Wednesday, April 22, 2009

39,000 feet

I woke up to more rain. Since we've finished the taille it seems to have rained every day. It seems such a waste, all the rainy days on days that I had off already. The funny thing is that it was just getting sunny where I was when I flew away.

Montpellier - New York.
A single thirty hour day and everything looks different.

Now when I get up and hear the rain falling it has a different sound. The rain is a much quieter sound here. It's a softer sound. Where I came from the rain hitting the tiled rooves and stone houses makes a smacking sound, you might say a tinging kind of noise in an attempt to be more precise. Here the soft earth and liquid lake soak up the falling rain, leaving only the sound of grey and mist. Even the commuter train across the lake slides silently through the dark morning.

The place du marche has been replaced with the open lake. Blue, grey, budding green just beginning again in replacing the winter black. It's always surprising to see a season step backwards. The forsythia is full yellow bloom but spring is just a bit less along and it makes me feel the fluidity of time. Just a slight cant is enough to put me off balance.

Then there is Good morning, good-bye. How are you? All the little words of the day tumbling out without translation. I was constructed with the language of my birth and now I am resconced in it. Without constraint of willfully forming my words I expand to the point of disappearing.

The place du marche', Indian lake. My people, and none of them too. Strange to be home and away from it too.

Monday, April 6, 2009

spring fever cures, for you

It’s spring now. The sap is rising. Everything is pushing out. If I was a bear, a female bear, I would be bearing, or at least getting ready to. Being a human male however I am outside that call, and so I just watch the cycles. Spring is all about starting again. It’s hyper active and full of sap.

The vines are weeping right now on a daily basis. They are so full of sap that each press of the trigger on my electrocoup 2000 brings on tears. It makes me wonder - does it hurt to be in love with growing, or is that just surplus sap that needs to be drained. In any case, out in the vines it’s springtime, and consequently I’m often wet with sap.

We’re coming to the end now. There only remains a few hectares to trim and then it’s over. The days are longer and the weather soft. All around things are popping out. When my sap runs I feel like popping out too, it must be the warm weather. It distracts the thoughts.

I almost cut myself in the vines today. The blade was just against the skin, but there was no penetration. For a moment it made me giddy, then I realized how close I came to fucking myself up.

It was my own fault, I just got bored and stopped paying attention to what I was doing. It’s so easy to do, forget what you are doing, it’s as if the lack of intention has a way of calling a cutting blade. I was all ready to cut myself, I guess just to bleed off some sap.

The thing is, as humans, unlike vines, after a certain point we aren’t growing anymore. At least not physically. It’s more a psychological taille that needs to be carried out on a regular basis. Perhaps that was the story of the sharp blade pressed against the skin today. Just a dumb way to wake up, pay a bit more attention to how things need to be trimmed, and not only on needing trim. It makes a significant difference.

In any case I think it is going to help me grow, the psychological pruning I carried out today in the vines, just after the blade pressed against my skin. For that moment the hot pressure on my sweated skin was the sole sensation I was experiencing. The blood was gathered awaiting the cut and a chance to spill outward. It was like a hot flash for a menopausal man.

The shear luck of escaping the closing blade, the cut never coming, the sap never flowing. Like that it had a chance to flow elsewhere, and as I said it was a psychological taille that went on in the vines today. It really is much more sane for us humans.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

There’s a lot of luck that falls my way. That’s not to say it’s all good, but that does happen too. Most of the time it is hard to decipher which it is. Chance, both heureux and it’s sibling malheureux, have a way of looking so similar that they are often hard to tell apart.

I have a wife, she’s a bitch. I have a girl friend, she’s getting fat. I have two kids, they don’t need me. Like I said, it’s hard to find the good without the bad, and it’s like that with luck too. In the end it’s how you want to see it. My wife’s a bitch, but I don’t have to see her anymore. My womans getting fatter, but her ass is getting sweeter, and the kids, well, they are forging their independence. In the right light anything can be good lucky, but some days the light appears differently, not wanting change. It seems cast with a grey that is hard to navigate by.

Yet it is a light none the less, one I’ve always been drawn towards. It’s the twi-night light. Where that grey beacons originate from. This cast of shady light where even the firmest of perceptions can be altered this way and that. It often makes it hard to get a fix on what to do. Never the less, things need doing.

It was this color that I woke to today. Wednesday present. Grey color cast over all. What is that lead color that has replaced the gold. Not raining, but slick with wet. An imperceptible fog covering everything. I am presented with sensations as quick and profound as sunny and blue. My days are not fixed, it was part of the aleatory contract I signed. The color of the morning changes my entire day, but what about my disposition, what to do with that.

I decide to stay in bed. In fact I had half decided the night before when I stayed up to an unreasonable hour. But when I woke it wasn’t exactly raining, one could say misting at most. The rains had been predicted and yesterday as I was leaving work, when I told the vigneron I would keep my eye on the meteo and if it wasn’t raining would report an hour early at eight, I really believed it. I was so sure of the forecast or a reasonable semblance to it, that I even said it gladly. It’s why I’ll always be a fake farmer, I truly believe in cracking out early to beat the weather and get the work in, but in reality I am far too fond of the pleasure brought on by the annulation of work to be a real farmer.

So I stayed in bed. The vines will rest with me, at least that’s what I thought until my mack called at nine and wanted to know why I wasn’t on my corner where we said we would meet. I had work to do, the vines were lined up like hardware convention johns at the cat house. They can wait, but not forever. It wasn’t even raining he said. I weakly replied, that everything was wet. After he called a second time thirty minutes later to talk of obligations and agreements, I sputtered a complaint and vaguely said okay. For a long moment I didn't know what to do. Then I turned the phone off, finished the chapter of the book I was reading and went back to sleep.

You see, I never doubted the forecast, all the signs on the ground yesterday confirmed it . Wind, moisture, temperature, they all felt like rain, and god-dammit I was committed to it, and the day off it would bring. Misty and threatening was good enough for me, and it should have been for the vigneron too, at least that’s how I saw it. But he was less mad, then disappointed, like I had let him down. Though even a hookers love has it’s limits.

In effect the day was one indecision after another. I did nothing, read a book, watched a movie, dicked around on the computer. Later I found a message the vigneron left on my phone not long after his second call to say the rain had started, and not to bother coming. As I said, I am full of luck. Good luck or bad is harder to say, though they say tomorrow it will rain again.