Today… bit by wine bug, working an event at Idlewild

pouring Italian wines, all quite rare, friend from company I worked at expressing how happy she is for me now, now that I get to enjoy wine as I should as a writer and blogger.  “Are you still writing about wine?” I told her yes even though I haven’t been, much, in days recent, but after today all I want to do is hop around Italian wines, and Italy, explore the entire fucking planet as much s I can and taste as much wine as I can, in any tasting room or villa, or terrace, wherever I can.  Was in the ‘IW’ TR from about 12-8:15, listening to my friend Thomas speak on Italian varietals in the Mount Etna area. I’ll admit—well I don’t actually have to admit, but…-I don’t know Italian wines that much.  Really not at all, till I started helping out at IW.  Now I get to have fun, as I should with wine, as anyone loving wine should.

Now that I’m home, I can actually have a full glass.  Was quite cautious sipping in the tasting room, Labor Day and all, and the CHP was out like the Panzer Divisions in Warsaw.  I was sipping a bit, spitting, but more so listening, thinking of where I am in my wined story and how now I finally get a wined story.  Me, now in tech, and I have not even a microscopic regret, will some day I swear have my own little label.  I’ve written about this so many times that I’m now actually annoyed I wrote it again, another vow, another promise, but today told me… give everything to the office new, to tech, so I can play in wine.  And not just for that, but my wine life is a gift from other work.  How can I blend wine and tech, and beyond some silly rating app?  That’s obviously too much the obvious approach.  My thinking goes to discussion, to conversation, sharing of information yes but more informing other consumers.

Wine is calling me back, but not in any professional capacity.  Like Bekah said, enjoy it as you want to.  I will, starting with this Rosé.  Blend of Nebb’, Dolcetto, Barbera, and I see some cove, the Mediterranean, me not having anything to do but write. The wine bug has bitten me several times today, warned me to stay away from the industry and if I go back it’s for my own tasting room which will be invitation-only.  Friends, family, or friends or family, and family, of either.  I see after today what wine should be.  Not a competition, not a status-anything. Nothing the industry promotes, certainly not some corporate blob-glob pretending to be family-formed.  I’m sipping wine, seeing myself somewhere, knowing that what I’ve seen in wine and wha tI now appreciate and feel is what I’m to do in the tech world.  Much now answered, much now seen, a gem trove told and gleamed.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

Not that it came close… it’s not even worthy of a brief comparative.  There are words everywhere, here… in this office.  If I think of where I was five years ago, Sonoma Valley at that disaster of a winery, more wine factory, I never, not once, felt what I do here in this break room typing with my complimentary coffee.  What I write, right now, is compliment.  To this place, me being here, the coffee and the doors, my badge that I need to use to enter through certain doors, the guy training me.  Everything.  Everything here and everything I see and hear.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

from book…

…stories and music and poetry— this Bobby Hutchinson song, Camel Rise…. Wine is all of this.  How I can afford coffee, how I only now at my old age “know business”, as is said.  Me, now, at the kitchen counter writing thinking about my day and what I want from all of this, where I don’t want to be versus where I should be versus and blended with where I am.  An equation glorious but as well just as much a kerfuffle scenic.

I look at the word count of this document.  31,822…. And I look at past entries and the day number is off.  Who cares, I say to myself.  Focus on the Now, NOW, right now in this kitchen and the Nicholas Payton notes.  Definitely hungry.  Need breakfast, or should I hold off, see how my character reacts.  Not sure what I’m thinking or feeling this morning but it’s certainly something and I need to not so much find out what it is, define it, but actuate within its congruency, or incongruence—  Again, don’t try to define it.  Me in the morning, thoughts and Philosophy, new approaches to everything already in place….

mikemadiganLeave a comment

from 30-day

Day 23, 7/2/17, Sunday:  Was up before Jackie, but not by much.  He came downstairs to find me in front of the coffee machine as it warmed up, making all those airy/gas-toned, water gurgle sounds.  One week from project’s end.  Am I closer to freedom?  Honestly, can’t tell.  I’m just going on with what I have— teaching and wine story and writing…. But I need my book done.  More poetry—  No more promises, no more lists of them in these entries.  Jack on couch while I type, “Daddy I love…” he says before another bite of his waffle.  I cough… may be coming down with something, but I honestly can’t tell.  Going to say no as I can’t afford to get sick.  Not even for a little bit.  Can’t afford days off, and not just from a money angle…. I have to keep my bull-like charge through life in its perpetuation.  Invariably.  No variables.  Write poems every day and gather them, react to them, be seen as a writer and nothing else.  I know I know, I’m doing the promise-list thing again.  Well, I’m still waking up.

