So I’ve been talking about this blog post for a while now, and here it finally is, a tidy little anecdote. It was two Fridays ago (or was it three by now? It was certainly March) and I found myself celebrating the first taste of non-winter by playing a couple holes at the local golf course. We’d been enjoying a few days running of 40+ temperatures, but two of Douglas Park’s three holes were still unplayable due to snow. So we set up on the third hole, itself half covered in snow, but the green was clear and each of the three tee boxes were clear enough to drive from. Along the right side of the hole is a large pond, still frozen over, with a couple of balls resting in various places, left no doubt by other intrepid (and unskilled) winter golfers.
We’ll skip forward here, no need to paint a picture of my beautiful swing and shoddy putting. Anyway, we decide to open up a new possibility—teeing off from a second hole tee-box to the third green, a trajectory that just so happens to travel over the pond for the bulk of the distance. Now most of you are probably unaware of this, but the Douglas Park Golf Pond and I have a rather contentious history together. Namely, it has pushed me to the furthest limits of my emotional well-being, getting so far into my head that my entire self-worth suddenly came into question, a mini-breakdown if you will. Well, on a brisk March afternoon it nearly did it again. My swing deteriorated to nothing, my golf balls shrunk to grains of rice, right became left and vice-versa, etc. Seven (found earlier that day, thankfully) balls later I walked away from the tee-box, my errant shots forming a kind of smirk on the surface of the ice. We took a slow walk up to the green looking for balls in the rough (sometimes you’ve just got to let your head clear), and I notice about ten feet off from shore there’s a ball sitting pretty on the ice.
So here I am, it’s been in the forties for almost a week, standing on a partially frozen pond five feet from shore, reaching with my nine iron for some used, probably cracked range ball, and it hits me: what the hell am I doing? Sure it’s warmer than it has been, but when this ice cracks under me I’m going to get wet, and maybe it won’t even be up to the knee but it’ll be cold still, and my feet will be soaked for the foreseeable future and I’m going to have to ride my bike all the way home and for a single, probably cracked range ball? And then there’s this question, this what the hell am I doing; I mean that’s, like, this hugely existential question, you know? I’m twenty-three and a half years old, I’ve been working a series of temporary jobs I’m absolutely miserable in, I’ve applied to some grad schools but that’s not looking so great right now, I’m hardly blogging, I have a half-assed twitter account… It’s a valid question, right?
But of course I retrieve the ball, the ice doesn’t crack beneath me, and I go back to the tee-box and crack a beautiful first shot that lands one foot short of the green. Now that’s how you get over a mental breakdown.
