Golf: Game of the Plutocracy or Sign of the Apocalypse? We report, you decide

I do not play golf. I also do not play pinochle, but that is neither here nor there. Many people do not play pinochle and no one thinks any the less of them or that they are racists because they do not. I have heard that playing canasta is a good sign of latent homophobia, but I have never seen any credible evidence of this and so the next time you hear this, you may want to ask the person making this statement where they got their information.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the late Carl Sagan used to say, and linking canasta playing and homophobia strikes me as a very extraordinary claim indeed.  In any case, I still do not play golf.

I bring the subject up because here in our happy little burg signs are going up everywhere that the fire department will have its annual charity gold tournament at the end of the month and they are charging golfers $125 to participate. The signs do not indicate if this fee includes lunch and a free beer, although it should, as this seems like an awful lot of money to ask for the privilege of tapping a small ball into a small cup.  Now, I understand that there are people who enjoy this sort of thing—I have two brothers who follow golf religiously, for example—but I should point out that golf is a Scottish invention, like the steam engine and the telephone, and nothing good can come from a people who think haggis is an actual foodstuff or that bagpipes are, in some vague way, a musical instrument (they aren’t, not really, and neither is the pot of boiling water you drop your cat into to get rid of its fleas, which is the bagpipes’ closest sonic equivalent.)

Of course, for the privilege of playing this odd game—an activity played largely by men who appear to be bulking up for a sumo competition hardly qualifies as a sport—the true addict will shell out truly ridiculous sums of money and gets very little in return for that money. Given that I do not play golf, a fact I mentioned earlier, I believe, I would ordinarily not care one way or the other about how much otherwise normal human beings will pay to knock a small ball into a small cup after hours of wandering around a faux Scottish bucolic setting. It is, however, in the nature of obsessives to want to spread their obsession to the non-obsessed and this, as it always does, becomes a matter of some contention between them and the people that they are annoying the hell out of (yes, I ended a sentence with a preposition. Go stuff it.)

All of which complaining leads me to this conclusion: if you, the you in this case being my golf mad brothers and their equally golf mad friends, want me to take an interest in your little ball fetish then certain changes must take place, changes that are not in any way negotiable. First, we stop playing this idiotic game on golf courses and start playing it in war zones. The never terribly interesting question of whether or not a player will make par or a birdie or an eagle or whatever the hell it is they do out there with their little balls and cups will be much more interesting if everyone involved has to pass through a minefield and/or a barrage of incoming artillery fire in order to get to the ball. Another possibility is that we replace the sand traps and the water obstacles with striking Teamsters. Players who drive their balls into the Teamsters’ picket lines will have to devise new strategies to get the ball into the cup while at the same time keeping the Teamsters from a.] beating the ever living crap out of them for crossing a picket line, you dirty little scab, or 2.] beating the ever living crap out of them for hitting one of the union brothers on the head with your ball, you stupid jerk. I think that would be much more interesting to everyone involved than the game everyone plays today. I think I’d even pay $125 to see, and maybe try my hand at the game a little, provided, of course, that the lunch and the beer were free. Hey, if I’m going to take a chance with an artillery barrage then the least the sponsors can do is pay for lunch and beer. It’s only fair, you know.

MY 700TH POST HERE: First off, I just want to make it clear that, contrary to anything you might have heard to the contrary, I like dogs. You will find no greater supporter of canine rights anywhere in our happy little burg than myself and I think that is it is altogether fitting and proper that a professional football player should face more time for killing a dog than for killing his wife; wives are replaceable, whereas a good dog is not. I do not support or condone cruelty to animals in any way, and I like to think that if I saw someone abusing an animal that I would try to save the poor beast from its afflictions. I think I would do this for almost any animal you care to mention, with the possible exception of hagfish, certain species of vulture, and that stupid mutt howling out in my garage right now. The hagfish and the vultures explain themselves, I think; both creatures are loathsome in both appearance and in their personal habits, like the sort of people you’d find shopping at Wal-Mart at 4:15 in the morning, but you might be wondering just why I would include the dog in the garage in this list and, purely to satisfy some misguided sense of curiosity, ask yourself just why it is that this dog is in the garage in the first place.

Curiosity may kill the cat, I fear, but won’t do anything for dogs, especially this dog, unfortunately, even though the beast is hugely curious about everything. I should point out that the dog does not belong to me, but to my brother; I am not really a pet person, which may account for why I’ve never had one. I had a pet geranium named Hubert once; my father named him, assuming you can call a flower a him and not an it, after the then Vice President of the United States and Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey; but a deer of deeply held Republican sympathies ate Hubert one night, leaving me largely indifferent to the loss. Then there was a mob of six-toed cats that chose our back yard as their base of operations, but you really couldn’t call them pets; my father would not have them in the house and would not let us feed them at all. They were predators, he reasoned, so let them go predate and leave us alone. All in all, if I were to have a pet, I’d have a cat. I know that lots of people can’t stand cats, but I enjoy their whole supercilious look, let’s not kid ourselves here, you porcine dolt, I’m doing you a huge favor by staying in this pestilential dump attitude towards being a pet. If I were a betting man, I’d guess the reason that cats ignore you when you talk to them is because cats only speak French.

