Me and Golf: A Tale of Destruction

I like to think this is what I always look like when I play golf: calm, collected, and dapper.

I swore I would never play golf again. It was the summer after my senior year of high school and I went out for a fateful round of golf (it also turned out to be my last for several years) with my good friends Paul and Chris. We were all pretty bad golfers generally speaking - I think Paul was the best of the three of us - but we were nothing special. Three hacks really.

Let me preface this by saying that my style of golf is more of a "get the most for your money" type of game. I don't want to hit par, because I'm wasting my money. I'd rather spend my time in the trees, the rough, the ponds, and the bunkers than play straight down the fairway. Anyone that plays par golf is a sucker because they aren't spending nearly as much time on the course as me. And I paid the same as them! Suckers.

For starters Chris brought a sword. Not a fake, cheap, plastic sword, but an honest to goodness sword that he purchased in Spain. It was part of his set of clubs. I think it took the place of the sand wedge. I had no weaponry but I did have 25 golf balls and a full set of clubs (13 clubs/25 balls) handed down to me when my step-grandfather on my mom's side of the family passed away. I also had a temper that I brought to the course with me that day.

I've always been a bit of a hothead. It's something I've had to work to control my entire adult life. Age, wisdom, and a wonderful wife who lovingly points out what a jackass I am when I get angry have helped me deal with my temper issues over the years. Needless to say at age seventeen I was not so cool under the collar. This combined with my overall sour outlook on life at the time earned me the much coveted "Oscar the Grouch" award from my senior class in 1997.

The round started fine enough. We all had horrible tee shots on the first hole but I figured we were "just warming up." By the fourth hole, however,  I had lost at least half a dozen balls in the woods and ponds and I think I had already scored 30. "It's okay," I naively thought, "we're playing 18 today." I figured it would all smooth out by about hole five or six.

At some point in the middle of the round, Chris was the first to crack. Early in the back nine he shanked a shot into the tall grass next to a pond, tore off his shirt, grabbed his sword, and began hacking away at the grass to find his ball. I started to lose it soon thereafter. Chris was merely my trigger. After going through another six or seven balls I chucked one of my long irons into pond (so far for the round: -1 club/-12 golf balls). I began to, as they say, "lose my shit."

On the very next hole I hit a second shot that flew into the trees (-13 balls) and began carving out an enormous divot in the middle of the fairway with my 7 iron. I did not replace this divot. Instead I stormed away to try and recover my ball which was, as it turned out, hopelessly lost. On the next hole I hit a shot from the rough that bounced into a pond and, in a fit of rage, snapped my 6 iron over my knee and winged it into the underbrush.

At this point with Chris and me both shirtless, and Paul not having too bad of a round, a lone gentleman who had been playing directly behind us (it will be noted that he was much better and much faster than us) asked to join our threesome. Unfortunately for this nice, talented gentleman, he had no idea of the boiling cauldron of rage that was slowly making its way around the course that day.

I tried to pull it together in order to be a gracious host. I really did. In spite of my previous offenses to the golf course and to nature itself I managed to compose myself to welcome this guy into our group. That is until we hit our next tee shot. When my ball careened into the woods down a steep slope and out of sight I began to weave "a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space" (to quote Jean Shepherd) over the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, and once again stormed off to find my ball which was, once again, hopelessly lost.

In the end, I gave up on the fifteenth hole because I lost all of my golf balls (-2 clubs/-25 balls for the round). By that time I had stopped aiming and was literally hitting my shots as hard as I could possibly hit them towards the woods. They were flying off in all directions and I didn't care. Chris lost most of his balls too and we wound up leaving the course telling Paul that we would return to pick him up when he finished the playing. We spent the rest of our round at McDonalds. Of course by this point the talented, eager gentleman had long abandoned us. I'm pretty sure he feared for his life.

After this horrific day I vowed to never play golf again. I stayed true to this until, after graduating from college, I cautiously picked up my depleted set of clubs and began to play once more. Eventually I swapped out my old grandpa set for a shiny new set of irons and woods which fit me better and improved my game considerably. Since that time I've mostly* managed to keep my cool, keep my shirt on, and not break any clubs over my knee. And I even manage to have a relatively pleasant time.

*Today I slammed my 3 iron into the ground after topping a shot out of the rough under a tree.

Summer Time Management

I am terrible at downtime. Just ask Kaia. When we go on vacation I usually plan out our entire day from morning until evening leaving precious free time to just sit and read a book, relax on the beach, or enjoy a campfire at night. It feels like a failure if I'm not constantly doing something - usually involving historical sights or hiking in the woods.

That being said I'm also really bad at summer. Usually I end up with several weeks to catch up on studying, practicing, or tackling an ever growing pile of books on my summer reading list. Of course this isn't a real "problem" per se, but it can lead to a slight dilemma for me. Since I have so much I want to do and so much time, the trick is to figure out how to create structure for my time so I don't do what I did yesterday which involved a lot of wandering around the house starting a new task every ten minutes.

This table was clean prior to yesterday afternoon. Unfettered additions to my "pile system" of organization have created what some might call "a mess."

For me the solution lies in the handy-dandy "to-do" list:

The to-do list.

This little tiny piece of paper, in theory, is my saving grace. It will keep me from wandering from task to task throughout the day and give me a blueprint for what comes next. If all goes well I will feel productive today. We'll see how it turns out.