Five-Iron

I don't know exactly when the speed-golf kick began.  It must have been early fall, because dad got the membership for my birthday.  I'd just started in for a few weeks at that point, so September, I guess.

I have no recollection of what might have been going on in my head when a decision was made to break par in around 35 minutes.  That was the goal, and I've gotten only as close as five-over.  The five-over was repeated many times, but this was the plateau established before the winter set in.

It was like all the other plateaus in life, the first one seemed like it came easily, then there were all the valleys that accompany the peaks.  Still, for the most part, I'd kept playing when the weather afforded the opportunity.

It's been a Texas winter in this part of Kansas.  It's been cold, and brutally so on a couple of occasions.  For the most part, it has been mild.  Throw in a healthy dose of post-New-Year's unemployment, and yeah...I was out on the fucking golf course from time to time, even when I didn't much want to.

Fuck, I haven't had a whole lot of want-to in any category lately.  When I quit or cut back on the exercise, bad things happen to the head.  I don't know how much is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the thing tends to feed on itself.  Bad deal.  I've got to figure out how to manage this phenomenon a lot better next go around.  This winter was a fucking dud.

The Wilson Staff 5-iron is the only club I've hit in almost half a year.  Even on many days and evenings when I didn't want to at all, I was out at the Baldwin Golf Course, hitting around that club.  When I got back up and going a few weeks back, I had to take some breaks.  My fitness level had dipped to the point that I needed breaks, and the greens at Baldwin are sand.  They need an occasional rake.  I've been raking a lot of greens.

So I'm not actually putting in this goal to break par, I'll take one putt within the flagstick, two without.  The short game isn't much to speak of.  I am at my best when approaching finesse shots as Beavis.  It honestly helps.  Clear the mind completely, and score.  It's the Beavis way.  It's been effective.  I've had to continue this unorthodox practice just to stay on the course.

God, there was a lot of anger and disgust in my game once I'd given it up the last go-around.  It's one thing to get good at something, and it's a whole lot different to stay good.  I lost the focus to stay good once I was somewhat at the doorstep.

Now, golf tends to mirror life more than a little.  My game, when I restarted all this business, was an awful amalgamation of herk, jerk, bounce and flail.  The overriding thing that I want most to accomplish is to avoid injury.  There have been more golf injuries in the past six months than running injuries, though it remains entirely up in the air if I have been running at all.

So, yeah...I'm struggling with the existence of time as a concept, and people are worried if I'm fucking drunk again.  Maybe the golf is part of it.  I've probably spent about as much time drinking while golfing than without.  Maybe that was part of what I was trying to change.  I'm still way out ahead on drinking and adulting vs. not drinking and adulting.  It's no big fucking surprise to me my mental age is about 29.  Jesus.  What a debacle.

After the second relatively serious golf injury, I'd decided I didn't much care what I scored anymore, I just wanted to be able to hold my arm above my head after any given round.  Another injury was an odd oblique strain or something of the sort--I pulled some muscle I didn't even know I had, all in the name of setting a ball airborne.

And what a struggle it's been.  The best part about this whole speed-golf business was that there wasn't enough leftover energy to get too upset about the upsetting shots.  For a player who was once fundamentally sound, it is a spell of torture to totally re-build the swing.  It's humbling.  If there's one thing golf can do to an individual, that thing should be some healthy dose of humility.  Moreso than baseball, golf is a game of making the most of and minimizing the graduated errors.

At one point, I'd ordered the golf instruction manuals that had been previously destroyed in a drunken August in Vinland.  There were three paperback issues that I bought in the eighties, along with a hardcover Ben Hogan's Five Lessons manual.  The paperbacks were a series of Jack Nicklaus comic strips, these must have been syndicated before my time.
  

This is one of the cartoons on the opening page of the Play Better Golf book I'd reordered.  Look at Jack's face.  One thing he doesn't want to be thinking about on the driving range is the blonde in a skin-tight sweater.  Look at Jack's face.  He's pissed.  Intentional or not, the artist depicts a Jack Nicklaus upset at the hottie on the course.  I wonder if Tiger has this frame up on his refrigerator?

Between the accrued knowledge of Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus, one would have some reasonable expectation of knowing where the ball is going.  This doesn't necessarily have to be the case.  If a person can't keep his head still and his limbs under control might as well butcher these copies with a random iron.  I'd certainly done this out in Vinland years ago.

Point of reference:  I used to regularly score under par out at the sands of Baldwin.  Drunk.  It wasn't tough.  I'd gotten good enough, and had hit enough balls, that if things were clicking, I was on auto-pilot.  The weakness was always the short game.  It usually took a great stroke of luck or an absense of cognition to get the short game anywhere near a competitive level.  Baldwin was a gin-swilling, beer-tossing good time, though.  Most every putt on a sand green is a straight one.  That should help.  Sometimes, it does.

