Stopped to pee. On Missouri border. We pick up snacks. KY gets the Doritos. Its bouquet brings back other road trips from times past. Northern Missouri is known for its fireworks vendors. Chat is gossip about so and so doing this and that.
Author Archives: docpark
The One
We pick up Nike One Tours, the same balls that Tiger uses. We all decide it’s the ball. Music -Panama by Van Halen.
Mother Nature plays ball
MF joins us. KY texted him earlier, asking about the weather in Houston. Saturday 0 percent Sunday 10% precipitation. How’d he arrange that. MF- “Mother Nature’s my bitch.”
We’re on the way to Kansas City to hop a plane. We’re making a stop at KY’s to pick up some ProV1’s he just received in the mail.
Lunch at the marvelous doctor’s lounge
Eating lunch. Pictures left to right are JH and KY. Waiting for MF. Fish sticks – it’s Friday after all.
If you could walk a mile in my shoes…
Men like shoes. Golf shoes. The first step in liberation is to appropriate the language of the oppressor. Why did I buy the sassy brown shoes when the Callaway blacks were perfectly serviceable? was the question.
“They were so cute, I had to buy them,” was my response.
As I prepared for my golfing journey, I spent long hours preparing my sticks -scrubbing last year’s caked on dirt from Hype, Legacy, and Waveland. The grooves that would impart the guiding and lofting spin and brakes, the grip that acts as the intermediary object between this world and the golfing spirit plane, and the shaft that translates torque and kinetic energy into momentum transfer into the ball.
The balls are the Costco Titleists -they cost somewhere in between Titleists premium brand and their bargain brand, and behave closer the high end of the golf ball bandwidth having a nice soft feel around the greens, excellent stopping power, and good flight. They are the few fun items that I grab while purchasing large quantities of meat and dry goods from the dispensary of modern delights.
The main bag has been replaced with a Callaway branded walking hybrid bag. Not the completely minimalist bag of my teen years which was just a vinyl sack, but rather a light composite bag with enough dark notes to give it the appearance of heft, but very light and heftable for a walk on the course. I purchased a Callaway airline bag which just fits over this bag, and will protect my clubs well.
The clubs have undergone a great deal of modification since last year. I purchased a Taylormade R7 Quad driver that is completely blacked out to instill awe and fear. I ditched my temperamental 3 wood and trusty 5 wood for a Nike Sasquatch Sumo 4 wood. Back in the day, my persimmon 4 wood (a middle spoon) was my go to club for driving under pressure -I once launched it close to 300 yards on a dry downhill hole with the wind, but it had a small head that let it pass through medium rough with ease. The square head on the SS 4 wood lets me hit off center with miminal loss of power. There is some degree of gear effect, and I found that it is the most forgiving of my long clubs.
My three iron became the household rabbit masher after I purchased a Callaway X-hybrid. This season, my missing 4 iron has been replaced with a X-4H hybrid as well. The remaining irons (5 thru P) are Callaway X-18’s. I carry three lofted wedges, all Cleveland of 52, 56, and 60 degrees.
My putter which gave me fits last year, has been heavily modified with a thickened grip over taped with leftover squash grip from my college days. I have been hitting a quarter reliably on my putting rug at 6 feet, so here’s to hoping.
I have packed a good supply of ibuprofen for the middle aged man aches, and cough syrup for the crud that has been going around the house, G’s school, and my place of work. I am packing Deepak Chopra’s Golf for Enlightenment (link).
We’ll be gathering at the physician’s lounge at the hospital for lunch.
The Life, all thanks to the Wife
Santa Rita of Cascia, Patron Saint of the Impossible
J, mysterious lady of wonders, gave the rarest of gifts to me a month ago. It’s a passport so rare that it has caused gasps of astonishment among my fellow married men. Yes, I got the green light to go on a golfing weekend road trip to Houston with three of my golfing colleagues from Des Moines.
Why is this such a great gift? Because J gave it to me with no strings attached -no emotional collateral or labor based mortgages. It was a gift given from a wife to her man from the heart. That’s why my partner, DC observed to me yesterday, “You married a saint.”
Indeed I did.
The Commuter
It’s 14 miles from my house to my place of work. I do this by car every dy, usually at day break. What I notice is not the number of cars on the road with me, but the fact that in each car, large and small, sits usually one driver.
