like a train with this, these writing thoughts.  I, not failed.  Not failing in my aims.  I won’t allow that.  No one should.  Why would you.  You are here, once.  And I’m not addressing the fact one only lives once…. I’m speaking to myself and you, that where you are, right now, the opportunity and life invitation to bring a project to completion is singular.  You see it once.

You are a train, if you wish be.  Some unknown animal of fruition, bringing works to an offering stage.  There are only stops that persist acknowledged.  So acknowledge none of them.  I see so many of these speakers and motivational-who-be’s profess all this counsel but don’t consider the most apparent reality… the audience member has to decide.  They only elect to act if they bring themselves to movement.  Tonight I could have just as easily poured this red from El Dorado, sat on the floor of this home study, went on phone and scrolled through some photo pour.  No.  We decide to draw, paint new plausible for our Personhood.  Decide to move, be alive, mentally, alive, wildly alive in all movements of your steps and actuating saunter. 

What work does for and to the character is animated in divinely lucrative chant.  Dodge the task, never.  Distractions and suitable sanctions to project-dodge are terminal.  The panacea, always, is preemptive production.  Never, labor deduction. 

10/15/18

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The Glass

img_7604Late, and wine and music, thinking about the day and week ahead.  Day off tomorrow from office new but class later.  Going to put thinking in mode of close, already for semester.  The writing daddy thinking, thinks now, bigger than in past sittings.  Tonight, Pinot Noir.  Went to winery he just in the last month left, yesterday.  He misses it, wine, the industry.  Would he ever go back?  Fuck no, he says to himself.  He says it loud so he can hear himself think it and say it, and feel it more before the next sip.  He’ll have his own winery one day, something small.  That small little tasting studio and room where people, anyone, can just taste wine and talk.

He closes all the other docs on his laptop.  Focuses on his memoir or note or memoir-ish novel piece, he throws more Pinot into his circuitry.  And I’m tired already, even though I did manage a nap earlier, and after having some coffee.  Guess the writer needed it.  Mike looks at the wine, remembers his last days at that Chalk Hill spot, going into the vineyard his last day with the TR manager to do his exit and she saying this is how it should be done as he’d always talk about the vineyard and everything in it, how he’d walk it everyday.

He’d write it.  That tell-all.  Or something like a tell-all.  He wasn’t trying to expose anyone or call anyone out, or do any tabloid shit on his blog, he just wanted to write the wine industry, the bar the glass the towels the inventory.  Each turn, jot on a paper clipped by a spreadsheet metal clip-y thing.  He looks again at the glass and writes more notes about it, what he thinks someone from, maybe somewhere like, Indiana would say.  Some small town Indiana person, now a rich oil or farm behemoth.  “That’s nice, that’s like one of those Pinots that tells you what Pinot is, what it’s all about… I’ve had Pinots like this before, I’ve had a lot of them…” He’d heard lines like this, so many times before, someone trying to sound like something, some wine something, an expert or “connoisseur” or “aficionado”, or just a fucking EXPERT.  But it’s in his head.  He knows he has to write this down.  All of it.  He sipped the Pinot faster, pour another glass or sip right from neck. It’d changed, 

Wine speaking to him in octaves applauded, in his thoughts.  Empty glass, full head of wine visions, walking a vineyard again like he did at every wine he’d ever worked at.  He doesn’t know where he is in this session, and he doesn’t care.  The mocha, maple, cherry and milk chocolate from the wine speaking even several minutes after sipped.  He sees himself light up after writing about glass’ occupant, even after gone, even before letting it sing through a bottle’s neck like he were Kerouac.  Much to tell, more now later.  As a writing daddy ought do.  Much anew do.

9/23/18

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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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vinward jot, 2017

Last day of the year, I’m in a wined mind.  At the wood table with my coffee, knowing just where I am in my wine shop countdown.  Walking the vineyard, I had the thoughts that will get me there.  All was visible right in front of the Cabernet sign.  I need more bolder be, unapologetic as someone recently me insisted.  There will be no abeyance, but constant motion.  Jazz and poetry in everything.  2018 begins today.. and the three wines I’m pushing today will be an enactment of me at my shop.  Have a $20 bill in wallet, I think from a tip either yesterday or day before, from some day… that will be for the shop.  Putting it away when home.