Allergies attack, I itch left eye and realize how tired I still am.  Today, do something completely out of character, something that forever changes the story, FOREVER.  What…. Take, I don’t know, like 20 pictures worthy of show.  Go out to vineyard before day starts, and shoot.  The most ignorable objects and scenes can be made to something of-record.  Today I make myself more a photog’ than a writer.  Why not.  Why not try.  Why not do and be and TRY something different.  Photog… and when in tasting room and can’t have my camera out I’ll sneak shots with phone.  THAT, is poetry.  Using the moment for more than the moment.  In fact, not “using” it at all but exposing its importance.

Interesting…. But useful.  Going to make son, daughter, and everyone proud of me.  They will be first witness to what extraordinary steps I today take.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

Swear tomorrow I’m going to start inventorying.  Everything. 

All set for the day that is tomorrow.  Forcing self to rest, rest of night.  But now I find myself crowded in my own education, self-examination of my pages and what the world wants me to do with my words.  What I’m living is nothing like what people see in Syria… was just watching a doc on the civil peril there, and I had to turn it off.  Enthusiasm, I think… what I hold the highest herald for.  Thinking…. Was talking to a winemaker this evening, about wine and what his family history is, and what brought him to the practice of fermentation.  This writer needs to singularize, and its not something I need to wish for.  I already have everything, here, in the books. I study and lecture on.

mikemadiganLeave a comment

inward jot

Character in the Wait

img_9929

The windshield, thick slab of stubborn ice that didn’t want to budge anymore than I wanted to leave the comforts of Autumn Walk and drive 25 minutes north to Geyserville.  Turning on the car, turning on the heater full-blast, even running the wipers and nothing would move.  No little chunks of ice, no thin moving contents of slush.  NOTHING.  So I sat there, exercised an unusually and rare intensity of patience.  It felt amazing.  I found myself more centered and ready for the day.  True, my impatience was seismic in that I couldn’t wait for a mocha (this morning with the lower-than-usual temperatures, needed 4 shots), and cruise to the winery with my music.  But, I waited, waited.  And finally, it started to separate.

Why do we get so impatient?  Why can’t Human Beings have a healthy pattern and practice when it comes to waiting?  And what was I so impatient for?  I later thought this, mind you.  “Is Starbucks going anywhere?  …  Is the winery going anywhere?” No to both.  So I used the stall as a sort of exercise and icebox meditation for the sake of learning patience and more steady composure—  I lecture on Composition at the college as it pertains to literature, but it’s more imperative with Personhood, one’s mentality and mood, attitude.

As I drove away with the last bits of silt-like ice being pushed off by the long rubber arms, I thought about the New Year about to land in less than 48 hours, and how to satisfy the aims I now have in place, patience and immediate composition of my character need be abundantly actuated.  It’s the ice’s definition and trenchant tangibility that got to me.  I should have learned from its fortitude initially, rather than let it unravel and unnerve me.  Now that I’m at work, here at my desk looking out at frozen vines or vines with melting ice on them, sipping these 4 cozy shots of espresso, I know already about the New Year.  I know where I’m going, I know what it’s meant to do and I’m the one assigning the meaning.  That glacial windshield gifted me with these thoughts, the meditation that followed me up Dry Creek Road in my Passat and here to the desk, to tapping on this laptop’s keys.

img_9928

Because of the ice, and that wait, I’m composed.  All departments of my thinking relate to each other logically.  Eager to start, to go, to fly through the next eight or so hours with my wild yay-yelling roar.  I didn’t expect to see the windshield that way, still.  If you want candor from the writer, I expected to forget about it.  But, as I noted, it followed me to Geyserville.  I just walked to the other part of the property, another building to note something somewhere, and I took a picture of a row with ice atop its skin, melting.  The peace there, right in front of those dormant canes assured and reassured me about the coming year, about how I interpret the metonym of the ice sheet—  It was a sheet meant to comfort me, counsel and teach me more about me and my moods and how I perceive the world and myself in it.  Going into 2017, and past that.  Patience…  Composition…  Composure…..

I’m Composed.

(12/30/16)

mikemadiganLeave a comment