For the first time in golf history, across the state line in a secluded course on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I knew what it felt like to be a competent player. You wouldn’t have gathered this from my score, which at 126 was 16 shy of my personal goal and 26 away from mediocrity, but it was the mojo poured into those swings that mattered. Something clicked on the back nine, caused my disdain for the sport to subside, and brought me hope that, with enough sweat equity, I would have the capacity to be proficient.
There was just something in the backswing that suddenly made sense. I’ve noticed decent players are able to jump right back into the game, even if they haven’t touched a club in months. This seems to suggest some kind of muscle memory at work here, kind of like riding a bike, except the proverbial bike in this case has square wheels and a handlebar fashioned from the bones of children. But that’s neither here nor there. The moment of clarity wasn’t an epiphany or anything having to do with thinking. It was a feeling, explicit instructions coded in my gut for how my arms should function in concert with my torso to get that stupid ball off the ground.
Now it’s time to work on the short game. This isn’t to say I’ve got my long game in the bag. Far from it, in fact, and I’m certain I’ll regress in short order. That’s just how the normal trajectory of learning new things resolves itself, you know? Be it written, though, that I have climbed to the top of the mountain and I have seen the face of golf, terrible and true, and I am changed! Actually, what really happened was I clambered onto a small hill, upon which I witnessed a wild turkey scurrying across the green.
Naturally, the best way to follow up our chat about avoiding pandemics is to go to happy hour, right in the heart of uptown among throngs of people, in direct contravention of all the tenets of social distancing. The context was a business mixer. The drink of choice? Rubbing alcohol. When you graduate to the hard stuff, you’re allowed to saunter up to the bar, slam your fist down onto the counter, and say, “Barkeep! A pint of your finest Walgreens, extra dirty.” Or, in all probability, I ordered a standard mojito instead, single glass clutched grimly in my left hand, hours on end, as if it were some kind of magical talisman designed to ward off social disaster.
I was in a contemplative mood during the drive back home. This was my first networking event in a while, and all told it landed to the right of the bell curve. It occurred to me I’ve been out of college for almost six years now, which in the career continuum means I’m no longer green. Off-green would be more appropriate, lightly seasoned, standing on the cusp of my earning prime. I remember scanning the job listings, senior year of college, and wondering why positions required either one to two years of experience or five years and beyond. Five years just seemed like an arbitrary, distant milestone.
And a year or two before that, one summer afternoon, weeks deep into an internship, I was commuting home with my old man on the Long Island Expressway, when out of the blue he began offering career advice. It felt like the Talk. That’s what happens in Asian families, I guess. Never had the talk about the birds and the bees or anything like that. Didn’t really talk much, period. Skipped straight to this. Shop talk. Where do careers come from? Well, they come from employers and employees who care about each other very much, and not from the stork.
Central to the advice was playing your cards close to the vest. After you develop your specialty, he explained, you’ve got to guard it, keep that secret sauce secret, and stonewall others from copying it and supplanting you. It made sense on paper, plus he was pulling in the big bucks. But like any good son, I vowed then and there to do the exact opposite: if I found a more efficient way to do things, I’d share it with everybody. If I constructed a new process, its inner workings would be laid bare. Keeping these things hidden felt flimsy, like a veil vainly stretched to block out obsolescence. I wanted to be Prometheus. Bring down the fire, you know? I believed what made you unique and relevant in the workplace was your cunning and your will to invent, rather than the inventions themselves. Then again, we all know what happened to Prometheus.
With two suspected cases of swine flu in Charlotte, a busted HVAC unit, and a recent spate of weather that could only be described as too good, I thought it wise to make preparations. To you I pass on the keys to the kingdom, should I find myself borne to an untimely demise: a handful of golf tees, an opened box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and–yes–the login to my Blogger account. All you see here, on this very screen, would be lavished unto you, such is my bequest.
When I refreshed the homepage of the local newspaper an hour ago, I noticed the headline for the flu coverage had suddenly changed to include ‘We will see deaths.’ It was gripping. Sensational, even. I clicked. And found the same damn article that had been growing incrementally throughout the day, piece by piece, like Voltron’s shit-greased cousin. I felt cheated as I read over the repackaged material. It was then I glimpsed the grim contours of mass media, wherein the public eye is guided down a swift current of drivel from one disaster to the next. Before the Swine Flu, it was the Ailing Economy, then the Housing Malaise, then the Avian Flu, then SARS.
And to complete this terrible calculus, you need only look below the article for a comments section, in which the public voice, duly enfranchised, attempts to share its theories in all lowercase on why things are happening. This epidemic appears to be the work of Mexicans, best as I can gather, or “illegals,” as one commenter posted, or possibly the President. The state of the economy, if I remember correctly, can be traced back to rich people or poor people or Republicans, I think? Chickens–those people–were to blame for avian flu, and SARS? Well, I deeply apologize for that one.
I suspect nobody, from quoted experts to reporters to CLTBankSlut_73, really knows what exactly in fresh hell is happening. Did catch one compelling article today, though, about social distancing and its role in combating pandemics. I happen to be the most celebrated luminary in the field of social distancing on the Eastern Seaboard, having cultivated a general disdain for humanity. Let me break it down for you. There are antibodies for the usual germs, and then there are antieverybodies for the outbreaks. I’ve been stockpiling this stuff for the better part of the decade.