Golfing with my handicaps

(675 words)

It is said with an earnest concern I find humbling, which is why I feel ashamed when I respond with jackass humor whenever someone asks me if because of my condition I’m unable to golf.

“No, I can’t,” I say. “I can’t drive. I can’t putt. My short game is appalling. So, no, I cannot golf.”

I let that sink in a moment before delivering the punchline most of you saw coming a mile away.

“… But then again, I never could.”

Thus, this is a story about a chronic muscular failure combined with a neurological regression that leads to anxiety and persistent feelings of failure.

Think I’m talking about Parkinson’s? No. 

I’m talking about golf! 

And because this about golf, I feel compelled to once again share the greatest line I’ve ever heard about golf, which isn’t really about golf at all, but is instead about sex.

And in the end it’s always about sex.

I was talking in 2007 with a new golf fanatic — he was in his mid-30s — who’d driven 38 hours from Denver to Pittsburgh to watch Tiger Woods play golf at Oakmont. He was out of his mind for golf.

“The first time I ever set foot on a golf course was 6-months ago. It was the most fun I’ve ever had at something I was so bad at since the night I lost my virginity.”

I told him I wrote for Golf Magazine and that was the greatest line I’d ever heard about golf.

He said, “You write for Golf Magazine? Man, you must be good!”

I said assuming I was good at golf because I wrote about the sport was like assuming sex with an adult film actress would be really hot just because she’s done a lot of porn, which is maybe the world’s worst analogy. But I persist in using it because it allows me a moment of illicit revery about sex with a porn star and that always leaves me feeling, oh, what’s the word?

Presidential?

I’ve played twice this year. Had a 108 Tuesday at Ligonier C.C. and spent a good deal of time wondering why I continue to pursue something I’m so bad at with no realistic hopes of a more satisfying performance — and we’re talking about golf, not sex, although the lines are beginning to blur. 

People ask if golf is so frustrating, why bother spending 4- or 5-hours doing it, a statement that is about 98 percent incorrect. Very little actual golf occurs during your typical round of golf. 

Your average golfer is only golfing for about 3 minutes during a round of golf, that is 3 minutes when the golfer is standing there engaged in the process of executing an actual golf shot golf.

The rest of the time is spent drinking beer, racing golf carts, whizzing against a tree  and gamely laughing at everything your mates say the way the gang at the old Bada Bing laughed when Tony Soprano cracked a joke. 

One of the requirements of being an acceptable golf partner is to lol in non-humorous situations where other people merely type lol.

Faking a good maniacal laugh, like faking a gangbuster orgasm, is tedious, but both deceptions can be essential to building relationships. 

In golf, fake laughter establishes open-minded acceptance so authentic camaraderie can be achieved later on when everybody is good and drunk and everything seems funnier than when you’re sober. And that golf camaraderie is for me the best part thing about golf.

It’s why I’ve lately been quoting the line, “A great day of golf involves where you played, how you played and with whom you played — and the first two are overrated.”

So, yes, I’m still playing golf and taking great joy out of a day spent drinking beer, racing golf carts whizzing against a tree and playing about 3 minutes of golf.

The instant I can no longer enjoy a day like that, well, I’m screwed.

Told you it’d in the end be all about sex.

Related …

Finally, I golf

After 15 years, turning the page on golf calendars

NYTimes features me, my ace book

Dad had real balls, real (golf) balls

Yesterday, Arnold Palmer watched me golf

Of golfers & God

Whole world needs to LOL more. Now!

(836 words)

Spending an hour in a doctor’s office waiting room is like being in the windowless elevator of a 3,000-floor building. Nobody talks. Nobody makes eye contact. It’s awkward.

Every hundred floors or so somebody else gets on and tells the elevator operator their name so they’ll know where to stop.

I was the responsible parent yesterday — it occurs with Leap Year frequency — and had to take the 15 year old in for a routine check-up.

There were about 10 of us in this 11-seat room the whole time. They’d come and they’d go.

A stack of of ancient People magazines on the corner table was being ignored in favor of an array of glowing tech. 

E-readers and smart phones have rendered the 1964 Barbara Streisand song obsolete: People who need People are no longer the luckiest people in the world.

They’re just people whose monthly data allotment has expired.

I’m old school. I’d brought a book. A real one. Thick. It was the 1,232 page Churchill book I mentioned in Monday’s post.

I like taking it in public because I enjoy ostentatiously reading and because it’s thick enough to stop a stray bullet and these days you just never know.