Pushing the Pinot, Cab today mostly.  And to an extent lesser, the Carneros Chardonnay.  I’m in my shop, today here at Roth.  Have to sell $1600.  That should be easy, with Britt and I.  So I start early.  Posting what I can… writing what I can… even writing a different poem for each wine, describe them differently than I have before… The Chard, my Jane Austen.. Victorian and elegant, convincing and luminous.  Pinot, consummate storytelling, conveyor of atmosphere, place and mood, the jazz singer next to you that’s an intersection between a ghostly whisper and a flirtatious hum.  And, mon amour des amours, the ’15 Cabernet.  Gothic, a novel, a cascade of romance and truth.  I write further about each wine knowing I won’t remember much of it but it’s here to blog and I’ll keep my composition echoing in my pages that me follow to the bar when I set out menus, taste through the bottles with Brittany.. my younger and ever-eager and unusually sagacious soeur de vin.

2017 leaves.  Book closed, done, and I’m starting the most layered and rewarding, enriching and educational manuscript of my total narrative so far.  ’18 is the invitation I’ve been waiting for.  From wine, writing, business and teaching, me as a runner, father, thinker… everything.  The year of not just me, but US.  All of us, readers.  We’re here to get what we want, and what we deserve.  I turn the volume up on my jazz.. not sure who’s playing now, but I recite to self— no fruit flies this morning, and I don’t know how I feel about their absence. No time to thank bout them being on-present.  I’m working in and with, for and through, from what I have— a cold tasting room, quiet and empty and filled with jazz at 09:15.  Cell phone charging, coffee getting colder, both are at left, then to left of them and this table is the dark crush pad, or tank room.. one of the production sectors.  None of them here today.  But I’m here, building my own wined story.  And building a wined story is building all the stories— education, teaching, being a daddy, runner… everything.  2018 will see me at Stanford, me running the Big Sur full or half-mara’…. It will see me do everything.  We, are going to do everything, this new year.  Today’s a day of readying… arming Self with ideas and yay-saying talk, thoughts, pulses and poetry.

Wine is everything.  More than just the pour, the spoken word after the one or one-and-a-half-ounce, or two-oz pour.  It’s all our aspirations… our books.  Our words and dialogues.  The stories and characters.  That’s why I’m here.  And that’s what will take me to my shop, and all and any of us to whatever we demand, in ’18.

Here we go….

Et c’est parti….

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inward jot

img_7573Colder than yesterday morning, just saw on temperature reader in car.  This morning, walking downstairs, elevators out of service, I walked into the well at the same time as this man dressed in a suit, with his sleek leather bag over shoulder, hair done, ready for something.  “Good morning…” he said.  I returned, as we walked downstairs awkwardly but not too much so together.  When on first floor, he saw another man who appeared to have just finished a workout, one demanding and putting him at breath’s loss.  “Are you ready?” Suit man asked.  Could hear what the other guy said but he said he needed a workout before whatever’s set to go down today.  Wish I would have slowed, listened in a little, but I went to get my coffee and head to car.  Now here at winery, thinking about the wine I sipped last night, that Corliss Malbec, listening to this track not sure who and don’t have time to look.  Have easily over an hour to write this morning, collect self and have time with my musings and thoughts, words, this feeling this morning carrying over from yesterday morning ordering me to be more wild with all writings.  And sell every fucking one of them.  Walking into this building, I saw John, the winemaker, asked him how he was and he said still trying to wake up, told him I’ve BEEN awake, and I’m just getting started— that today is MINE.

