Category Archives: my golf

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The Road Trip

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img_0831The weather broke and hit the mid 50’s yesterday, which gave me the opportunity to shake some rust off. The golf hut was warm without the overhead infrared heaters turned on. I realized I had been missing this essential component of my life. With each swing, the joy factor rose. 

My lovely wife J understands this part of me and indulges me. I have planned a road trip to Texas in a few weeks with a few golfing friends. Friday night down, 36 holes on Saturday, drive back Sunday. Still need a a #4 -any takers?

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Man’s Second Puberty

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img_14401The first puberty comes with surprising hair in strange places. You get used to it and you move on. The second puberty which occurs to men at around 35-45 also comes with strange hair in surprising places. I had made note of my vibrissae in an earlier post. I was scratching my ear with my pen earlier today when I heard an incredibly loud sound -kind of like one of those parallel parking wires attached to the right side of cars hitting the sidewalk. I ran to the mirror and was horrified to see these -it was the same fascinating horror that I welcomed hair in my arm pits and nether regions so many decades ago. I demanded information from J who with a roll of her eyes informed me that she

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 has noted these for several years now! And didn’t mention a word. I can respect that, I suppose, because if I see crazy hair sprouting from some part of her that she can’t see, I probably would keep mum too. All the more reason to get a personal trainer, go on a diet, and buy a Porsche. 

My take on this is too personal to relay, but I will probably blurt it out in some later post in metaphors, allegory, abstract symbolism, Klingon, and modern dance.

 

addendum 1/17/2009

Gizmodo, one of my favorite gadget blogs, posted this ear mirror -who knew that I am pioneering a trend? Eternal friendship to the person who sends me one for my birthday.

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The Fortune

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img_1410My wife J has a long history of cracking out dissatisfying fortunes out of fortune cookies. They are never completely bad, but inevitably not as fun as mine. Yesterday was a case in point. Out with friends at Iron Wok near Jordan Creek, where the chef is a master of the wok -cooking fresh ingredients at lead-melting speeds to sear in taste without losing texture or flavor, the meal ended with the passing of the fortune cookies. I made a gesture at first handing J a cookie, but the look in her eye told me that it would be more entertaining if she picked the fortune. The results, typical, are preserved in the picture above. 

For some reason, J would get these runs of bizarrely written fortunes like, “Hard work is its own reward” and “Reward without suffering is no reward.” This is made worse by my skill in garnishing fortunes like, “Success must be rewarded with pleasure” and “You deserve a Porsche 911 Turbo in Ticket Me Please Red.” 

I made up that last one. Statistics will inform me that odds are 50-50 that J get the totalitarian propoganda while I get the license to boogie in our fortune cookies, but tell that to J. This is where bias is a central feature in the way we view the world. Even when I get the fortune that says, “Trust in Effort, Be Wary of Easy Path” and she gets the one that says, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” J would say that I got hers and she got mine. I am Snoopy to her Charlie Brown. I fight the Red Baron, and she is my owner. 

That being said, with her by my side, with her sympathetic outlook on my shenanigans, with her hardworking nature, and strenuous efforts, I have been and will always be the luckiest guy around.

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The Good Mike versus the Bad Mike

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When Lehman Brothers was about to tank, the Treasury bandied about a scheme to divide the bank into a good bank with all the profitable assets and a bad bank with all the bad debt. The plan was to allow the free market then take care of the good and bad bank. Turned out, the whole bank was pretty bad, but it made me think. What if we could divide into our good and bad selves?

The good Mike would be basically indistinguishable from the present whole Mike, I suppose. But let’s stretch our imaginations and reflect a bit on this. The image on the left is actually an enhanced picture with all the blemishes kindly removed -all the bumps and moles. Looking deeper, the good Mike would be more humble and less profane. He would think and talk less about himself and work harder for the greater good. The good Mike would use coasters and keep everything tidy. The good Mike would obsess less about his own petty needs and be more generous with his time and attention. The good Mike would be patient and kind with people’s faults and foibles. The good Mike would exercise more and eat less. The good Mike would flush.

