I Want To Say

What I want to say is, well fuck I have no idea where or how to start saying or sharing all that I want to say. I’ve been gone so long I fear, no it’s not a fear it’s a fact, that my voice has become lost amongst the chatter of the interwebs. My blog was, is, never really relevant within the wine community, writing, blogging or otherwise. Not sure it ever was but my lack of content and desire has pushed me further down the rabbit hole and the slide down has left me a bit chaffed…and with a fiercely uncomfortable wedgie.

I’ve had some personal struggles last year. My post about my brother exposed some of that, but there were plenty of other nut grinding situations and dramas that sent this historically buoyant knucklehead paddling to the steps and climbing out of the pool. Hate it. Like really hate it and find that the longer I’m away the angrier I get, at myself. Some sort of weird teabag of self-punishment not allowing myself to seep and marinate in the warm bath of peace I find when I let my thick nails fly across my keyboard, making my thoughts into rudimentary crayon drawings for the nine people that come here to share time with me. Not sure what kind of sick ass emotional cutting I’ve been doing but not being here, the scars are getting thick in that ugly and shameful kind of way and I’m really over pulling down my sleeves to cover them.

I’ve had about thirteen posts partially written, both in my head and here in my Word documents. None of them worth much, I mean, come on we are talking about wine blogging here, but stuff I sort of wanted to say but fell short, either in my estimation or imagination, in keeping with that whole shit giving enough to even bother finishing. Again this could be a symptom of my fed-up’d-ness or an actual fact, can’t tell but the not bothering to finish or complete something has ended up adding to the irritation but now, now it’s starting to feel less like a healing wound and more like a itchy, prickly rash. Fuck you silence, I’ve had enough…

So there’s all that dealing with shifts and twists and then there is the having a couple ideas, like solid ideas that I truly feel need to be said but they’ve been bobbing around in my head, so close together that they end up mashing together and banging bodies like rowboats tied along a dock…the collisions cracking holes so big in each other that the repairs hardly seem worth it, or are too massive for me to begin patching together at the end of my already taxing days. This cycle, well it has been vicious. 

 My plan for 2016, aside from spending a month in France, increasing French wine sales by 10% and Champagne sales 15%was to get a post written and up by end of day on the 1^st. After such a trying year emotionally and physically for me I had my eye on the prize, that magical flip of a new year and a fresh start. Sound too whimsical and group think coming from me? Yeah, I thought so too which is why I just went ahead and fractured my right leg, like literally, before 5:00 PM New Year’s Day. How’s that for taking the New Year by storm? “Fuck you, I don’t even need both my legs to handle this shit! Rawr!! Um, but, mother fucker OUCH!” whimper. I was a bit shut down by the 2^nd, couldn’t walk, wash myself, had to call into work and leave my staff and bosses hanging but it was that blowing out of the light in the tunnel that just socked me in my puffy gut. Goddamnit. 

I was a blob of unwashed deflation on the second day of the New Year, wishing I could sit long enough to type even a little something and wondering who is holding the voodoo doll in my likeness. Leg on ice and elevated on the couch I ran my dry tongue across my even drier lips and felt a thick slap of spent skin, my eyes empty and glued to whateverthefuck program I was not at all actually consuming and I gave the lip scab a tug, rolled the dried bit of flesh between my fingertips and gave the same kind of roll and flick you see when people hang their hands out their car window to discard a freshly picked booger. Noticing how dry I was I reached for my water glass and took a long, throat coating tug, put my glass back on the bookshelf that is my new desk/table because of my gimpdom and noticed a thick swath of blood where my mouth had been. Whimper. 

Thirty minutes, two ice cubes and three drenched paper towels later and the bleeding finally stopped. I looked down at my swollen leg, over at my empty laptop screen, hopped to the kitchen to chuck the lip tampons and waddled off to bed. I didn’t have to change as I hadn’t washed. I felt especially gross and let down or emptied, leg getting worse and knowing that an urgent care visit was coming. I brushed my teeth with an extra furious desire to feel at least a tiny bit clean and in charge. Hop-hop-hop to the potty, nighttime piddle, tear off a piece of tissue to blow my nose, dispose of the spent tissue and that was when I felt the trickling stream of warm blood come running out my nose. I just sat there, wiped, jammies around my two different sized ankles, mouth twisted into a knot as I shoved wads of toilet paper in my nostril on the verge of crying. I felt my face twist, my head drop, my unwashed ass still pressed against the commode, my eyes closed and before I could even process it all, I started laughing. Broken leg, (although I had not been x-rayed yet, I just knew) bloody nose and lip and not one word written, happy fucking New Year right?! It would suck if it weren’t just so damn cartoonish, and so Me.

It was that crack in my armor, the laughing when everything I had been planning, thinking about and even walking had been whacked off my forecasting table, on the second day of the New Year, that was when I felt a wonderfully familiar scratch. The whisper of, “Just, let, go” and I knew, it is time for me to just leave the strategizing behind. I mean don’t just run like a 4 year old hoped up on Skittles through life, but let the things that happen just happen, don’t take them so fucking personal, or worse act like there is some ominous cloud of shit following you around, because guess what, in the scheme of things, you ain’t really that big a deal….I mean, other than to those that love, want, need, miss, and wait for you. 

It’s here that I found a part of me I never knew was lurking about beneath my skin, and it is here that I can count along with The Wine Country, with my tiny, (but growing…oh, my, gawd am I madly in love with my new niece Emily. She is perfect and I am now her servant) family, my vinegar, lemon, white wine and beef fat scented kitchen, the importers that bestow upon me the honor of trusting my palate and this, (you) tiny band of folks that let me just talk….like me either because of what I say, or in spite of it. It is here that I have this one thing that is just me. I’m done punishing myself because as I sat on that toilet seat, twisted wad of Charmin shoved up my nose and flicking the new scab that formed over my bloody lip, and I tried to figure out how to stand, flush, and shove my fat, un-washed ass back into my needing a wash jammies, that I realized, I am the one holding the voodoo doll. I’m the one keeping me from being me and it isn’t you guys that are waiting or wanting…..

It’s me.