Category Archives: Golf and Religion

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Live Forever

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The hyperbaric chamber reached mythical status when it was found that Michael Jackson slept in one at the height of his fame. Once the patient is sealed in the tank, the pressure in the tank is sent up to several atmospheres with increased levels of oxygen. This is useful in treating decompression sickness (the bends), carbon monoxide poisoning, and maybe some nonhealing wounds.

It sits in an unused part of the hospital, but I can understand its charms. It has a sci-fi movie feel to it, and the only way to talk to the person inside is via a telephone -COOL! It makes you think of pharoahs, pyramids, and immortality. It’s just a plexiglass pressure tank. 

Why do people want to live forever? It’s a supreme form of egotism. I rather like the view that being subjected to life is much like playing a round of golf on a municipal course on a sunny Saturday in the spring. It takes patience, a bit of smiling when you don’t want to, and the reflexes to duck when you hear “fore.” If this is life, then heaven is an championship caliber course in prime condition empty behind and ahead of you, with your favorite chosen companions, your stalwarts, playing by your side. 


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Indulge Me

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img_0812The indulgences are back (link to NYT article). Yup, the indulgences you learned about in world history in high school -the same that drove Martin Luther to nail his grievances to bring about the Protestant Reformation. Its absolution for sin that you can purchase from the Roman Catholic Church which works to intercede with the heavenly authorities to take a few years out of slow roasting. It lets you cut line in Purgatory. It turns Heaven into another place where you have to grease the maitre de’s palm. 

To me, its a sign of the times. You can buy anything if you have enough green, and this includes avoiding punishment in the afterlife. But what if you did something awful and you were poor? Does the Church take layaway on your soul?

This is why golf appeals to me. No matter who you are, out of bounds means stroke and distance. The red stakes means you get to drop for a stroke. Honor really means something on the hallowed greens. You can’t buy a scratch handicap. You play where you lie.

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The 25 Things About Me

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southpark

This is a chain letter circulating around Facebook -this is my contribution. My soul has been bared. 

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

25 things about me

1.Imagination -my imagination tends to run amok. Ally MacBeal was a bit jarring to watch because on some levels, my brain works in a similar fashion.
2.Navel gazing -I am a chronic self examiner. Combined with number 3, blogging and Facebook suits me like swamp water does for a frog.
3.Exhibitionism -Yes. I am a bit of an exhibitionist,. Not in the trenchcoat with no pants way, but more in the need for getting everyone’s attention. But I have a purpose!
4.Food -Food, good food, obsesses me to the point that I have to force myself to view food as a bodily function and not the center of my day. Spam is the pearl of American food, by the way. I can be seduced with food. I prefer savory over sweet. 
5.Bloody mindedness -I have a masochistic streak. My personal motto was set at four, when I declared to my whiny cousin Eugene, “Namja neun ch’ah muh ya deh.” which loosely translates to “a man must persevere.” Stoicism appeals to me, even though I may unstoically complain of its absence. Once, out of boredom, I pulled out 5 of my remaining baby teeth at age 10.
6.I can’t talk about number 6. It involves the Plaza Hotel, the Harvard Club of Boston, Locke-Ober, The University Club, the Four Seasons of New York…There I said too much. They might be reading this.
7.Doing things from scratch -I enjoy creating things from elemental items. For a cucumber and tomato salad, I grew these items along with the chives and then became flustered over not being able to make the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and coarse pickling salt. I then contemplated making the bowl out of the clay from the deeper soil of the garden. The longer the process and the shorter the reward, the greater the appeal. I like to fish with flies that I’ve tied myself, and dream of catching fish in Central Park with just the items from a sewing kit from one of the hotels. 
8.Narcissism -I tend to personalize everything. You are me, and he is me, and we are me, and we are all together -isn’t how that song goes?
9.Golf -I play golf in my mind when I’m not thinking about myself or what I’m going to eat next. I’m a big baby.
10.Rules -I like structure insofar as it draws lines for me to cross, if I can.
11.Impatient -I am not terribly patient.
12.Grand Gestures -I am a bit of a primitive or a throwback in my love and appreciation of grand gestures. Think Taj Mahal or the Defenestration of Prague -actually scratch that last one. 
13.Mongols -Yes, I love anything Mongolian. I would love to live in a yurt with forty horses and my clan in tow going from pasture to pasture. 
14.Chimpanzees -I can sit and watch them all day for weeks on end if given the opportunity. Their inner workings are so mysterious.
15.Women -I can sit and watch them all day for weeks on end if given the opportunity. Their inner workings are so mysterious. 
16.Minorities -The Yakuts, the Kipchaks, the Tai Dam, the Hmong, the Hottentots, Parsis, everyone Stalin moved around, the Piraha, remnant hunter gatherers of the world, Central Asian Jews, the Celts, the list goes on and on. Fascinating stuff. 
17.The Encyclopaedia Brittanica -I used to read it obsessively.
18.Scouting -I was an avid cub scout, but made the mistake of not going beyond Webelos. The ethos of scouting has always been a part of my worldview. 
19.Fishing -I can usually catch fish. A good skill to have. 
20.The Next Thing -My To-Do list is a branchy, multiply bifurcating clade of the next shiny, neat thing to figure out or do. I enjoy constantly remaking my environment.
21.School -If I hit Powerball, I’m going back to school forever. 
22.Anchovies -I really enjoy the salty, super fishy flavor of anchovies on the side with a freshly made Caesar’s salad.
23.Writing -If I had to do it all over, I would have put more effort into writing and storytelling. 
24.Love -I am a believer in true, romantic love. The kind that gives you strength, perspective, and a clear vision.
25.Purgatory -If the Old Testament, hellfire Christians are correct, then the best I can expect is to be in a line with quadrillions of people ahead of me, a line that includes Gandhi, Socrates, the Buddha, the entire pre-Columbian Aztec nation, most everyone who has ever lived in Marin County, aborted fetuses (each wearing an original sin pin on a simple gray smock), spilled semen (reconstituted as hopping demi-beings with whiplike tails, wearing half a black tee shirt with Onan in globby white letters), and a couple of my high school teachers. We’re all waiting to get processed and sent down a large hole in the clouds. We entertain each other with stories about our lives. I’m surrounded by a couple of billion demi-people who claim some relationship to me…

