Fore!

I am going to play golf tomorrow. I recently had a birthday and this is how I am going to celebrate, since I am unable to rent a limousine full of booze and hookers and go to Disney World, principally because my wife won’t give me any money. My wife doesn’t like Disney World. Anyway, golf is a reasonable substitute for me since my golf game is generally rated NC-17 for pervasive vulgar and abusive language, crude humor, sci-fi violence, intense peril, frequent urination and disturbing images. PETA has filed for an injunction in Federal Court against me playing golf, but the matter remains unresolved. My contention is that those animals were engaging in an inherently dangerous activity by sitting there in the woods minding their own business. If you’ve never seen a spotted curlew struck by a golf ball traveling 176 miles per hour, you don’t really understand how tenuous our grasp on life is.

Golf is great relaxation for me. I work in local government, so I am constantly being berated by various elements of the community for both my successes and failures, real or imagined. The tax-paying citizens believe their contributions merit a combination of Jesus Christ and Einstein, while all they get is a cross between Mr. Bean and Darth Vader. You can imagine how stressful that is. In addition, I have two teenage sons, which is perhaps self-explanatory, and a wife who has been unemployed for almost a year now. While I love them all dearly (most of the time), my unregulated resting blood pressure in the domestic environment tends to be about 463 over 186, unless there is a broken appliance at home, in which case it is usually out of the range measurable by the sphygmomanometer. Golf provides me the opportunity to be at peace with an indifferent universe and accept my intellectual and physical shortcomings without harsh self-judgment, and drink beer.

To further illustrate the metaphysical benefits of golf, picture this; a golf ball is 1.68 inches in diameter. An average golf course is about 6500 yards in total length from tee to pin. This makes the average hole approximately 361 yards in length. This distance is 7738 times the diameter of the ball. The hole is approximately 4.25 inches in width. This would be like whacking the Earth with an enormous club and sending it 61 million miles through space (two-thirds the distance to the Sun, just inside the orbit of Mercury) and passing it through a hoop only 20,000 miles wide. Perhaps God will ultimately choose to do this to relieve his stress level, but it involves such a complicated calculus of force and motion that Newton would most certainly have turned to haberdashery.

I am actually the proud owner of a book entitled “The Physics of Golf” by Theodore P. Jorgensen. This lengthy tome is a must for any golf enthusiast who is also autistic and suffering from OCD. I ordered the book from Amazon, sight unseen, thinking it might improve my game to have some understanding of the physical forces at work in golf, but the only revelation was no damn wonder I can’t hit the ball worth a crap. In Mr. Jorgensen’s defense, he probably didn’t anticipate that anyone with so little grasp of advanced mathematics would waste the $19.95, and he has undoubtedly done a great service to legions of Ph.D. candidates in Physics who will be able to reference his work in their dissertations. I still proudly display it on my bookshelf with the idea that the more gullible members of society will actually think I was able to read it. I did take golf lessons for a while, but when the primary feedback you get from the coaching pro is “interesting”, “oh shit” and “are you retarded?”, you pretty quickly lose your enthusiasm for the eighty dollar an hour payments. It seems that my mind and body are not on sufficiently good terms with each other to properly coordinate the sequence of complex motions necessary to strike the ball appropriately, and my predilection for brute force over finesse appears to somehow exacerbate this failure.

There was a time in human history when the ability of individuals to hurl projectiles in an accurate manner over distances or speedily navigate obstacles would often mean the difference between eating lunch and being lunch. We developed games to reinforce these necessary survival skills and have handed them down in evolved forms from generation to generation. Golf, however, is not one of them, unless decapitating paralyzed moles was at some point necessary to human survival. Golf exists purely for me to visualize the hard, round heads of my enemies and detractors and to strike brutally without regard for the direction of the splatter, which suits me just fine.