In a world of abundant energy, this makes sense -who wants to walk to a subway station or wait in the rain for a bus? Our city planning is centered around the car, with multilane highways and huge parking lots which render walking a frazzling venture for only the very young or very poor. No car, no job. 14 miles is about 3-4 hours by walking, 2-3 hours by horse, an hour by bike, but a perfectly reasonable 20 minutes by car. It allows us to live in “the country” with large lots and trees, away from the city which is surprisingly empty of people before and after work hours. Very few people walk on the sidewalks of downtown.
Last year, when gas went over 4 dollars a gallon, this meant 8 dollars a day to go to and from work. For people who live an hour out, usually because these homes cost less, this translated into 20 dollars a day (assuming a slightly more fuel efficient car), or a hundred dollars a week, or 400 dollars a month. Because of the economics of our car based lifestyle, the majority of people who make 40,000 or less live further out to share in the benefits of the American dream -a lawn, a 3-4000 square foot house. This 400 dollars a month or 4800 dollars after taxes easily translates into 10-20% of income.
It was unsustainable for many, and the downturn in the economy, with slip in demand, brought a welcome reprieve to most who have managed to keep their jobs. The problem is that we have this moment to try to fix some of this, and likely we won’t. With the prices down, it makes sense to move closer to one’s place of work or move that work closer to the home. Walking distance is best. The problem is the suburbs and exurbs are not designed for bipedal commuting. Grocery stores are miles away, minutes by car but up to an hour by walking.
When the economy revives, demand will spike, and gas prices will go back to where they were last summer. This is a sure thing. What to do?
The sensible thing would be to increase the gas tax, ratchet it up slightly to make it hurt less. This was something proposed by President Carter a generation ago, so that we could bank during times of plenty, to develop energy alternatives because America’s oil reserves had gone “past peak.”
What is peak oil? In any oil field, there is a finite amount of oil. In any country’s sovereign territory, there are only so much oil accessible with available technology. As the oil runs out of a field, it takes more money to extract this oil. As known oil fields are tapped out, money needs to be expended exploring and developing newer fields. Investments must be made in extraction technologies. The oil wrung out of the fields may cost more than simply importing it -this is what the US faced in the seventies. We had gone past peak and every subsequent year, less oil was available domestically, and more had to be brought in from abroad.
This has had many consequences. For a while, North Sea fields belonging to the UK and Scandinavian countries kept prices down and we had the flush years of the 80’s and 90’s -exactly the times when we should have been banking this wealth for future times of need. Carter saw this, being an engineer, and understood it. But America became besotted with cheap oil which allowed for cheap food and cheap stuff -all byproducts of petroleum (ref Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan). It was made blind by 2, 4, and 6 year election cycles, when 10-100 year vision was needed.
It is a closely held secret -the estimated reserves of the Saudi oil kingdom, but many experts believe that it has passed its peak. The hidden gift of this recession is cheap gas, but it is also a curse, because the impetus and economic incentive to purse energy alternatives while promoting conservation are gone when gas prices drop due to low demand. Think about this when you sit in traffic, idling that SUV along with everyone else sitting alone in their car.
reference
The Monkey House
The NY Times, our nation’s crier, reported on people who chose to live with primates (link). They almost uniformly are charmed by the infant primate, but soon after a year or two, are overwhelmed at the onset of puberty, super monkey reflexes, and superhuman strength. The fascinating thing is how they remain attached, bonded, by the experience of raising the baby -changing the diaper, feeding the bottle, holding the infant chimp, baboon, or Capuchin monkey.
It points to a switch that humans have in their makeup that reaches across species. The infant primate shares many features with human infants -but it’s mostly helplessness and cuteness (link). We are all neotenous apes (link)-apes whose infantile features are preserved into adulthood -possibly by the act of taming ourselves.
A baby is born unable to fend for itself, unable to walk, unable to find food. It is in our makeup to compensate for this to propogate the species. It goes both ways. There is the great story of a toddler that fell into the gorilla exhibit. A mother gorilla came over and cradled the child until help arrived (link).
The NYT article goes on to how the people cling to their trans-specied progeny when puberty and adulthood brings out ape dominance behavior. This is what we do as we raise our children into adolescence and adulthood -despite the hormonally driven antisocial behaviors, they are still our children and we cling to them.
