PARADISE LOST

 

I now play a lot of golf. In fact, over the last three years I calculate that I’ve played more golf than the first six decades of stomping around the goat tracks on the Cumberland Plain put together. But the abundance of time now allocated to chasing the pill through fairways, bunkers, the rough and fuckin’ crows’ nests has come at cost.

Like most things, delusion has infected any type of reasonable self-analysis of my game. In the younger years, I figured that the main reason I played golf like an arsehole could simply be put down to the fact that I didn’t play enough rounds. Family, work and the alarm clock all conspired to thwart my attempts to have a fair crack at the title. My own diagnosis was that I possessed the skills and latent talent that would be immediately liberated once the time and motion creeps disappeared and the associated prognosis was one of realising golfing nirvana- along with the added bonus of a complimentary token to the afterlife. Win/Win!

The reality is that my swing, setup, stance and scores have not improved one jot since resurrecting a career that was never there in the first place. I still launch divots that travel longer distances than the ball, skull sand shots from greenside bunkers and activate loud salty language when the bloody pill refuses to drop. The adage that golfers are prisoners to their best shots and victims of their worst doesn’t apply to me because the latter is my permanent profile. Besides, a victim is ‘poetic’. If paradise exists, then my TomTom must be faulty.

The same message surrounds this blogging. I’m far from a writer but I do like writing and now that a surplus of available time exists, you’d think that no area of human oddity, frailty or weakness would be left untouched by my amateur’s ballpoint. Yet, on many occasions, I’ll do anything but write. I ogle the process but snigger at the accompanying effort. An editor would have a field day with me, not because of the obvious poor written expression but because of my lack of expression….period.

In addition, this bounty of time should encourage adjustments to- and reflections on- any text. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The reaper must be fast approaching since the rush to ‘publish’ assumes primo importance every time I write. Most of the corrections happen after I’ve put each masterpiece up on the screen and they’re riddled with errors that even a NAPLAN Band 2 kiddo wouldn’t make. I could blame Beelzebub but he doesn’t recognise paradise either. 

Then again, maybe all the stalking of ‘paradise’ just might be a confidence trick. If that’s the case, then I’m not a solitary dunce. You only have to turn on your devices of choice to view paradise in its many guises……….. food, families, holidays, retirement, gigs and affable geezers. Whether any of these actually represent the apex of existence can only be gauged by the number of ‘likes’ they attract. And that makes about as much sense as the concept of paradise itself.