So Danish

The art now quantified. Golf joins medicine, politics and Wall Street to appoint numbers as the bearer of truth. Actually, it's fascinating how it's a boom for the teaching and equipment business. It has to be better cuz the numbers say so, or, now you know why you suck.

Executing the strike to twiddle numbers, however, seems a bit difficult for mortals. Like doing tango to specific three dimensional positional coordinates over time. Still, a lot of physics of feel can now be explained, which is a neat step in the evolution of the game. And the impact of real innovations can now measured.

It's like I just popped out of cryo sleep. Second thought. I did, kinda.

Enter Social Media

The kings of chatup continue to dominate, even on the YouTube golf scene. Must be that accent, ever so wise and trustable for the rest of us that dream of making it to London. Crossfield leads the proletarians complete with branded smart phone apps while Leadbetter advises the wealthy and erudite who know the option value of the "A" swing.

Travel the world. Rub elbows with the famous. Vlog to manage the asset value of your followers. Write it off on the taxes as business.

Sponsorship (as in dough) by the brands probably isn't far behind. Beats life in a concrete bunker. Kudos to all for stepping up and doing it.

Alchemy

Wonders of the net. How clubs are actually made. Forged versus cast. It's fascinating. Then all the stuff that comes afterwards, like lie and loft adjustments, the entourage of golf labs on wheels for the tour, the gadgets used to bend and measure... Gotta figure a way to get inside a factory.

Then there's all the stuff about the balls and how they're made, how they squish when hit, why they spin. As a kid, a balata Titleist ball was a real find. Today, the balls are a bit different as is the kit and technique necessary to make them fly. The super slo mo stuff is awesome. Have to squish it to make it go.

Then there's the magical shafts, and even more magical putters. Can't find much on how titanium driver heads are made. Hmm...

Rocket Scientist

Theres always one in the bunch. All clubs the same length. The more the establishment disses that, the more interesting it becomes, for me at least. DeChambeau became my portal to the whole custom club scene (Edel et al), the current hacker bible "The Golfing Machine", and the legend of Moe Norman.

All clubs the same length...The elite establishment probably will slag it. A great idea for the once a week never will break 80 crowd. If DeChambeau makes it on tour, some brand will make it the next rage and re-buy kit cycle. If he doesn't, the trend won't happen.  As far as I can tell, golf is a lot like fashion.

Got the book. Like artists, genius is anointed posthumously. Wonder why?

And the whole NCAA punishing coaches and therefore the players thing...yeah, it's a business.

Bee Cam

The biggest cataract surgery risk is post op, and the potential culprit is the patient self-inflicting damage to the eyes. Turns out they don't use sutures to close up the eyeball. Instead, a flap is made so that like a ball valve the liquid inside exerts pressure to keep the flap closed. It's a neat way to do it. Problem is, if you push on the eyeball, the liquid will gush out and now Houston has a problem.

So, you wear around this metal eye mask for a week. Enough holes in it so you can get around.

Bonus: people are really really nice to you when you're out and about.
(via Jiro on iPhone)

THEN vs NOW - Part 2

YouTube was made for a couple of weeks in low stress post-op recovery when it's raining and crummy outside. There's enough content up there now so you can surf the flow of your curiosity. Went all over the place. Spent quite a bit of time checking up on the international space station, and got curious about all the experiments being run up there by space agencies around the planet. They say it's about Mars. But there's too much asteroid crashing, orbiting, landing and sampling going on. Then I found out about Apophis. So that's it. As for Mars, getting there isn't the problem. Coming back is.

I caught up on a lot of golf via YouTube and the places it led me. Mind blowing (and mind confusing) deluge of swing instruction. Videos from the old days of players I never saw but now can watch. I'd never had any insight (or access) to that before. It was an eye opening experience. Who's number one after Tiger. The Olympics. Why the europeans keep crushing the americans in the Ryder Cup. All of the marketing hype. Go further. Stronger lofts. MOI. Groove rules.

I looked into my used golf kit. Turns out Ping black dot is designed for a standard sized person of about 5 foot 6. And the 2 iron in that kit is almost the same loft now as a modern 4 iron. Then the PGA Tour iron distance averages started to make some mortal sense. So, time to make an appointment with Mr. Ping and see where my clubs stack up versus the modern kit. Oh, and this Trackman phenomenon...