My First Computer
My first computer was the Coleco Adam computer. It came in the winter of 1983 as a Christmas gift. I chose it over the Apple ][ and the Commodore 64 because this computer came with 80k of RAM based on a Zilog Z80-A processor running at 3.58MHz. It came with a daisy wheel printer which put out typewriter-like text, and had built in wordprocessing.
I fancied myself a writer, and quickly began using it to churn out really bad science fiction, erotica, fantasy conversations with famous historical figures and chimpanzees, and long, simultaneously self pitying and self-aggrandizing essays about myself. Somehow, I have never broken out of this Kilgore Trout writing style.
I wrote my college essay on it -if I can find it, I will post it at some point. And, you could program on the BASIC language that came it it. I programmed LIFE (the computer problem, not the board game –link) but each generation took about 10 minutes, and I would have to let the thing run for days to reach a steady state.
What was even better was that it was also a full blown Coleco gaming console, and you could play War Games which I did for many days on end fighting writer’s block. Buck Rogers came on the silly proprietary tapes that Coleco admittedly decided was a big mistake.
In the end, I left it behind when I took off for college, like a sad younger girlfriend or a bad haircut. I moved up to a 512k Macintosh, but I still have a soft spot for the ADAM. Like everything in this navel gazing age, the uber geeks out there have actual conventions where they meet and commerce in this defunct, obscure relic from the 80’s. Some bright chap with too much time has actually got it to go on-line and act as a web server.
The Mandibulous -updated
My grandmother told me that a person’s face determines their character and behavior. I thought it was one of many old Korean sayings and fables that have been handed downs since the Ice Age, but as I have lived these two score years, I do believe that she had something.
Our development is a balance of hormones which like the yin and yang symbol to the right, the male hormones -the androgens, and the female hormones, the estrogens, both exist in men and women and play a role in behavior. Their longterm effects are written on the faces.
The masculine jawline and heavier nose and brow ridges (frontal bossing) is a result of androgen influences. Aggression and sex drive seem to be associated with androgens, as well as increased muscle mass and low body fat. That is why Chyna Laurer formerly of the WWF looks like a man -she was taking steroids and it shows on her face with the heavy mandible, the thicker nose -and where it doesn’t show is the 3 inch long clitoris growing into a penis and the labia majora growing into a scrotum. Mudflaps indeed! The testosterone increased her muscle mass and decreased her body fat (she required breast implants after her natural breasts melted away). It probably also made her aggressive, both sexually and in general behavior.
Cate Blanchett shown at top has many of the cardinal features of the mandibulous female -the strong nose and jawline, the deep voice, and brooding eyes under sharp brows. If she is anything like the characters that she chooses to play, she is likely very aggressive and probably always trying to wear the pants (which she does in the movies). 
Natural aging brings on mandibulousness -note Sharon Stone in her youth and a more recent picture of her. The decrease in estrogens brought on by menopause causes a relative uptick in the androgens -and thus mandibulousness. It’s a fact, that as our women age, they become manlier -women losing hair and growing mustaches is one of the biological costs of living past our natural evolved age of 20 or so. But, even one of our founding fathers, Ben Franklin, noted that mature women are the ideal first liasons of a young man as they not only have the experience but the urge -mandibulous. Here are more examples:
Mandibulous, and likely hornier than on the left
Mandibulous indeed!
The gals with the soft roundish features, the girly girls, are not the ones likely to have the high hormonally driven sex drives, and are the ones most likely to gather fat around the hips and thighs and have a high brooding index -need to roost and decorate the house obsessively, eat chocolate, and have strategic headaches. It’s the tomboys who are the aggressors, and it is the MILF-y cougar who is strong of jaw and deep of voice who will likely tear your appendages off.
Addendum 2-25-2009
This idea is well illustrated in the recent SNL skit Cougar den (link). All the characters are deep voiced, horny older women. Though meant as a caricature, they get it wrong. It isn’t that they are desperate for lack of sex -they are desperate due to an imbalance of androgen to estrogen. This is why you can go to Wal Mart and buy a back massaging wand with all those nubbly appendages on its round vibrating head. Men with back problems are not purchasing these.
Golfism -life is a metaphor for golf 