And 39 just treks and trudges toward me. I have the wrong attitude about it, age 39 and it being mine, I know. At least I’m up now, gathering whatever thoughts are left from yesterday’s close of the semester. Now into Summer where I don’t teach but have only the wine and its industry to write about. Last night, a Chardonnay and Syrah. Think the Chard spoke more to me than the funky Rhône. Or maybe not spoke to me but showed me more of the language and a side of Chardonnay I haven’t seen before. The wine keeps me motioned, keeps my writing, young. That’s what I tell myself. It’s not the wine, it’s the writing I’m after. Truthfully, I only see so much in wine, can speak about it in verse for so long and have something to post on this blog. Last night’s offerings had a way about them, I’ll say…. the Syrah with its unfettered jumps and locomotive-like presentation and palate pummel, then the Chard with its instruction. A new induction, for me, wine… write more freely, as I told my students yesterday. Care less, be fearless, be free… wine’s distant inquiries and immediacies are for me, this summer and beyond that. If I seek to leave the tasting room and write more about wine and travel and speak wherever about my missions, then I need study my essays on wine, my notes, consider the meta of meta’s meta. 39 is nothing, I see now. Just a number and I would dispute even that. It’s a lose concept of quasi-reality.

Thinking of that Chardonnay, again. More than the Syrah. I remember going to Burgundy in ’09 with family, tasting more Chardonnay than I thought I could ever handle. Same with Pinot. The trip showed me I need more trips. Longer ones. Writing escapes where I don’t escape but self-station in new stages and scenes, thought mazes.

06:21. The winery…. the winery…. Have to find something new, there. Either in the cellar or out in the vineyard. Something about wine’s place and character, sense and way. Why have I been blogging about wine since ’09, at someone else’s suggestion. I got away from it, wine as a singular address, here and there, but would always come back to her and lean on her for ideas and a pulpit for me to speak my verses and translate and deconstruct her as a metaphor. I’m a bottled ox as my prowess and visible formidability generate in and from and for wine. People ask what I write about, what I blog about, a question as you might know used to send me through all roofs. Now I answer. WINE. That’s it. That me. That’s my best. Age 39 or whatever. Wherever. Typing next to some varietal, some glass, to a vineyard visual, the thoughts that from there compose. Wine as a symbol, an image to interpret and explore, defines and redefines composition in so many ways. So many that I don’t have time to catalogue and calculate, narrate. But, going over student essays yesterday and speaking on composition, the essay and what it does, structure and support, introductions and summations, I see wine as a foremost expository piece.

More later, I promise my aging self. But here I am, my thinking, at 06:29, 12 days before 39.

(5/17/18)