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The Circle of Life

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img_1658As the man of the house, I do get asked to do things that my fairer partner is loathe to do. I am, after all, good for something. When we were living in New York, we had a mouse problem, and it fell to me to rid our apartment of it. I dispatched it after cornering it, and then whacking it with a curtain rod after J flushed it out. It’s entrails popped over the kitchen tiles, and of course, it was my job to then clean the mess up. So it was no surprise when J pointed this mess out to me with a “OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT!!!!!” From our kitchen window, it looked like a particularly large bird poop. 

Close up, it became apparent what it was -the remains of a rabbit snacked upon by one of the golden hawks that patrol our neighborhood. The rabbit fur was the giveaway, along with the pellets in the intestines and the grassy material in the gizzard. I first thought, is this bird poop -did a vulture poop out his dinner? But the small intestine underneath the dried pile were still pink and moist -pointing to a kill within 24 hours and undigested. I think the hawk either found road kill or took its time eating everything but the vegetables -which is what we were left with on our porch -actually more like grass and green leaf sausages.

Haruspicy was the art of reading the future by observing the entrails of sacrificed animals performed first by the Etruscans and then by their successors, the Romans. The haruspex would look at the lobulations of the liver of the sacrifice to determine the future. The hawk, of course, ate the tasty liver, and left us with only the intestines. My overall read -be grateful for your full stomach lest you be reminded with a nice meal of undercooked grass sausage.

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Dead X-mas Trees

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treeturnercopy1We used to get “real” Christmas trees when we were living in New York, but it was the disposal of the trees that made me sad. There is something definitely pagan about sacrificing a a living being for holiday purposes. 

An old Christmas tree and an unwanted corpse share many features. They have overstayed their welcome. They shed. They smell funny. You have to hack off limbs if you want it to fit in the garbage. They are best dumped in state parks off hiking trails –I recommend transporting in a black Lincoln Town Car which is virtually invisible in town, roomy trunk. Even better if you have a wood chipper.

Now, we stick to a plastic tree. 

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The Golfist Holiday Season

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Grabulosity - The Exhilaration of Getting the Easily Distracted Parent's Attention

Grabulosity - The Exhilaration of Getting the Easily Distracted Parent's Attention

The holidays are upon us, and like other belief systems, golfism has its holiday. It falls on any particular day of the year when you realize that you deserve something amazing and fabulous. It may be simple like that tiny laptop that’s burning an image in your mind’s eye. Or extremely portable, like that shiny black and tiny digital camera. Or sociable, like a golf and poker trip to Scotland with eleven of your closest buddies. Or visible, like a 112 inch flat panel TV. Or practical, like a Porsche 911 Turbo in Darth Vader Black. Self love is the basis of self-confidence, and the true golf swing reflects that. Like my good friend, W.A. Hamilton IV from high school once said: “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”

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The iPilgrim

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applestore1A long line of pilgrims stretched around the glass cube waiting their turn to descend the glass staircase into the shrine. They came from all corners of the world with a purpose in their mind, an apple in their heart, and their credit card in their hand. Once inside, they circled the space under the plaza, from Genius Bar, to Macbooks, to Macbook Pro, to iPods, to iMacs, then to Mac Pro’s, to the final station: the iPhone. They smiled, and felt comfortable in their knowledge that they had come to a good place. While other stores offered 30-70% discounts for electronics made by lesser manufacturers, this place offered only 2-5% off only their least popular items. It didn’t matter, because these were the faithful. There are in fact documentaries and academic papers written about this cult (link). For myself, I can’t fathom why anyone would consider joining this religion when you could be a golfist or a Presbyterian.

