Golf is Stupid

So, a couple of days ago I ventured out onto a public golf course for the first time since last July. I picked Royal Virginia out in Hadensville since I knew nobody would be there. I have my first round scheduled this coming Friday, so I thought I should at least play 9 somewhere first, right? I pulled up into the nearly empty parking lot, rented a cart and headed to the first tee without considering a trip to the practice tee. A more prudent person would have loosened up first, but I have always detested trips to the driving range. There would be no prudence within a country mile of me today.

When I stepped onto the first tee, the wind was blowing a gale in my face. At least it wasn't raining. My first swing produced a rather severe hook. My next attempt was a topped five iron. By the time I arrived at the green I was putting for a double bogey from twenty feet. Of course...I drained it.

The next two holes featured more of the same. Brutal, ugly swings. Giant pieces of rust flying around everywhere. Then, like a scene from a terrible sports movie, I stepped onto the tee of my fourth hole, took a deep, cleansing, what-the-hell breath, and proceeded to stripe a long drive down the middle of the fairway of a very long par four. My four iron approach shot landed neatly on the green after a gorgeous right to left ball flight which I seldom see. Two putts later, I had a par on the hardest hole on the course. 

Walking back to my cart, I scanned the horizon for camera crews. Maybe this was some sort of trick ball that had been placed in my bag, maybe somebody was getting back at me for all my April Fool's tricks. The following four holes were more of the same. Out of nowhere, my hack-attack performance on the first two holes had been replaced by some strange game that featured long, straight drives, beautiful arching iron shots and stellar putting. By the time I walked off the eighth hole I had started to believe that maybe my long layoff from the game had allowed my natural innate abilities to rise through the clutter of horrible golf memories. Maybe this was the real me! Maybe I had to walk away from the game in order to shed the thousand small bad habits that had crept into my game. For a moment I imagined a future on the senior tour.

Then, the last hole of my day presented itself in front of me, a reasonably straight forward par four, which if I could get home in par would give me a nine hole score of 40, quite amazing after a eight month layoff. 

Anyone who has played this game for more than five minutes knows what happened next. I don't even have to write it down for you, right? As quickly as the game had come to me so miraculously five holes ago, it left in a huff. Big duck hook drive, shanked second, fat third, pedestrian fourth, then three putts from twenty feet for a triple bogey.

Still, 43 was about seven shots better than I had expected. Only, which golfer was I? The guy who was hacking the ball all over the place, or that dream-like guy on the middle five holes who could do no wrong? Neither. Golf is too stupid to analyze. 

The Big Wait

Now comes...bad April. The Masters is over, April Fool's a distant memory. Now comes the Big Wait.

Every morning, first thing, I open my iPad and search for...the email. When I get to the office and see the orange light pulsing on my phone, I listen for...the message. At some point over the next four days it will come. No, it's not results from blood work, or an MRI. This message will come from a guy named Carl, and like the last 35 such messages, it will be to inform me of just how much the privilege of my American citizenship will cost me this year.

Carl's a good guy. He's good at what he does. It's just that his annual bad news comes with his bill for professional services, adding salt to the wound. It's what he does. I will open the email when it comes with stoic resignation. My hands used to shake. My palms used to get clammy with sweat. Not anymore. Carl has gotten fancy. There's a password embedded in the email which unlocks my tax return from its cloud-based home. I go there and see the number just to the right of those bitter three words...amount you owe. I sign electronically. Very modern and impressive.

Usually, at some point in the thirty days leading up to April 15, I have one dream where my tax return gets delivered by a gleaming white flying unicorn. When I break the elaborate burgundy wax seal, I read the beautifully calligraphic words...amount overpaid, applied to your 2016 return! Then I bolt upright in bed, and the glorious fantasy evaporates.

