Trying to wake. Coffee, cold and dipped in and out of a few sips already. Busy day ahead of a writer but I welcome all of it, the idea from yesterday haunting and taunting me every time I yawn. I can’t afford to be tired or focus on anything other than action, moving, getting done what I need to. A storm of appointments today, there’ll be no time to write so everything in this wined chapter and direction, for over 8 hours, cut and pasted to thinking, my character’s most intrinsic and functional form.

No kids in studio, so I have time. I have time for this, this sitting, wine thoughts all over my character’s perception and placement on this couch…. I think about the winery and the wine business and me in it a writer and blogger, honing more on the wine than the business and maybe that’s my business, what for the rest of my life should keep a writer busy.

I’ll get in the shower soon, iron clothes and be in character and get to writing spot before having to be at morning meeting which solves nothing and then my winery, the tasting room for the show. The bottled ox this morning, meditative and decisive, thanking the morning itself for this quiet, for this, THIS, me sitting on the couch with legs extended the later crossed and set on ottoman, blanket over stems. I can hear the sounds of the winery now, here in the studio with wife sleeping upstairs and me down here with this new conception and election, like I’m staring down at a crowd from a before unattainable mezzanine. A dream but not. New plot, clock, nonstop.

06:31. Giving self a bit more for this, the me here on couch and needing another sip from this mug that a friend and past co-worker at a past winery bought me while in Mexico with his girlfriend. I need travel, I realize, if I’m to know wine and define her and if not have some denotative then some abstraction in which I jot and sketch, note and quake in paragraph or verse form.

What Mike Madigan is, I think now a visual tells. Finally, right before 39. Now as wine and I have the dialogue of my life, why she’s here to begin with and what she wants me to do, how many books am I supposed to write, and what does today mean for the story. Right now, what I’m doing when in that tasting room, bottled ox or no, I’m there with wine and people speaking from what they sip and I note, trap and record everything, no try.

06:36. Now I’m ‘wake, functioning in my happy scribed turns. Need to wake earlier, as I do many times have in this journal my intentions to be writing at 04:00. I’m up now, though. Seeing everything in a vino and oeno scape before it’s poured. Right when I walk through the door, brandish an ink sword, record.

(5/19/18)