If you ever needed proof that my enthusiasm should never be left unsupervised, well, here you go:

Less than 144 hours after crawling out of a truck
that had sought to become one flesh with a concrete wall,
I went golfing with my dad and brother at @SaintCroixNational.
Yes, my knees were still purple. Yes, my ribs were still bruised piano keys.
And yes, I know that there are no doctors nor clergy
nor ancestors of any era that would sign off on this path.

But, because logic has never been the captain of my particular ship,
I bypassed WebMD’s advice entirely and decided
that the best physical therapy for a freshly crumpled human spine
was 4 hours of recreational torso demolition in Wisco.

I was wrong. I can see that now.

By the 15th hole, in a shocking twist for me but a triumphant return for science, logic, and everyone who has ever tried to warn me about me, my back clenched up and called an emergency all-anatomy meeting.

The first to show up at said meeting were my ribs,
who came in real hot and bothered,
slamming down a blood-stained manilla folder marked:
URGENT / WHY ARE WE GOLFING?

The left lung darkened the doorway next,
but refused to enter the room without a lawyer.
The right hip filed for divorce over email,
citing irreconcilable differences with my hobbies.
And then the shoulders sashayed in last,
insisting that despite their dramatic wobble,
guys they didn’t wanna make it all about them
(which, for the record, is exactly how shoulders make it all about them).

It took about 15 seconds max for the boardroom
to devolve into an emergency impeachment hearing.
Every organ took turns reading their impact statement
of what it’s like to live inside of my skin.

At some point, I think it was when enough became enough,
my ego — the loudest toxic hype man I have ever had
the misfortune of spiritually carpooling with —
took a break from vaping in the back of my skull,
adjusted his Pit Vipers, and rose to address the court.

“Your Honor,” he said, speaking directly to my spine like they were in a frat house together. “May I remind the room of the 8-iron on 14?
It was cinematic. Inspirational, really.
Are we truly prepared to ignore that kind of momentum?”

Then he turned toward my ribs, pointed at the scorecard,
and said the most dangerous sentence any man has ever said
inside a failing body: “Surely we can do one more hole. For the culture.”

At this, the lights dimmed to dark and the room temp dropped to tundra.

The Father to me — my Spine to y’all — slowly removed his readers from the bridge of his L4 vertebra and leaned forward with the ancient disappointment of a man who has survived every version of my enthusiasm.

“Quick show of hands”, he said, "has anyone here ever head this guy say ‘one more’ and watched that choice become an act of wisdom?”

The ribs collectively checked the archives.
The liver grinned like it had been waiting for this moment.
The knees looked at each other like children in a custody hearing.

No hands hit the air.

That’s when my ego and I read the room and shrank back down,
all cart-ridden and shook.
We stayed like that for about an hour, and with nothing left to do but lightly sweat through the consequences of our own enthusiasm, I started making meaning out of my poor choices and began connecting the dots around all the strange and stupid and sacred reasons addicts love golf.

Here’s where that got me:

Addicts love golf because golf is one long argument
between the scar and the swing.
The scar says, “I know the ending.”
The swing says, “You know an ending.”
Between the two stands the addict, undocumented in the future,
smuggling a prayer in the strangler’s palms.

Addicts love golf because it is Step One in soft spikes.
It is 4 hours of looking at a cloud and admitting that you have
absolutely no control over the spin of the earth,
the slope of the hill,
what happened in 5th grade,
the thickness of the rough,
or the specific brand of insanity that takes over your forearms
when the club approaches your ears.

Addicts love golf because golf is the serenity prayer with a glove tan.
God grant me the serenity to accept the wind I cannot bribe,
the courage to swing without narrating my entire childhood,
and the wisdom to know that the ball goes where the truth gets told.

More than any of this though, my grand finale conclusion in that cart was this:
Addicts love golf because of the pencil that’s in the wheel.
That tiny, judgmental little toothpick of accountability
that comes with no eraser attached.
That little yellow narc clipped next to your hands that offers
no cosmetic surgery for your mistakes,
no anesthesia,
and no interest in your redemption arc
unless the numbers are there to support it.

It doesn’t care at all about your trauma or your tempo
or your passionate insistence that you were “actually striking it pretty well today.”
It just sits there as the world’s smallest parole officer,
and offers the holiest bargain golf and life has to offer:

Tell us what actually happened, and no angel will remove you from the garden.

Which is everything an addict (and likely everyone) has ever wanted to hear,
and almost never known how to trust.

For us, we have a propensity to think that truth telling is the thing that gets us removed from the photograph. That it’s what makes the house go quiet and the people we love turn toward the window.

If we say all the story out loud, than we are certain that the future
will quietly gather its coat from the back of the chair and say,
“I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

So we lie. Not because we are evil or uniquely broken,
but because we are terrified of being accurately known and permanently left.

The pencil on the wheel, however, says “Let’s find out.”

Write down the truth. Write down the one you hate.
The one with the woods in it.
The one with the water in it.
The one that is “basically a 5 if you understand my journey.”
And then, for the love of every life you are trying to save, look up.

The Pines are still kumbaya-ing in green.
The blue birds haven’t turned in their notice.
The sun is still kissing your face with an intimacy
you did not earn and cannot ruin.

The beauty has not been revoked.

You are still here.
Not because you played it clean and found your inner Rory.
But because you told it true.

So go on.
The next hole is still just up ahead, waiting for you to try again.

Isn't that amazing?



Make a statement in any room with this framed poster, printed on thick matte paper. The matte black frame that's made from wood from renewable forests adds an extra touch of class.

• Ayous wood .75″ (1.9 cm) thick frame from renewable forests
• Paper thickness: 10.3 mil (0.26 mm)
• Paper weight: 189 g/m²
• Lightweight
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