It takes little reflection for me to conclude that golf is probably the worst possible sport for me. I'm a perfectionist. Always have been, and in spite of my father's best efforts, I always will be. There are sports where a perfectionist's cravings can be satisfied. A pitcher can throw a perfect game. A bowler can roll 300. A tennis player can win in straight sets without losing a single point. These things aren't possible in golf.
Any golfer will tell you that perfection will never be yours once you start winging a little white ball all over creation. Consider the most coveted shot in golf: a hole in one. And, for the sake of this conversation, let's not even restrict ourselves to a hole in one on a par 3. Let's say you manage to drive the green on a short par 4 and the ball miraculously trickles into the cup. You'd be happy, sure. But, think about this: that's still one stroke against you. Your score still creeps upward, even though you just hit the most remarkable shot of your life. Of course, I spend much of my time on a golf course thinking that I didn't just hit the most remarkable shot of my life. And, since I'm a perfectionist, this troubles me greatly. And, when I say "troubles me greatly" I mean that I often want my golf bag to explode just before I spontaneously burst into flames.
In spite of all of this, I generally look forward to golfing. Because maybe today will be the day when I don't want to spontaneously combust. I harbor optimism, even, and this makes precisely no sense at all. A good 98% percent of my brain will be saying "this will end badly for you... just start drinking now" and yet I listen instead to the 2% that's saying "good things will happen for you. You can do this." God, that 2% voice is an idiot.
In recent years, my dad, my brother, and I have tried to play at least one round of vacation golf at The Rookery in Milton, Delaware. It's a relatively young course, and it's well-maintained. The layout is pretty open (because all of the trees are still young), the beer cart girls tend to be shapely (because, like the trees, they're still young), and it's not a long drive from where we stay. Win, win, win. The big concern for me was that my most recent round before vacation featured some of the worst golf I've played in about 15 years. I'm accustomed to posting a score in the 80's. On my good days, I'll head to the low 80's and on my bad days, I'll play bogey golf. So, you can imagine my dismay when I dropped a 109 while playing a relatively easy course in upstate New York. I'll spare you all of the gory details, but suffice to say that the best shot of the day was a tee shot on the back nine where I swung as hard as I could, caught the ball perfectly flush, and hooked it out of bounds. Sure, it was a lost ball and a two stroke penalty, but it felt damn good.
Unfortunately, the mental scarring that accompanies such a round of golf sticks with you for a while. What if I had developed the golf version of Steve Blass Disease? What if I never hit a ball solidly during a round ever again? What if I suddenly started shooting triple digit scores? What if all of these things happened and I never had the good fortune to burst into flames while shrapnel from my exploding golf bag ripped me to shreds, finally putting me out of my misery? These are the things I tried not to think about on the first tee at The Rookery.
Fortunately, I could take comfort in the fact that I was wearing my favorite golf shirt. In the past, I've taken some ribbing (for everybody's pleasure but my own) about my baby blue polo shirt. But, here's the thing: I've played some of my best golf when rockin' the baby blue, so it's in pretty heavy rotation on golf days. Besides, it brings out the color in my eyes, and one of these days, that's going to matter to the right beer cart girl. The truth -- really -- is that if I broke 80 while wearing a "kick me in my misters" shirt, I'd wear it every time I went golfing, even if there was a Crotch Kickers Anonymous convention in town.
Some days, though, even your baby blue polo shirt isn't enough. I mishit my opening tee shot and limped around the front nine while trying to maintain a jovial demeanor for the rest of my foursome. They say that God never challenges you with anything you can't handle. Which makes me wonder why He let me leave consecutive sand shots in a greenside bunker before picking the third one clean and airmailing the green entirely. It definitely didn't feel like I was doing a good job of handling it, and given how far the rest of my foursome stayed away from me for the next two holes, I have to imagine that they felt the same. Walking off the seventh green, I decided not to keep score any more. The 98% voice had been right, and the beer cart girl was pulling a Where's Waldo? routine at the worst possible time. Remarkably, in spite of my poor play, it still represented an improvement over the previous round of golf. But, I guess if your previous round featured multiple instances of you snap-hooking a drive out of bounds and then trying to kill yourself with a pitching wedge, it's hard to go anywhere but up.
Speaking of going places, I don't know where I'm going with any of this. I simply can't be rational when I start talking, thinking, or writing about golf. It's this johnson-withering bitch of a sport that makes you feel bad about yourself and the world, whether you're a perfectionist or not. Oh, and if you think I'm not looking forward to my next round of golf, you're crazy.
There are modifiers I would not use to describe the beginning of my recent vacation. For instance, auspicious wouldn't make the cut. Flawless, sublime, or smooth would not be used either. Even something like "passable" seems overly generous.
Our destination was a beach in Delaware, one my family visited religiously once a year when my siblings and I were younger. And, since the traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge becomes biblical sometime around mid-morning on a Saturday, I accompanied two of my family members on a drive to Annapolis, MD on Friday night, so that we might cross the bridge in the early morning on Saturday.
I have only one question about my dinner on Friday night in Annapolis: How come when a server finally decides to touch me about fourteen times during a meal, it's not a 19-year-old brunette named Ashley with girl-next-door approachability but a middle-aged dude named Kevin? Honestly, I'm not asking for the world.