The bad Mike refuses to submit to an interview but instead asks that all questions be referred to his office in Dubai.

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The Entourage

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All men need fluffing. It is a fact. You wander into work with a headache that the coffee has yet to work on. You face a day of processing. All it takes is one positive comment, a “hello, you look nice today,” from a female and the day looks better. The workday is now a chance to facilitate miracles. A cute, perky personal assistant taking notes and making phone calls would do fine -think Sarah Palin in her twenties with those glasses and beeeeeeeeee-hive! If I could, I would also have someone to attend entirely to my mood while providing physical labor -crack jokes, carry my laptop bag, make espresso, make lunch, and beat up people. Someone to be a caddy, a butler, a driver, a chef, and a batman (colonial English officers would have a loyal non-com assigned for life, called his batman). Some six foot tall Australian, ex-Special Air Services, with barista and Cordon Bleu training would be great -I think Tiger Woods has one of these. Some days, I wish I had a three women chorus in pink chiffon walking behind me alternately singing my praises and repeating what I say in three part harmony -Stefani, Aguilera, and Knowles would do just fine. I wish I could have my own trailer parked outside wherever I work so I could wander over and take in naps in the afternoon, enjoy a sauna, and a Swedish massage. At the end of my day, I would be deposited at home by this crew completely refreshed and able to help G with his homework, fix something, and listen well.

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The Grabulous One

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img_0761The evolution of the 21st century man occurs everyday. This one has a keen sense of what is likely to set a parent off. He doesn’t hide my keys, for example, but merely puts it on his mother’s night stand, in plain sight, knowing full well there are parts of the house where I am blind.

He comes up to me within earshot of his mother, and declaims loudly in his small voice, “Do you know how to speak woman?” I turn to him, pleading with my bloodshot eyes, “Don’t do it, man!” All I could manage was a whispered, “Nooooooo.” He grinned broadly, “You say the opposite of what you mean! Hahahahahahaha…” I turn to look at his mother and shrug with the deflated denial of a man found with women’s underwear in his coat pocket. She let me hang for a while, and let me off by saying, “He saw it on TV.”

Grabulosity is the incessant need to get the attention of the self absorbed parent. For me, I had more of its opposite, confabulosity, which was the self-absorption in response to overly attentive parents. As an only child, I can understand these intersecting emotional forces. It is the incubator of complexity and wisdom. Just ask my sister.

In medical school, our anatomy professor was very grabulous. There is a lot of hissing in the Ivy League. There, hissing, which is done by making a sharp Ssssss sound, like air coming out of a tire, is done to express displeasure, disagreement, and dyspepsia. To our anatomy prof, a lecture without hissing must have been an empty day indeed. He loved goading angry, over-educated women into fits of livid rage by attaching whatever body part we were being lectured on to a slide of a naked and inevitably hot woman. Foot anatomy? Naked chick with foot. Head and neck -always with a bit of breast. It was grabulosity at its finest and it was an epic display of one man raging against a changing world.

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The Word Process

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img_1258_2It’s interesting to me that the method that I use to capture my words has an effect on how and what I write. One of my great interests is using old school methods of pencil and pad. The handbound leather book filled with blank sheets of handmade linen paper is a joy to have around. I scribble in it a few times a year.img_12711This is the sketch I made for a series of paintings I have planned entitled, “Practice Signs for the Post-Apocalyptic Physicians and Surgeons.” This one is for an otolaryngologist. 

The writing is done with a Cross fountain pen which was a graduation gift from my fellowship. I used to have a beautiful Mont Blanc pen, another gift, but sadly, I lost it during residency. There is something fun about scribbling that is lost when scrabbling away on a keyboard. 