Walked into winemaking break room and saw coffee being made.  Today… something’s set to transpire, something en ma faveur.  Coffee, jazz, a quiet, well-warmed office for this yay-saying yodel of a writer.  Noted earlier that the Malbec Cara sent me is just the kind of wine I want to make.  Why not do it… why not.  And not to make money, but write about, of course, have more intimacy with wine and my understanding of it than any somm’, or even winemaker, wine “critic” or “expert”.  Can still feel the cold from outside and for some reason it pairs with how I remember the Malbec, how its notes slowly suggested themselves to me, as if to acclimate to me as I to her.  HER… have to stop calling wine, ever, an ‘it’.  She encourages my poems, my wandering lines and pages that will afford me the ’18 vintage… next year, going to do it.

Made new list of projects just now.  Have to sleep less, work more, write more.  Today, and for no other reason than to test self and work ethic, a 5,000-word day.  Wonder if coffee’s downstairs, ready for the writer, ready for the day’s education and being integral in it.  An orphic morning… divine and otherworldly with its multiplying spells, again like the Malbec she sent me.  I’m lost in my fervor, my thoughts being like multicolored webs and equations I have no interest in solving. Once they’re “solved”, something’s done.. something’s gone, dead.  I want the endless, the infinite, the indefinite.  Reading the sounds and colors, lightings around me… keep writing, they tell me.

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Something at every corner today it seems. 

One co-worker dealing with something, then me, then another, then me walking into the kitchen with water spraying everywhere.  We just roll with it.  Pour ourselves some wine and make do with what’s ado.  In office at “my” desk, not at that foldable one.  Tasted a bit downstairs, the Zin seeming to show with more show and sexiness than any of the other offerings.  Even that Santa Rita Hills Pinot doesn’t recite with the romantic revolution that my Dry Creek beauty does—  She tells her own story, a story that can only be hers, HER way.  She smiles and walks and blows kisses at me from the glass before even putting it to a writer’s lips.  She tilts, she tells, she relaxes and instructs.  I just witness and listen and know I’m a different wine writer these past few days, since that sitting in the hotel lobby at Sonoma Mission Inn a couple mornings ago, and especially this morning pouring myself a three ounce oration and listening to everything she says— each blackberry verse, each lavender pull, each stand and sit and sprint of her enigma.

Not sure how much time I have in this “lunch”, and don’t care.  Just listen to the wines, what they, the she’s, tell you to do.  Sip more, write more, tell more, recite more in the language of wine’s angularity—  Have all my wines for tonight, ready, cued, ready to pour.  Have to leave in just under three hours.  More than eager to recite as I do, see how that Chalk Hill blend is tasting, and that Chardonnay.  Tasted a couple wines at Lancaster while there.  That ’14 Nicole’s showing with more vibrance and sky, climate and focus than most of the past vintages.  I was surprised, and a bit saddened that my previous favorite, the ’10, has been shoved off stage.

So… next wine of focus.  Why not open something off-book, not-expected, some surprise for people when they walk in?  Why not?  Wine should never be overthought and, I mean, definitely not over-planned.  Thought I heard a door slam out on the crush pad— Why don’t we give more tours there, show people the dormancy, the spooky feel of the tanks and all the weird sounds they make, all the ambient echo and tangible haunt of where they visit?  Maybe I should start.  Wine is so much more than wine, I’ve been thinking the whole day, especially when in that copy room or mailroom at CHE.

Pinot Noir calls me.  Not sure why.  All the Pinots we have here.  Wanted to open them all the other day and didn’t.  Well, after “lunch”, I will.  Why not?  Why not tell a story different, why not surprise people?  Wine is Newness and randomness, and doing things just because you in that moment, in that minuscule umbrage of time, you CAN.  So, I will.

Notes from just about a half-hour ago…. “Perfect rained asphalt touches […] cold redwood tree exterior […] Washington weather […] industrial structure and lotsa fruit”.  Just me having fun, and putting self in the head of some of the people that come into the TR.  Seriously…. How could someone not have fun in there, working there?  You don’t like people?  Guess what, NEITHER DO I.  But I make it mine, I own it as I want to own it and operate it as I see ought.

Break over.  More wine.  More notes.

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