Wine is Work

I may be one of the only people I know that considers wine tastings work. Now, I know, it is still a very pleasurable kind of work, an enjoyable experience especially so because I love wine passionately, but nevertheless, it is work. Yesterday I went to three (three!) wine tastings, the first a small in-house tasting for my fellow reps at our company, the other two to help my friend Michael who's wine shop I frequent and help out on the weekends. There was some very good wine - beautiful French wines and some great Spanish, a gorgeous Madeira, and more good Greek wine than I have ever had in my life. Vin Santo? Yes, please, and if there is anything more hedonistic than that, I don't want to know what it is.

Well, I can think of a few things, but I probably ought not mention them.

Wine tastings are an occupational hazard for me. I trudge blearily on, smiling and sniffing and sipping, and by the end of the day my liver hurts, well, in a metaphorical sense, and my temples are pulsing, and I feel like laying down in the leaves under magnificent trees to shield me from some overripe Mediterranean sun. I tell all of this to my girlfriend, who is the most dedicated, hardest worker in the world, and she raises her eyebrow suspiciously. Okay, okay, so graduate school and teaching a university course MAY be more difficult than drinking wine all day. But it isn't drinking!

Tasting, it's tasting. I do spit, not swallow.

Right. I've stumbled onto sexual humor, so this is as good a time as any to wrap this up. Life is pretty good, and I'm doing everything I can to work hard and make it better.

Glass by glass.

Ahem

If you know me (which, since no one reads this, you don't), then you know that I am prone to abandon things for long periods of time. Blogs, books, music projects and girlfriends fall to the wayside while I stumble on, momentarily oblivious, until I feel something dragging at me and I remember the things I've tied to myself. At that point I decide on permanence - some things go while others stay. My exes are gone, music is sadly part of my past, writing comes and goes, while blogging, well, let's just say it's like exercising. I know I need to do it, I want to do it, I just never seem to be able to convince myself that I need to do it NOW.

So where does that leave us? Probably with the most boring website on the planet, a blog which is updated on a yearly basis. Tell you what: I'll give you the Cliff's Notes, and then you can decide whether or not to read on if I write anything. Here goes.

I moved to Seattle. I now live with a view of the Cascade Mountains, and the air is sewn with mist instead of vapor. I traded big cedar-like Northwest pines for scraggly Southern black pines, and cool mornings for sultry nights. Winter was dark, lonely, and short, full of rough personal anxiety while I worked in an industrial warehouse and pain from a work-related back injury. After rehab, both physically and mentally from friends, I found some connections, got into the wine business, and am not building a life when before I simply existed, legs crossed in zazen but thinking too loudly. I still squander time and drink, still while away on computers and put things off, but under it all there is this HOPE, and I write some, and I sell wine, and little by little I become more motivated.

Perhaps I'm growing up.

Will I write again?

I won't tell you. You didn't think I'd make this easy, did you?




J