Speaking of keyboards, the picture below shows a manual Royal office typewriter, the kind that were used in the forties and fifties. I saw this one at a church sale in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the spring of my senior year. It was in mint condition, and I was poor, but I shelled out 25 bucks for it. As a kind of perverse oppositional-defiant pose during medical school, I submitted all my notes to the class note-taking cooperative by typing them out on this dinosaur. I thought it just oozed an old school vibe that went along well with the drafty lecture amphitheaters that were constructed in the 1920’s, and the chain-smoking anatomy professor puffing away after revealing some hidden, secret bodily chamber in the very anatomy lab that inspired the book and movie, “Coma.” The typewriter also went very well with my Barton Fink apartment. 

img_1270My current writing instruments include a Macbook Pro 15 inch running the simple TextEdit that came with it. When I want to create formatted documents, I use Pages (Apple) or NeoOffice (free! port of the OpenOffice suite). Just can’t stand to give another dime to Bill Gates. When I go portable, I use an Acer Aspire One pictured below. It goes 6-7 hrs on a charge, and allows for a fair bit of work, if you don’t mind the cramped keyboard. It is the size of a non-fiction hardback book. The only handicap it has is that it runs on Windows XP. img_1272I confess that I write to enjoy the process of writing as much as reading the final product. Mastering the many ways you can write -whether scratching a mark on a rock or typing in the cloud on Google Docs, is pleasurable. It’s the same in fishing when you tie your own flies or dig out your own worms, grubs, and crickets. Or when you golf by knocking a rock with a stout tree branch.

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The Wish List

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I humbly submit this wish list to whomever has the luxury of extra time to read my poor blog. These are things I wish for when I am overworked, tired, or blue. I’ll put some bath salts into a tub of hot water, light some scented candles, pour some Mountain Dew into some rosé wine (the Pink Zinfandel), turn on some Peabo Bryson, and then close my eyes…

Top 10 Wish List

1. Porsche 911 Turbo in Darth Vader Black

2. Peace on Earth

3. Bacon without consequences

4. Private Clone Army

5. Book and movie deal about my life, be on Oprah.

6. Goodwill to man and his helpmate.

7. Lust without consequences, germs, or wifi.

8. Ability to transform myself into the shape of various animals, inanimate objects, and cars.

9. Elimination of flatulence as a source of humor

10. 2-handicap

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The Denier

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Seen Better Days

Seen Better Days

Among the psychological defense mechanisms, denial is considered among the more dangerous. It’s because the denier is meddling with external reality. Denial is the quiet little sister to her sociopathic older brother, delusion. There are few comforts afforded a family man of forty -the golf eked out in small bits here and there, overeating, and pontificating ad nauseum about himself. If these few shabby activities are over-the-counter remedies for the pain of standing upon the summit of your life and seeing not the road home behind you, but a cold remorseless downhill march to a corpsy slumber in the dark valley below in front of you, then denial is pure opium. 

If you are a middle aged man with too much hair where the sun doesn’t shine and not enough where it does -Deny it! Go and buy that Porsche 911 Turbo and a Brazilian (the wax job). If you don’t get spontaneous erections at the drop of a dime (picture your hot high school teacher bending over to pick it up), Deny it! Go get yourself some of those boner pills and get prepared to pester your loved one all weekend. Or if there is no soup there, go book a room in a hotel with wifi and pay for view -some of those pills claim bioactivity for 36 hours so go to town, big boy (what do you think all those towels are for?). Feeling flabby? Suck your gut in. Feeling blue? There’s always bacon, my man.

 You are strong, gifted, talented, fleet, accomplished, humorous, witty, charming, humble, handsome, heroic, and just too shiny. You look in the mirror and see Zeus, king of the gods. Flee before me mortals before I strike thee with lightning bolts shooting out of my ass! Kneel befo…what was that honey? Who am I talking to? It’s the people in the computer. Okay, I’ll keep it down…

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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.”