4/18/19

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Sales team here in about ten.  Been nonstop since day started, noting and thinking trapping thoughts about everything from wine to writing, teaching and education to sales and selling something.  De-emphasizing book idea for a minute, more so fixating on not letting any thought go, not letting and notion or possibility (hate the word, notion), story and narrative, last night’s class still in my behavior I can see and I’m in learner’s stride as well as professor’s.  What do I want to sell…. Nothing, honestly.  But then, everything.  All these approaches to writing, reading, reading the scene you’re in, the wine you sip, the work you do.  Everything I do in the classroom as an educator of English, Reading and Writing, is here.  At this desk.  Like when I used to list writing projects on a piece of binder paper in Math class, freshman year of high school… music projects, script ideas, novels, visions of poetry collections.  Almost too many dreams or sights, but is there such a thing?  I see now at my older age, yes.  We shouldn’t contain ourselves excessively, though.

 

Wine and what it’s done to my story, teaching me not only about sales, but about organization, what to read and how to read it, how NOT to write about wine.  Everything, truly…. Wine it’s fair to say has taught me more than most worlds and stories, characters and scenes.

 

Today, observe more.  Talk less.  WRITE.  Collect.  Learn.  Read, WRITE, be taught.  At this older age, 11 days and 1 month from 40, I’m moving faster in my project and prose pace.

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from another ‘nother journal …

4/17/19

Writing in too many spots.

No more on this laptop.  Noting everything, this morning.  Have a schedule for self.  Desired time for “cruising altitude” as Dad would say…..

Lost in a thought, not sure how to write.  Running at lunch, what to write from there.  Need a break.  Need to toss backpack, or just use for running gear.  Yes, the latter.

Organized desk a bit, plugged in laptop wife gave me.  Time for break, some journal jots, or walk to car to get running gear.  Or both.  How to optimize day… how.  Grade papers when on campus, then home for quick dinner, bed.  And goddamnit, wake…. No, won’t promise.  Will only do.

All the loose paper pieces and swarms around me, distracting, dividing my concentration and enslaving each parcel.

10:07.  Break.  Just for a bit.  Sparkling water.  And what else… running stuff.  Do I want to run at lunch, or take self to lunch.  Here I go overthinking, again..

Running.  I’ve decided, finally.  Need a snack, hydrate, get gear.  I can just see someone reading this years after I’m gone and noting something in the margin like, “Goddamn, just do something already!!!” I agree, just so you know.  Huh, there’s an idea for a book, note to future reader.  And another from yesterday, the ‘argument for me’ idea.  Like a very much stretched out cover letter and CV.

Different route today, for run.  Out 3.5, back 3.5.

 

10:30 – Done with a 90 minute challenge to self for morning.  Schedule done.  Or a draft at least.  My first, composed.  Team arrives in about 20.  Should go to car, get running facets.  Where am I running?  Just get out there and run, Mike…..  note for Reps, time sheet-related.  Old journal taken from backpack, should go through those pages, what I wrote when first hired, all this information about the internet I NEVER knew.

Seeing now why I stress the habit and practice and maintained habit and practice of journal writing so much.  To know you, your NOW, the Nows that approach.  What you want, why you want it.  Today is different, as all todays are, but I note that there’s something more paralleling about today with my aims.  The office, travel, running all over the world and writing about it.  The journal is a beacon of YOU, a place that’s more than a place, but a stage and bibliotheque or understanding and exploration.  The desk messy, and I don’t mind.  It’s honest, it’s NOW, it’s ME.  Why am I capitalizing so much.  No need to analyze or even lightly understand.

The journal teaches not so much ‘me about me’ but to see more clearly and honestly.  Fearlessly.  To not fear, to not question, to just madly LIVE.

Working on attitude, perspective, how I contextualize matters and then react to them.  If someone says something, and I find it getting under my skin or into my thoughts, echoing in me in any way, then pause.  Find sense on the page.  Make sense of it, of everything, on page.  In this “journal”.  And, honestly, if I can accomplish something of that magnitude and altitude on a page, is it really just a one-dimension and as-it-appears tablet, or “journal”?

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Waiting for haircut

time. No time to waste and no time to wait. All minutes are instructional, all times in your story narrate something to you, teach, they demand your direction and response. Gems compile right in front of you. Eyes should be ever present nets. Catch everything.

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Breaking from work for a bit.  Need cereal. Need more coffee.  And, notes.  More notes.  Studying what I do here as a Field Sales Supervisor.  I’ll be honest, I detest the word, supervisor.  I’m proud of my position, I guess, but more so proud of being a part of this.  Everything here.  All the facets and dimensions, atmosphere and narrative nuances of this building, this business.

This morning has been especially meditative for me.  More than others.  Maybe more than any other since working here, I’m pretty sure.