While what I owe may not be my fair share, thanks to Carl, it's my legal share. No legitimate deduction will have been missed, no justifiable tax reduction scheme unused. No matter what the number is, it will be paid by the 15th. No extensions, no payment plan. I will stroke a check and be done with it. Because I have used honest numbers, there will be no anger or resentment. April 15th isn't a day for debates about fairness, it's a day when my obligation as a citizen of the greatest Republic on the face of the earth must be fulfilled. Besides, what does fairness have to do with taxes? The only people who think taxes are wonderful are those for whom money is theoretical, or those filthy rich enough to afford $50,000 a plate Hillary Clinton fundraiser dinners. For the rest of us, taxes are a necessary evil. Roads need to be paved, teachers need to be paid, and it takes a lot of expensive jet fuel to keep an F-15 aloft. So, we pay. Then we suffer silently when we hear politicians refer to us as "greedy."

The Box Score

Every April begins sublimely for me because of April Fool's Day. Then two days later, my birthday arrives. Usually the very next day, the blessed trifecta is achieved with the opening day of Major League Baseball. The fact that The Masters starts in the same week is just an embarrassment of riches. All of these happy things conspire to remove every dark cloud from my horizon. It's as if, for ten days in April I live in a world where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton don't exist.

But, the very best part is the return of that most hallowed and glorious literary form in the universe, a form of communication which is part ledger, part story telling device. In my 58 years of life, I have probably read at least 100,000 of them. I'm talking, of course, about...the box score.

Here, in one tightly compressed space, lies literally every possible detail of a game that I didn't watch, and yet a skillful reading can tell you everything that happened in this game because of this information packed record of names, abbreviations and numbers. From this one I see that former National, Drew Storen is having a rough time with his new team, having given up two runs on only five pitches, ballooning his ERA to a grotesque 13.50. Meanwhile David Ortiz, despite being at least 50 years old by now, is uncharacteristically off to a good start for this young season, hitting a robust .385. ( Ortiz' steroid provider must get some sort of shout out when he is enshrined in Cooperstown).  I also learn that 48,000 people were in attendance for the Blue Jays home opener...how the Canadians love their baseball. Also, Jose Bautista went 0 for 4, making me very happy...he's a show-boating, me-first bum. 

Over the next six months I will study over 2,500 of these beauties. They will do for me what other forms of journalism fail to do...tell the truth. There's no spin in a box score. If you went 0 for 5 with 4 strikeouts, and committed an error, the box score will faithfully disclose every gory detail to me. My box scores have no liberal bias, there's no faux fair and balanced hokum to deal with. It's just the facts. Every pitch, every hit, every error, with no editorializing disguised as news. There are no moral victories, no momentum, no winning the expectations game. Just a winner and a loser, clean and clear. There's no escaping your record. You are who the numbers say you are. Excuses don't work as explanations. If a starting pitcher gets raked for 7 runs in 2 and 2/3rds innings, then there's going to be a big L  beside his name, not some dog and pony presentation about how he was distracted by the death of his favorite childhood dog the night before. There's no crying in baseball, and no hiding from the box score either. You are what you do...and what you do is all there in the box score. Deal with it.

There's a life lesson in there somewhere.

Snakes In My Head

Yesterday at the Masters, Ernie Els, four time major winner and Hall of Famer, six-putted the first hole from inside three feet. I've never seen anything like it. I've never even seen an amateur take six putts to get it in the hole from three feet. Occasionally professional golfers miss tap in putts, mostly because out of frustration they foolishly try to back hand the ball into the hole. But this...this was something else all together. I watched the video with a sick feeling in my stomach. Ernie Els is one of the nicest gentlemen in all of sport, one of the good guys. It was hard to watch.