My brother, however, has little use for cats. No indeed, the youngest brother is a dog man from way, way back. He always wanted a dog, but my father wouldn’t have one in the house, and now that the brother has grown and lives in his own house, he has his own dog to go with it. He got the dog about ten months ago, when it was a puppy, the kind of ugly pooch with huge floppy ears and woeful countenance that makes everyone who sees it go awww, isn’t he cute, he looks just like my cousin’s oldest boy when he was that age, which doesn’t say much for the kid at that age, I think. In any case, it’s been a little more than ten months since he got the dog, and while I can’t prove this beyond a reasonable doubt, I am fairly certain that there are steroids, lots and lots of steroids, in this dog’s food.

I got stuck with this canine behemoth in the usual manner; the brother, who is cavorting away in Cancun with his girl friend even as I write this bitter screed, told our mother a sob story, something about the dog having a urinary tract infection and that it wouldn’t be right for him (the brother) to board the dog at a kennel, since they would keep him (the dog) in his cage all day long, allowing the infection to get worse and so could he (the brother) keep him (the dog) at my mother’s house, just until he (the brother) got back from Mexico? This is an old story in this neck of the woods, what with the youngest brother spending his life getting away with this kind of thing simply because of the lateness of his arrival on the scene. In any fairly large family (I have four brothers), the oldest children traditionally bear the brunt of the discipline, simply because they’re the ones who have to put up with amateurs trying to raise kids. By the time the youngest sibling arrives, the parents are usually too exhausted to care much what the youngest one does; so long as he doesn’t smoke dope or contract an incurable social disease, he can do whatever he wants without too much negative input from the parents.

The thing of it is, however, that the brother tried to fob the dog off on my mother the next day and she took one look at the size of this beast and said, no way, bring him to your brother’s house. So he did, and when I grandly proclaimed, Get that dog out of my house now, the brother took the opportunity presented by my going to answer the phone to hop in his car and drive to the airport, leaving me with Rudolph. Rudolph is a purebred bloodhound, although why my brother would want a purebred bloodhound in the first place is one of those Rosicrucian mysteries that defeat even the oddest of imaginations. While there are a fair number of prisons within driving distance of our happy little burg, cons busting out the big house is not exactly a major problem around here, and consequently there’s little need for a bloodhound named Rudolph, whose nose, for all its olfactory prowess, does not shine at all and therefore will never have the honor of pulling Santa’s sled on Christmas Eve. Maybe on the day after Christmas, when Santa hunts down the escaping elves, but for the big gig, it’s reindeer only.

Rudolph, as you may have guessed, is a large dog, weighing about a hundred pounds and standing about six feet tall on his hind legs. This latter fact I am sure of, since Rudolph likes to jump up on me and look me straight in the eye while he slobbers all over my face. I hate dogs slobbering all over me, but I should not feel angry in this case, I suppose, as Rudolph slobbers over everyone and everything. The dog lives to smell and to slobber, smelling and slobbering the unsuspecting without regard to the race, religion, or place of national origin of the person or thing slobbered upon. And, as you might imagine, trying to walk Rudolph while at the same time keeping your shoulder firmly in its socket poses something of a challenge, as does actually holding onto his leash and keeping your balance. Chewing gum or thinking about baseball is not advisable in this situation, as it may present one challenge too many for the human mind to cope with. The dog’s original leash was a heavy chain, which I no longer use; I like my fingers—they are invaluable for typing or picking one’s nose, for example—and I want to keep the undamaged ones in a continuing state of undamage, if there is such a word.

It’s been like this for a week now, but all hope is not yet lost: the brother returns from his romp in the Mexican Riviera tomorrow and will take Rudolph off my hands once and for all. I was so ecstatic about this turn of events that I put the dog in his crate tonight, just to make sure he didn’t try to hide somewhere on the premises, and one of the other brothers promised to walk him tomorrow morning, just so I wouldn’t have to look at the beast ever again. I am so happy that I can hardly contain myself anymore, a happiness tinged with much anger, however, as this episode has turned me into something of a criminal. I do not like confessing to this in such a public forum, but there are pooper—scooper laws in effect from one end of our happy little burg to the other, and I have spent the better part of a week violating that law. I know that I am an evil person, a criminal, a threat to the public’s health as well as to its shoes, a knave and a varlet and a scoundrel for my vile flouting of this important municipal ordinance, but I am not cleaning up after a dog, any dog, and especially a dog I didn’t want in the first place. Fraternal obligation will only go so far and then it’s every man and his dog for himself.