I don’t deconstruct it, or analysis it at all, very much, no not at all. I just keep self moving, keep studying where I am, this building, the idea of speaking in “the Field” about what we have here.

One segment of erudition in this, is THIS.  The idea, the fact that all this precipitates from an idea.

Today I examine all ideas, write them all, no matter how silly or unrelated to anything here or with me… written.

More than a supervisor, today, I am a STUDENT.

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4/11/19

Left a ton of writing on work laptop.  Up early tomorrow for quarterly meeting and party.  “Quarterly”, they call it simply.  Allergies killing me, started at run yesterday.  Tired, but sipping wine.  Another bottle of that St. Francis Claret.  How to get back into the wine industry, but in a dimension and sequence, tell and pulse I prefer.  Blogging, writing, photography and video.  Should take a detour to office, tomorrow.  Do I have time, to sneak a couple new shots in, somewhere around here… one of those vineyards on Piner.  I have an idea.. about and in and on, for WINE.

Wine and writing.  Blogging.  Okay, yeah… for me, completely expected.  But… different.  Wine in the glass now gone, sipped glass too fast from excitement from idea.  More red, more sentences, more of the world around us.  And if this is too hard for you to conceive and encapsulate for purposes of retention.  It is wine, it’s always been wine.  Wine for me.  Wine for all days.  And not just glasses contents.  But the life there, the life here, thoughts of my sister on the crush pad watching fruit come in as she did that day in 2011 when our Cabernet landed—the best early xmas present I’ve ever been gifted.  One ton of Cabernet fruit, maybe a bit less, from RRV.  Katie said all I have to do is meet her on the crush pad.  The thoughts were overwhelming before it happened. What if this turns me into some famous writing winemaker, what if this changes everything?–  It did, but now that I look back I see missed opportunity.  I need back in the wine sphere.  Stay far and clear away from industry contaminants.  I’ll take notes, starting here… small room, appointment only—NO, invitation only.  And not to be one of those wineries, but to know the person coming in.  And to not depend on the business but to enjoy it. I just want to break even, I used to tell people about the eventual and envisioned label.

Wine to me has always told vignettes, not short stories or exhaustive novels.  Wine has never been patterns, or paths.  You compose and narrate your own way how you see it played.  It’s jazz, not classical.  Wine is random and unexpected.  Excess order and constriction will shape no listen.

Writing on the laptop at work, addressing wine as well.  I feel wine as all the answers to everything in this writer’s story and I always get fucking distracted.  Why.  WHY, do I let such fuss.  About to pour self another glass, and think of the tasting room days at St. Francis, Dutcher Crossing, then back again to Kunde Family Estate with its incongruent operations and terrestrial functionality in bar presence atop multitudinous garnishing acrimony, then wherever then wherever.  I have to be done with tasting rooms at this intersection.  I am.  I AM.  So I put it here.. wine, wine in everything.  As I was “advised” years ago. Ten, now. Not so much advised as condescendingly urged.  Spare me your counsel, counsel.  Not going to think about that, or anything.  Wine and writing, wine, then write. Me now, what I’m doing.  New story, new business, new Now.  Ox free from bottle to write about current bottled composition and voice, character and place.  I’m peacefully and pleasurably placed.

4/11/19

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4/8/19

Done with singular piece.  About run.  May add to it, now that I see it’s only 3 pages, full, when double-spaced.  Have about an hour left to self.  What to do.. oh, have to plan for …. Walked away to get pen from mail room and can’t remember what I was going to say.  Oh, yes, plan for class.  Or don’t.

Overheard one of the full-timers say it’s raining outside, quite hard.  Tempted to go look.  Tempted to get something to eat but no…. Have water, gum, coffee, and I hate not too long before pulling into the spot I found in the lot outside Emeritus.  So I’m good.

5:53.  In shared office.  Much cooler in here than that conference room.  Want to be home with my kids…. Do bath, play, read books.  These night classes, especially this semester even though I only teach one, have truly incensed me.  Letting it go… enjoy this time before class.

 

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Again minutes before class. 

Wrote this entry hundreds of times.  I’m sure probably hundreds.  So I’m not going to write it again.  Until I start to write it again.

Lecture on Wright’s book not even close to prepared.  So I lean on the creative writing invitation.  The memoir.  Not really an invitation as it is an actual assignment.  But not due for another week.  The invitation was to share whatever they’d written, thus far.

6:27.  Have to decide, before too long how I want to start.  More than likely this semester will be the last for a while if not forever, at the JC.  Or anywhere, at any institution.  So I need to make each meeting more than some expected, everyday class session.  Tonight, not scripted.

Not planned.  Just in the moment.  We narrate as we go.  In the moment, as I am now, just minutes before class.  29, exactly.

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