Everyone in there was ignoring everyone else — everyone but Josie and myself. In an endearment I’ll treasure forever, she put her head on my shoulder and would chuckle at my whispered jokes.

After about 20 minutes, I told her I wanted her to stand up the next time the receptionist announced a name. Any name.

“If they say, ‘Amy?’ stand up and say you’re Amy. Same if it’s Tim or Beth or Joyce. Then start a fight with the real Amy, Tim, Beth or Joyce about who gets to go first.”

She said she’d get in trouble.

“You might even get beat up, but it would shatter the boredom and everyone would have a good story to post for their Facebook friends and that would make it all worthwhile.”

I believe we have a moral obligation to demolish life’s many tediums.

That’s why I’m ashamed of what happened next.

I was reading a passage about how FDR in 1942 wheeled himself into the White House guest room where Churchill was staying and found Churchill buck naked. And there these two world leaders began discussing how to best obliterate global tyranny.

As Roosevelt aid Harry Hopkins later recalled, Churchill was standing there “stark naked and gleaming pink from his bath,” when Roosevelt questioned Churchill on a point.

Churchill responded about his tactical intentions and then added, “You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide.”

The absurdity of the situation and Churchill’s sparkling wit provoked from me a snort of laughter.

I’d reflexively LOL’d.

Yet, I was too situationally coy to truly LOL.

I stifled my giddy laughter.

Really, I should have just laughed out loud. Even better, I should have right there rolled on the floor and laughed my silly ass off.

The spectacle would have made everyone happy.

I probably see ROTFLMAO about once a day, yet in my entire life I’ve never seen a single hysterical individual rolling on the floor laughing his or her asses off.

The Centers for Disease Control tracks the rise of infectious diseases. I wish there was an organization dedicated to spreading infectious laughter.

It needs encouraging.

If I, a sober and sane appearing middle aged man, had succumbed to an out-of-the-blue bout of hysterical laughter everyone in that godforsaken waiting room would have laughed right along with me. My insane laughter would have made everyone happy.

Well, everyone, but my teenage daughter who despite her paternal affection would have been mortified.

My stifling laughter, too, goes against what I advise people to do when they enjoy my book or blog.

I have friends tell me they stifle laughter when they’re reading my posts in some public place.

One friend said she got shushed in the quiet car on the Manhattan train while LOLing because of my blog.

Manhattan. That’s New York City.

If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere!

Or so I’ve heard.

I told her she should have said it was too funny to stifle and she should have as proof read the entire post aloud until everyone either got the joke or she was placed under arrested.

Imagine the euphoric headlines: “Woman arrested for excessive laughter!”

I’d be booked with Jimmy Fallon the very next night.

When was the last time you truly laughed your ass off?

Even just the memory of having done so feels so good, doesn’t it?

So next time something funny provokes you to laugh, don’t hold back. Just let it fly. Laugh loud. Snort. Pound your fist on the table. Get down and roll around the floor laughing your MFAO.

You’ll feel better. The whole world will.

We need all the laughter we can get. Even if it comes from observing happy strangers.

So it’s okay to laugh your ass off.

Just keep your clothes on. Because Churchill was wrong.

We all have a little something to hide.

Related . . .

Yukkin’ it up over laugh track history

I speak, some laugh, some cheer, some snooze

Don’t hate me ‘cause I’m beautiful

Monkeying around with bananas

A Three Stooges tweet extravaganza!

I have the hots for the angry traffic flag waver babe

Happy 50th Birthday to these words!

I was pleased to see recent media fuss when it was announced that “OMG” and “LOL” were born last week.

Of course, these obnoxious words have been around for it seems like years or maybe I’m just confusing the words themselves with the people who use them.

I’ve always known people who, “OMG!” were shocked by things like the daily sunrise and would “LOL!” at banal Facebook observations.

But there’s nothing I can do within the crush of laws concerning unlawful imprisonment of people who say those things so we might as well celebrate the birth of two new words, even words that connote dimwits.

And by birth, I mean recognition of the words by the Oxford English Dictionary. 

We don’t think words and phrases have birthdays, but the venerable Oxford English Dictionary does. It lists exactly when almost all of the nearly 600,000 words in the English language entered the lexicon.

Some of these singular words say as much about society and our advances as entire essays. 

For instance, both “Weight Watchers” and “all-you-can-eat” were born in 1961. So were “doomsayer,” “moonshot,” “rehab” and “advertorial.” Some words that were new then are passe already (“dial-up” and “splashdown”).