I did enjoy the interviews with Jack Nicklaus. It was one of those "heard it the first time" kind of experience listening to the man's point of view on things. Things kept feeling a bit more mortally possible. That was good news.

And what is all this hype all over YouTube about Ben Hogan this or that? Must be some god.

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Good PHARMACEUTICALS

Surgery was a piece of cake. You get to pick your music. People are nice to you. And you get to use the handicap facilities for a week thereafter.

Fentanyl is awesome. Twice.
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Dilemma of Distance

The lens in my dominant right eye is toast. Easy to put a new lens in. Hard to figure out which lens to put in. Bionic lens technology is awesome, but it's not connected to the eye anymore and sort of floats in there. So where it focuses, is where it focuses. Period. Depth of field is relatively narrow. So where do you set the focus distance?

Casually you might think 20/20 would be great, but it's not so great if you think about it. You can see perfectly far. But across the room, across a table, or to a book in your hand it'll be blurry. I'm also nearsighted so the brain doesn't like one eye focused far and the other near. And optically, if the differential is too big, you can't even correct it with glasses and it'll split your personalty.

Spent a week thinking about this one. In the end, got practical, and squeezed a bit into the unknown for the solution. The right dominant eye I wanted focused at arm's length. So I can read a menu or tie on a reasonable sized salt water fly. The left eye, being also very nearsighted needs to be adjusted as well, so that focus distance was set at someone across a table, or a golf ball at my feet. That put the focus distance of the two eyes about 1 diopter apart which is the max the optics can correct properly. It meant that I can actually find my glasses when I lose them in the house. Or thread a fish hook to stay alive on an island (though I won't see the ship passing by in the distance, I can eatfish to stay alive long enough to figure out how to make fire). Practically speaking, I can spend most of the time without glasses, and only need them for far and very close.

Which means getting the left eye fixed while at it even though it hadn't yet completely become a white marble. Oh, and it is illegal to get both eyes fixed at the same time in the United States (go figure). On the bright side, shopping for new sunnies, dive masks and reading glasses just once. And dealing with the healing issues now, when I'm younger, than later.

It's never as simple as it seems. But I'll be good for another 50,000 miles.
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PSYCHIC CHANNELS

I'm writing the previous post, and Dr. K pings me with the live view from the man cave in Sun Valley.
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DOC TAX

My ophthalmic surgeon doesn't need a plug cuz he's one of the best having been at it since the pioneering days of cataract surgery. He's a keen fly fisherman, so the deal is I get squeezed in and get a little extra TLC and I tag along with him to this place in the Indian Ocean in the spring.

Twist my arm :-) More on this little atoll later...
(via Jiro on iPhone)

Selfie Proxy

Proxy for selfie during the gadget session. Double the fun and do both eyes at once. Tripped out during the sesh and forgot to snap a pic.

Feels weird having that thing inside your eyelids kinda squishing and being touchy feely.
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Paninis

Meibomian glands are unfortunately located on the insides of your eyelids so they're kinda hard to get to. Fortunately, someone invented a little cooker for your eyelids, that heats up the eye lid from the inside, while it massages and squeezes the lids from the outside.

Not sure if it's cheaper than a lifetime of eye drops, but after a bit of toasting the eyelids, the gunk in the glands heat up, melts and gets squeezed and, like zits, unclogs. No more dry eye :-)
(via Jiro on iPhone)

Meet Meibomian

Read that cataract surgery was a quick 10 minute fast food kind of deal. Wrong.

First, had to deal with my dry scratchy eyes, which again assumed to be some age thing. Wrong again. It turns out we have these things called Meibomian glands which secrete an oil film so your tears don't evaporate. Like acne, mine had gotten clogged with gunk. Yes, bunch of whiteheads inside your eyelids.

Apparently the eye drop business makes a killing not telling you the cause. And you know something is up when you have to work at finding proper high res images on Goggle.

Fortunately, fixable. If nutty enough.
(via Jiro on iPhone)

Cataracts

Since about 2012, that's been my view of the world. Got foggier and foggier. Kind of part darker, part blurrier, part double-visony mix. Thought it was just age. Made me stop using email (was a blessing, actually), get a big arse iPhone. Finally, time to ping Dr. K. Cataracts. Too much fun in the UV.