I cannot recall if these Wilson Staffs were found before or after I'd quit drinking.  My mind wasn't in much of a state of differentiation for a solid eighteen months after cessation.  I'm not sure it's in that much of a state yet.  Obviously not too much, but that little discovery seemed at the time to be a sign.

I'd always wanted a set of Staffs.  There is no feel like that of a well-hit forged iron shot.  All the modern club technology in the world can never replace that point of perfection of the well-struck ball.  All the advancement in the world is no exchange for that feeling, and I'd been good enough for a long enough period of time to know the feeling.

In my very first bag were a couple of sawed-off blades.  They weren't Staffs, but a K-Mart knockoff of some sort or other.  I do not recall the manufacturer, but these were certainly broken in due course.  Not from a well played shot, but bent around a tree, heaved over a cliff, and etc.  Golf was my first varsity sport in high school.  It's always going to have a soft spot of sorts.  There wasn't a baseball team, and my destiny was to attend school without one.  Until it wasn't.  Then it was again, but that is another story for some other day.  Or not.

I subscribed to the Edwin Watts catalogue, Golfsmith, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, etc.  One thing I'd figured out after my freshman year was that I didn't like losing, and especially didn't care much for having my ass totally kicked and being a laughingstock.  What a year.  We worked at it, got better.  We were so bad, we couldn't help but improve.  Eventually, we got kinda good.  Then one of us died, and those that were left got a little better.  It was an incremental buildup for me, just as it was an incremental breakdown.  Again, golf and life, life and golf.  Maybe this was some sort of an attempt to cobble some broken pieces back to some more proper place?  We'll find out...

After abandoning first the liquor, the golf game was in total shambles.  For starters, a spate of anhedonia is bound to occur in any ex-drinker's life.  The golf was just one of many manifestations.  Back then, things had to be pared down.  I think it's about time for another round, and there is a new volunteer in the five-iron.

I'd mentioned before it was a decent shot.  I think it was as good a shot as a person could expect when starting the swing with a club and ending with two club parts.  The previous several holes had been the typical exercise of patience and experimentation, but the last couple holes had demonstrated real progress.  I was generating some tremendous clubhead speed for the first time this year.  A couple of the jacks went about 200 yards.

Well, all good things come to an end.  The last shot only went about 190.  The clubhead went about forty yards.  RIP, five-iron.  The even irons have too long been a weakness in my game, anyway.  If I can hit a five-iron 200, it stands to reason that the six should go almost 190.  That will just have to do for now.

For What It's Worth

This doesn't matter much, what's about to be stated:  I'm not drinking, and I'm not drunk.

There.  I said it.  Everyone feel better?  It's true.

This little long-abandoned project began as an exercise to see how crazy a person might get when they try to take alcohol out of a life where it had been more or less present continually.  Here's the thing about experiments:  They don't always work.  They almost can't work, if "work" is this thing that someone might have in mind.

Well, a person can go about as crazy as they'd like when no longer under the influence of alcohol.  I'm proof of that, not at all unique.  It's likely little coincidence that once the running came around, my time spent on this little project took a back seat.  It was something to do.  This, this writing about nothing and nowhere, this space in time was something to do.

There's been a little bit of doing in the past few years.  I think that was probably a good thing, overall.  There are bad things that have come down the pipe as well.

It's tempting to go back and delete the nonsense in the past of this space, but that won't be happening soon.  It's there for a reason.  I don't want to go back there.  Here may not be the best place on the planet, but it isn't there.  Now is better than any of my previous thens.

If someone would have asked me the odds that I'd be sober over seven years down the road, I probably would have lost the bet.  Just to prove a point, maybe?  Hard to say.  I was convinced to be done at the time, but had very little confidence for eighteen months about the long-term ability or ramification of such a thing.  The running has been tremendously helpful on this front.

The absense of that running messes up the body and mind every bit as bad as the absense of alcohol.  It is odd, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising at all.  The physiological and psychological benefit of that sort of discipline in training cannot be easily replaced.  It's saved my sobriety, every bit as much as a continued attendance in a little AA.

It's as much society as I can stand.  Still.  I'll go to a ballgame or a concert once in a while, but found that the library isn't the easiest damn place in the world.

It's still tremendously unclear if any attempt will be made to piece in these four years that elapsed.  There's been a lot of movement.  Little settling.  Shifting sands all about, and yes...no true north.

Oh, well.  Gonna have to do for now.