I supposed that getting molested by our server was just a hiccup and that better fortunes would prevail as we moved into the weekend. But, there was a pretty substantial hurdle still to clear. My two traveling companions, with whom I would be sharing a hotel room on Friday, are notoriously powerful snorers. Fortunately, I had prepared for this situation by purchasing a 75-minute rain recording from Amazon's mp3 store. Some pre-vacation testing of the soothing ambient noise indicated that it would do a pretty good job drowning out noise pollution like the sound of the air conditioning unit, people in the hallway, or a blind, legless squirrel trying to land a Boeing 747 in your left ear canal. Unfortunately, as I discovered Friday night, my traveling companions' snoring is louder than any of these things. And, my little mp3 player with its eardrum splitting volume levels was woefully inadequate as the situation clearly called for the services of an old priest and a young priest. I'm not sure if it's possible to do justice to the noise levels we're dealing with here, but imagine the following. If you recorded a timbersports event involving chainsaws with engines larger than your average midget and slowed down the audio by a factor of 100, you'd be in the right ballpark. Alternatively, at times the snoring is reminiscent of a family of pneumonia-suffering rhinos being fed -- against their will -- into a chipper-shredder. Hopefully these are noises with which you're familiar.
It's about 6 AM on Saturday and I've been awake since 1 AM. I don't rise from bed until I hear the bathroom door open. While standing beside my bed, trying to steel myself for a busy day on only two hours of sleep, he who just left the shower remarks, "I tried to be as quiet as I could in the shower. I hope I didn't wake you up."
Given my condition, I'm convinced that this is the funniest thing that any person has ever said. I manage to get out, "No, you..." and then I start laughing so hard that tears come before the end of the sentence does.
An auspicious beginning? I think not.
Being unemployed is grueling work, so I'm headed to the beach next week to relax. Which means that my pitiful posting schedule will be even worse than usual in the coming days. Honestly, if you still have serious expectations for this space, it's time to revise them downwards. In the meantime, one of my college friends just launched his own blog for reasons that are detailed in his first post. Check it out here. Among other things, he claims, "I promise to be intelligent and interesting a majority of the time."
That's the kind of thing I would never promise my readers.
Like most dogs, my parents' pooch, Casey, is a perfectly fine companion. She's sweet, she's entertaining, and her devotion to the other members of her pack is unwavering. That's not to say, however, that she's without her blemishes.
She has a strange and unfortunate fixation on things that, in the parlance of our times, smell like shit. Like, for instance, shit. She finds that a hearty roll in a steaming pile of horse or deer poop is intoxicating. So much so, in fact, that she is completely oblivious to the horrified screams of her owners as they strongly advise her against smearing another animal's excrement all over herself. Sadly, this is not her most foul habit. Casey's most foul habit -- in my estimation, anyway -- would be her desire to roll in the dead carcasses of woodland creatures who have lost battles with beast, infection, or good old Father Time. I haven't asked Casey, but I don't think that the cause of death is of much importance. What matters is getting as much rotting flesh on her coat as possible.
And, so it was on Sunday morning in the bucolic calm of a public park that I didn't spot the lawnmower-ed groundhog soon enough. By the time I arrived on the scene, Casey had covered some reasonable portion of her left and right flanks with her fallen comrade, and as no amount of verbal dissuasion was getting the job done, I had to jump into the fray and pull her off the dead fella. (I'm tempted to make a joke about the expression the groundhog was wearing at the time of his passing, but honestly, I don't think that my face would be a picture of distinguished calm if someone dropped an inverted running helicopter on me either.)
After fouling the peace of an early Sunday morning with a series of expletives and pulling Casey a safe distance away from the decaying carcass, I wailed, "Why? Why do you do that?"
Still panting from the ecstasy of the moment, she looked at the ground and at a nearby bird for a little bit before working up the courage to make eye contact with me. And her expression said, "I know.... I know.... but that one had maggots on it! Maggots!!!"
I have to admit, I was intrigued by the link (yes, Dronken means what you suspect it does) to a Belarusian soccer (that's pronounced FOOT-BALL, people) referee who had approximately 5,291 drinks at halftime during a match (is that what they call these f*$#in things? I'm American, dammit, unless a particular event is silently sponsored by a bunch of steroids that haven't been named yet, it just ain't football), and so I couldn't help but watch it.
What I did not anticipate was seeing this video in YouTube's "Related Videos" section. If you're a dude, you probably don't want to view this at your place of employment. If you're a woman, you probably don't want to view this unless you're a lesbian and you wish for the four-eyed geeks who administer your corporate spy software to know that you're a lesbian. After very careful review of the cinematography, I've concluded the following:
- Europeans are more progressive than Americans are.
- WTF?
And, yes, if you've arrived at the supposition that I still haven't thought of anything substantive to write about, you can give yourself a point. Additionally, I offer the following:
- The lyrics are in English. Not that it means anything (unless you consider, "Techno sucks. Even the techno that Europeans like" to be something).
- Slow clap to the
soft-pornographersfilmmakers who elected to employ the white vs. dark, good vs. evil theme. As always in crappy fiction, good prevails. - They couldn't have done another take around the one minute mark in which the ref flipped the coin vertically? Seriously, does film cost as much as gas in Europe?
- Models -- anywhere -- will do anything to collect a paycheck.
I still don't have anything to write about. Feel free to submit your suggestions in the comments section. And, no, I don't care if you've lost respect for me. Additionally, no, I don't care if you never had any respect for me.