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Miracles and Statistics

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I had read that McCain’s aides, the ones trashing Sarah Palin this week, called Barack Obama, “the one.” This, I believe, is the reference from The Matrix series. It comes from the moment where Morpheus, the leader of the human resistance, reveals to Neo, “You are the one.” The Christ references came in spades as well as all kinds of Buddhist and Exodus references. The movie poses a serious question about miracles and statistics.

Science is never about absolute truths, but a series of questions and answers based on logic and statistics. If explanation A describes phenomena X 99% of the time compared to explanation B which works only 95%, theory A is the better explanation. Even so, there is no establishment of absolute truth, but support of a stronger theory. It is this process which refines the understanding of phenomena X -but this confounds people of faith.

People of faith believe in incontrovertible truths. They see the world in black and white and are highly suspicious of the shades of gray offered by theories. Science is a process that offers increasing degrees of certainty measured by statistics -some theories become established and become principles, but are always open to exceptions. These exceptions require new theories or amendments of theories, but on their face, they can seem miraculous because they occur in a vacuum of explanation. This happened when whole ecosystems were found around volcanic vents at the bottom of sea trenches. This will happen when we find extraterrestrial life. This will happen when a computer demands civil rights.

In the Matrix, the presence of Neo, and his antagonist, Agent Smith, are said to be the result of a statistical anomaly that occurs every few millennia. I have often thought that if something has a 1 in a billion chance to occur, it is likely to have occurred if there are billions of people. There is that great Youtube video of a baseball bat flung to the ground after a hit, ending up standing perfectly. Of the millions, perhaps billions of times, a bat has been flung to the ground, it usually should come to rest in a state of lowest potential energy. Because the bat has a flat surface on its end, there is a potential energy state that is metastable standing up. This seemingly miraculous event occurred and may likely occur again before the Cubs win the Series again.

So what are miracles? Are they statistical anomalies? Phenomena that occur in the vacuum of theory? People mystified by a standing bat? I believe in miracles as I have been the beneficiary of one requested on the tails of falling Perseid metorites in 2001. I cannot explain how it occurred or why. Miracles are the impossible made real. In a world where you can wish on a falling star and get your life’s wish a few months later, I cannot argue against the miraculous.

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The Tao of Golfism

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Spring, looking toward clubhouse from number 4 fairway.

Spring, looking toward clubhouse from number 4 fairway.

 

I recently started rereading Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, and it hit me that the Tao can be completely understood through golf. Taking the translation by Dr. Stanley Rosenthal (link) and replacing Tao with golfism, and it reveals so much about both as they seem to be one and the same. See excerpt with modifications below. 

 

1. THE EMBODIMENT OF golfism

Even the finest teaching is not golfism itself.

Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.

Without words, golfism can be experienced,

and without a name, it can be known.

 

To conduct one’s life according to golfism,

is to conduct one’s life without regrets;

to realize that potential within oneself

which is of benefit to all.

 

Though words or names are not required

to live one’s life this way,

to describe it, words and names are used,

that we might better clarify

the way of which we speak,

without confusing it with other ways

in which an individual might choose to live.

 

Through knowledge, intellectual thought and words,

the manifestations of golfism are known,

but without such intellectual intent

we might experience golfism itself.

 

Both knowledge and experience are real,

but reality has many forms,

which seem to cause complexity.

 

By using the means appropriate,

we extend ourselves beyond

the barriers of such complexity,

and so experience golfism.

 

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Par-mageddon

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I dreamt a happy dream last night. It was a perfect round of golf played at even par. The putts rattled in. The feel was natural. That great feeling though turned into dread as I had the feeling that I was the last person playing. A sadness mixed with a chilly fear, of ghosts watching. I hit a ball out of bounds and took stroke and distance, yet the next shot rolled in for par. And then I knew that it was all a fake. I shot backwards and the wind picked up and blew the ball the right way. I was in that place because all suffering had been removed from golf.

I stopped playing, and a beautiful angel lit next to me. She asked why it was I had stopped. I complained that no matter what I did, my score was par. She spoke, telling me that the greenskeeper had made it so, and my path around the course was already mapped out for me in this book she handed me. It was bound in black leather and the pages’ edges had been dipped in gold. It’s title, Your Round.

I ask, how can I manage my game if everything was already preordained?

But you do manage your own game, she said, and the greenskeeper maintains the course to suit his plan.

What of my free will -where is that in the context of this grand plan? I might as well be hitting the ball randomly with a stick, with no plan and no goal.

However you choose to think of it, it is your choice, made freely, she said with a smile, floating back to the blue sky.

I stopped playing right there. I made a thermonuclear device, and I detonated it, out of my own free will, to destroy the plan of the greenskeeper, who, I decided, was my jailer. An infinity of golf balls flew outwards, traced their separate arcs, and landed on their respective infinite targets, rolled to the hole, and dropped.