I am looking forward to my 50th birthday in 2013 and will be pleased to blow out the candles with the word “boink.” I’m tickled that the OED says both boink and I were born the very same year.

Boink is a splendid word, not to mention pastime, so it pleases me that we’re aging together hand-in-hand. 

Of course, you won’t hear me doing a lot of bragging that the OED felt the need to recognize the word “dipshit” the same year I was born.

It pains me to think that the word was in its embryonic stages for years and didn’t need barnyard liberation until the year the docs told my folks, “It’s a boy!”

Who knows? Maybe I did something to push the popularity of the word as soon as I was born. I know my late father said the word so often that I still turn around and say, “Yes?” anytime I hear it spoken in my vicinity.

But I have a busy week and am going to take the easy way out today by presenting you with a list of words that are turning 50 this year.

What interests me is that many of these words seem to stem from a Madison Avenue heyday of when rampant consumerism was really starting its American roar, and how many of the words stem from space exploration.

It must have been an exciting time to be alive and not just some little dipshit awaiting delivery.

• advertorial -- This is advertising masquerading as advertising. I’ve sneered at advertorials, but only when I’m not being paid to write them. I’ve done maybe two or three of these in what for a lack of a better word I call my “career.” Guaranteed, I’d be a lot better off if I’d done a lot less sneering and a lot more selling.

• all-you-can-eat -- I wonder what they called this before they coined this now-common phrase. Probably gluttony.

• A-OK -- The space program gave us so much. In hindsight, it seemed like such an  exciting time. I think right now things are about C-OK, which is an improvement over F-OK from just a few years ago. 

• back-talk -- How come there’s still not a goody-goody front-talk?

• bionic -- That means the word to describe him is about 25 years older than the man who came to represent it: Astronaut Steve Austin.

• dial-up -- Even the reading the seven-character name makes me tap my fingers in impatience today.

• doomsayer -- It took until 1961 to get to this word? I’d have thought doomsayers would have been around since Pontius Pilot started toweling off his dripping hands.

• fab -- The word would have faded into obscurity had it not been for John, Paul, George and Ringo.

• gillion -- Someday I’m going to get around to doing a story about the biggest number known to man. I’m pitching a piece now about the shortest time measurements. I’m going to call it: “No Time At All.” Just wait. No one will snap it up and I’ll write a half-assed version of it for the blog in a New York minute.

• incapacitate -- A word that was launched just in time for a decade when access to and consumption of mind-bending drugs made the word so necessary.

• intel -- This must have coincided with when the CIA was devoting more time to snappy acronyms and abrevs. than actual intelligence of what was going on in Southeast Asia.

• moon shot -- Baseball fans ought to relate to this. The meaning, of course, is another space program coinage adapted to mean what guys like Mickey Mantle was blasting them out of the old Yankee Stadium.

• no-win -- How did this once come about? You mean before this there were just win-wins? It feels like I’ve been no-win on every March Madness pool I’ve entered since before Mantle was blasting moon shots.

• off-air -- Imagine a simpler time when every TV set could receive just three stations and they were on the air for just about 14 hours or so a day. What did people do with the spare time? Read? Drink? Boink? Ah, the good ol’ days.

• omigod -- It took us 50 years to condense this one? All I can say is, OM--, er, amazing!

• randy -- Austin Powers rules, baby!

• rat fink -- It’s just the perfect pairing. Go ahead and try substituting any other loathsome animal and watch it fail. Things like skunk fink or roach fink just don’t cut it. Didn’t James Cagney corner the market on this one with “Dirty Rat Fink?”

• rehab -- You mean rehab predated Betty Ford?

• retro -- As mentioned, this word is still cool. I don’t watch much “Mad Men,” but I sense its retro appeal.

• skyjacker -- Oceanic pirates have been around for centuries. How did we get skyjacker instead of sky pirate? I like sky pirate better.

• wazoo -- I’d say I’d have to look more into this one, but I’m fearful of what the ol’ research would require. 

• Weight Watcher -- Fascinating. Both Weight Watcher and all-you-can-eat were born the same year. To me, it’s the chicken and the egg argument all over.

• woody -- This, I guess, refers to the old station wagons bands like the Beach Boys sang about. I like the newer meaning, but it would be fun to time travel back to 1961 and tell mom I was going to run my big old woody down to the beach to meet the bikini babes.