After his round, instead of blowing off the press, he sat down and answered their questions. What happened? "It's hard to putt when you've got snakes inside your head," was his perfect answer. He described how it felt to stand over that first three footer and simply not be able to take the putter back. Snakes inside your head is a much more descriptive expression than the yips, but it's the same thing. At some point in every golfer's life, the prospect of making short putts becomes the equivalent of walking across hot coals in bare feet. It's inexplicable. Ernie Els, a man who can routinely launch a golf ball 300 yards down the middle of a fairway, then curve a five iron beautifully onto the green, freezes up standing over a shot that even old ladies can make...a three foot putt. The most confounding game in history. An example from my much less storied career:

I was playing out at Independance one day. On a 520 yard par five, I hit a beautiful wind-aided drive right down the middle of the fairway, over the hill and out of view. When I crested the hill, the ball was only 140 yards away from the green! (Later, I discovered that my drive had landed on a sprinkler head, propelling it down the fairway). I then hit an 8 iron to within 10 feet. I was going to have a 10 foot eagle putt!! Four miserable attempts later the stupid ball finally dropped into the bottom of the stupid hole. I walked off the green with a bogey. @$&!' game!!!

But now, thanks to Ernie, I have a new explanation for all embarrassing things that will ever happen to me on a golf course, and in life in general...there were snakes in my head!

Lucy Wins

Most of our friends who have come to our house have been greeted by the wild, maniacally neurotic version of our dog, Lucy. She wags her tail, runs around in circles, and generally loses what's left of her fragile mind when confronted with the unbridled thrill of visitors! What none of our friends get to see is this Lucy:

Every night, after Pam and I finish dinner, and after Pam has fed Lucy half of her paper napkin,(don't ask), our dog becomes the world's greatest snuggler. She jumps up on the sofa between Pam and I, horses around with me for a minute or so, then calms down and scoots over as close to Pam as possible and sleeps. She never does this with me, or seldom does. It's almost always Pam. There is a reason for this. When we first got her, I was 100% all in for getting another Golden, Pam probably only 75%. Dogs pick up on these things. They instantly know when someone is committed and when one isn't! So, they set about to win you over...it's what dogs do. From day one, Lucy has been showering Pam with love and attention, overboard and overloaded, desperate to win her affections. It's worked. Dogs just won't take no for an answer, but what they really, truly can't abide is ambivalence. Cats might crave it and they certainly dish it out by the truckload, but not dogs. Nothing short of unlimited love and adoration will do.

Pam never stood a chance!

Tired of This Campaign

Perhaps you have noticed that I haven't written much about the election lately. Last night there was a primary in Wisconsin and I should probably have an opinion about the Cruz and Sanders victories. I should, but I don't. I'm tired.

It has been mentally exhausting watching this primary season. While some of it has been entertaining, much of it has been an embarrassment. The further we get along in the process, the more it becomes clear that some sort of fix is either already in or is being currently devised, especially on the Democratic side of things. Poor Bernie Sanders is out there firing kids up and hustling his a** off, but Hillary just plods along with that knowing, maniacal laugh of hers, secure in the knowledge that she has bought everyone who matters off. Over at the GOP, the grand poobahs are spending money like its going out of style trying and finally succeeding in destroying Donald Trump. The current beneficiary is Ted Cruz, but those same poobahs hate him almost as much as they hate The Donald. A brokered convention seems a sure bet at this point, and the chances are high that neither Cruz nor Trump will be the nominee. So, all those rallies, all those speeches, all those debates will count for...nothing. This isn't how my 12th grade government teacher described the democratic process, but that was a long time ago. So...I'm tired.

Yesterday, my daughter asked my opinion of this meme type thing that came from the Bernie Sanders website describing how he planned to pay for all of his policy presents to the American people. First thing I thought was, well...at least he is admitting that it's gonna take a boat load of money to pull off. Kudos to him. It was an enlightening list of tax increases, all of which assumes that the targets of these higher taxes will never change their behavior to avoid paying them, a classic mistake of tax increasers. Most of the items listed would raise chump change. But the two biggies were both enormous new levels of taxation on income which would effect almost every demographic in America. That's fine and all. I mean, if you want a government to provide stuff to you, you've got to be willing to pay for it at some point. But then my daughter asked me why it is that most of Europe has governments that do these things? Why are most of them so into the welfare state and we are mostly not? I explained that most of Europe moved quickly to the left after WWII, having lost so many of their men in that horrible conflict, and with many of their cities in ruins, a strong and paternalistic government was for them a necessity. We, on the other hand, lost a fraction of our men, and none of our infrastructure was destroyed. And by the end of the war, Americans had grown weary of the overbearing excesses of much of the New Deal. We went the other way...it was time to make some money. The next two decades saw America grow into an economic juggernaut that left Europe and the rest of the world in the dust, despite the fact that we helped rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan, and our defense budget became the defense budget for all of Europe essentially, since NATO was basically the United States Army.

