Frustrated with myself as I wanted to post a piece I wrote about Emma, earlier, but this evening is about a vent, a shelling of sorts. Nothing negative, just that needle-esque candor. Right now on floor of bottom floor of Autumn Walk Studio sipping night’s cap and thinking about day, how crazy it was at the winery. How I love and loathe such momentum in tandem, how people that ask the dumbest, most self-absorbing probes of wine perturb and infuriate me— one lady today feeling the need to ask a question then use the answer as the foundation of her grievance— example: “Did this see any oak?” she asked about the Chardonnay. “No,” I riled, “we wanted this to be clean and bright, expressive and charming.”
“Well,” she said, spilling the remainder into the pour ceramic in front of her, between us, “I like the oaky Chards, this is too thin. Why didn’t you use new oak?” I dodged the question and told her something that made her feel more empowered so she’d shut the fuck up. ‘It’s wine for fuck’s sake’, I thought. Why do people get like this over wine, and I have to be honest it’s less than a percent of people walking through that front door-set that have such demeanor and lean. I always watch from behind that bar, writer I be, to see what I see. You have these presuppositions at times, we all do, but you never know.
Already I can feel myself getting lazy on this Studio’s bottom floor, and I haven’t even lifted the night’s capping of captain cappings. So now what do I do, with this time to myself, after getting up when I did with daughter, then soonafter son— the writer’s a pretzel, self-promulgated in prose promiscuity, yodeling from this idea to that, and I get more frustrated with self. So how is this helping. I think of the vineyard walk I took yesterday, how if I were the owner I’d be doing the same thing as the current owner. True acuity and familiarity with the property, telling a story. It’s all a story, a zooming and tangibly scenic story-set. I’m relaxed but not, as I see again how life’s shortness motivates us. I’m angry, but then I’m not. I refuse to smoke from negativity’s cig. I’m here, now, downstairs, the fridge going mute, and me finally having a whale upon which to write. Yes, each moment I can write while having two babies is like joyriding a whale, in the middle of the Pacific.
I’m okay now, with not touching the Emma piece. I’ll get to it tomorrow. Typical writer procrast’— So now harm in my creative skin or waves, telling tide. What’s going to happen tomorrow at the winery, who will ask what? WHAT? Feel like I need to know now so I can have some witty fucking response. The wine industry’s like a circus, then like a business, then like a riot, then like a war. Which facet do I better like? Not sure. You know what, curtly, I’d rather write about my daughter.
(8/27/16)
families and people with whom they can share that story, what’s in the bottle— more than sipping, or feeling of effects. But an envelopment in wine’s sensory atmosphere and phenolic music. I roll my eyes sometimes when I hear people conveniently using the Robert Louis Stevens quote, and I think I finally know why. As much poetry as I read and write, teach to English students, wine spans disciplines, is more than verse and establishes its own discipline in our worlds, becoming inter-dimensional and intergalactic, defying natural laws and going to spaces in our existences that indubitably teach us more about our existences. Like my vineyard stroll earlier and anything connected to wine and its development and elemental assembly, where I am now at my desk, staring out at the Sauv’ Blanc block, gifts me innumerable lessons.