06:20

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)

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06:07.

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)

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