Time for bionic lenses.
(via Jiro on iPhone)

Blog Break

Back when, never imagined to be feasting on hamachi toro ponzu crack in Arizona while on some weird golf journey. A bonus gem find on the road trip.
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Dilemma of Purpose

As a youth, it was about how far the distance and how low the score with some fantasy thrown in of being like someone whom in fact I'd never be.

I'm not pro material (laughingly). Jay Sigel's the poster boy for keeping the dream alive for the affluently aged, but he was a great player that couldn't go pro earlier for other reasons.  So I'm not going to make a miraculous post mid-life appearance on the Champions Tour. My friends tend to not count things so scores don't matter much, and got too much stuff already, so more shiny kit for kit's sake isn't an option. So having to reflect a bit on the purpose.

Why do this?

One of the things I've been passionate about for the last 30 years or so has been fly fishing. Over time, I've come to enjoy it as a mirror for interesting perspectives on life. And see the world. Meet and hang with good mates from all walks of life over making it really hard to catch a fish you'll then release. Maybe golf similarly offers new insights. Probably. But be a monk if I really wanted that in spades.

So far, I've chosen purpose to be, not score or handicap or best kit, but to be able to master the mechanics to the point where the game embedded in the course design is revealed, so that playing the game becomes the game it was intended to be by the designer of the course. I know about St. Andrews but never played it. I'd want to be able to play it, to play the mind game programmed into that place, rather than being blinded from that by my own incompetence (and unconsciousness) with the mechanics of hitting the ball here or there or wherever it needs to be, modulated further by the physics and the environment (inside and out) at that time.  So, purpose of mind and body transcending mechanics so I can play the game of golf, rather than be out there trying to hit the ball around and being able to say I played that and shot that.

Ever imperfect, it's a game of odds as well. So, a bit of gaming I'm sure will find me on the route one way or another.

That feels right.
(via Jiro on iPhone)
 

What's The Plan

Plans are good, as long as you're not too attached to them. Here's my plan:

1. Lose weight, get heart rate and blood pressure to more or less normal
2. Get my vision fixed
3. Unlearn or forget all I knew and felt about golf, in mind and body
4. Figure out guiding purpose, or vision, which, like a spinnaker, pulls everything along, good times or, more importantly, bad
5. Figure out how to make it fun
6. Engage in the process, discover step by step, and let results emerge as they will
7. Enable the above, in climate and conditions sans unnecessary torture

Basically, mine the rewards of the journey, and enjoy the ride.
(via Jiro on iPhone)

Starter Kit

Gotta love E-Bay. Got the mood, now need some sticks. Some old Ping irons (standard black dot since I don't feel worthy of anything but "standard"), Titleist D2 907 driver, a really old Ping Anser putter (not sure which vintage). Optimistic and got stiff shafts and a used lightweight bag and a "deal" on some new Titleist balls, which isn't a deal after they add in the unstated shipping and handling. First golf rip off experience. Live and learn. Surely there'll be more.
(via Jiro on iPhone)

Then VS Now

Unlike some people, I grew up not wealthy and taught myself how to hit a golf ball by feel and by studying a few scrounged golf magazines. Back then, golf was like hitting a baseball that didn't move and flew further, low scores were good, being a pro was the dream, golf balls came from ponds, gambling and sandbagging were legal, and the trick was to get out of school fast enough to ride the bike 20 miles to the municipal pasture, get the twilight rate and finish 9 holes. I always rode home in the dark.

My first clubs, scrounged from the used club bin at a golf shop two towns away:

I unknowingly started with blades. That's all I knew.

This time around, I have Google, YouTube and all the stuff available on or via the net. I have transportation. A bit more patience. And I have appreciation for the insights along the way, rather than chasing some dream at the end.

Excited, yet walk. Don't run.
(via Jiro on iPhone)

On Charlie Bukowski

The golf bug found me plunged into a vast labyrinth beyond logic. While seeking the Dalai Lama, alter ego Charlie Bukowski found me, and taught me the perverse pleasure of all in never giving up. Along with piles of golf balls (the razor blades of that business), I tucked Charlie into my pocket for the ride.

My favorite Bukowski quote:

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”

Best when consumed after living it :-)

(via Jiro on iPhone)