But, that was then. This is now. Maybe my country has changed to the point where we don't want to be the world's street cop any more. Maybe we want a much smaller defense budget. Maybe we have changed to the point where we no longer desire the freedom to create and innovate if it carries with it the freedom to fail. Maybe we are ready for a large benevolent state that provides cradle to grave care for its citizens. Surely, such a state would always be benevolent, right?

So, I suppose I've grown  weary of always being the guy who defends free enterprise and extols the virtues of limited government to a world that is increasingly not interested in either. My quaint views seem to have gone the way of the ideas of our founding fathers, curiosities in the Museum of Antiquities.

What a Weekend!

I had a great weekend. First, I pulled off my April Fool's prank perfectly. Then I celebrated my birthday with a couple of meals out with family and friends. Finally, my son sent me an amazing music video of his own creation, which I have played over and over for the past two days. Now, for the details...

Several years ago, I introduced the bright orange ping pong ball to my work mates. I bought hundreds of them and boobie-trapped all sorts of things with them on the big day. One of my buddies at work is particularly susceptible to attack. A few years back I got him three different times. I perched a container of ping pong balls precariously on the top of his office door. When he entered that morning, obliviously on his cell phone, he was showered from above by 100 of them. Later, I had deliberately removed all the paper from the copier, making it necessary to get a fresh ream from the cabinet above the machine. Only, I had filled the cabinet with...you guessed it...100 more. As fate would have it, it was Lynwood who got hit. Finally, later on in the day, I was able to place 100 more in the cabinet above the coffee maker. Knowing that Lynwood enjoys an afternoon cup, I emptied the coffee jar of its contents, forcing him to open the cabinet to get more. Bam!! The trifecta!!!

So this past Friday, I played it very low key. Lynwood was wary all morning, as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but when lunch time came and nothing had happened, he began to relax. However, earlier, during his morning trip to the bathroom, I knew I had a ten minute window to swipe his keys from his desk and fill the cab of his truck with hundreds of strategically placed orange ping pong balls. The resulting hilarity was filmed by two different cameras and was posted on Facebook on Friday. The best part is, it's not even over!! I can safely share this because my man Lynwood isn't on Facebook. In maybe a couple of months, he will find cause to open his glove compartment, maybe when he gets pulled over by a cop for speeding. When he does, 100 beautiful orange ping pong balls will rain down, providing comic relief for the cop, and for me something close to a Christmas in July moment. 

Despite the fact that I paid an insane amount of money to educate him, my son's musical training never gets used for my benefit. Asking him to perform a song for his family usually nets me...nothing. Since he started dating Sarah, a vocal performance major in college, I have been pestering the two of them to sing a duet for me. Thanks, no doubt, to Sarah's insistence, I finally got my wish on the morning of my birthday. The two of them recorded a duet of that classic song from the Movie, The Jerk..You Belong To Me. Patrick played the keyboard, and the two of them sang beautifully. But then, just like in the movie, Bernedette Peters' trumpet solo was performed by Patrick's roommate, Elias, who burst through the door at the perfect moment. Then, some guy I didn't know strolls in playing a green ukulele at the end. As of this morning the video has 4,000 views. Maybe 25 of them are mine!

So, a wonderful weekend. It was still strange not seeing either of my kids on my birthday. But, you can't have everything, right?