Cockroaches, July 4th and The Winemakers' Blog
As many of you already know, I’ve laid most of the unpleasant aspects of winemaking upon the shoulders of my codependent winemaking partner, Clay Selkirk. He’s young & in need of some of that character building that comes with daily doses of abuse, & surely the occasional arse-flopping in the odd fermenter will serve its purpose. And to ensure that his efforts remain up to Le Cuvier standards, I will of course make a point of tasting all wines repeatedly & frequently, & otherwise making a perfect nuisance of myself.
And now that I no longer spend all of my waking hours schlepping barrels filled with wine, or fixing every broken thing that chooses to appear around the winery—now that I have time, what am I to do with all of those seconds, minutes & hours? Write blogs of course, & what better way to re-invigorate a blog than with a 4th of July Celebration.
Yes, the 4th of July. What many of you don’t know is that I’ve taken a small place in Templeton, a town just south of Paso Robles. The purpose of the Templeton house is one of achieving small moments of refined isolation in little sanctuary that I can frequently escape to, & from which it is fervently hoped that I will finally & inevitably finish writing the Great American Porn Novel.
Actually, the novel’s not about porn, though a bit of salaciousness would certainly help potential sales; rather, the book is about cockroaches & beetles; it is a blindly scribbled oeuvre wherein is revealed in detail the specialized function that these delightful bugs play as intercessors between the confused spirits of the dead & a particularly perplexed Latin American bruja. Though my novel is not yet complete, you can rest assured that every word of it is fact, & every fact has been checked & double checked, all to ensure that the methods & the manner of chitinous communication are accurately revealed with absolute clarity, & all within the modestly priced pages of the soon-to-be-finished-and-published novel.
Yes, it is sadly true that I still face the blank stares from a few absent pages that are wanted in order to complete the wicked thing, but while awaiting inspiration (or just plain nerve) I’ve nonetheless managed to spend a great deal of time on the title & cover, all to my delight & satisfaction. Here’s a preview of the cover:
But more on the book later.
There you have it: a re-boot of the Winemaker’s Blog, now become the Winemakers’ Blog: note how a subtle change reflecting joint ownership is achieved by simply moving the humble apostrophe one slot to the right. This has thus & therefore become a blog that is most assuredly destined for weekly publication…without fail.