The leader of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, Nicolai Tangen, has a podcast. His fund has over $2.3 trillion in assets, including large stakes in a bunch of huge companies. Apparently these stakes are large enough that he can bully basically anyone and everyone to appear on his podcast. that Tangen constantly talks over guests I’d like to hear riff for a while, but, largely, the podcast is really cool.

Tangen will say, frequently enough for me to remember it, that he believes in responding to emails as quickly as possible. This saves time. To Tangen, if he responds to an email quickly, he doesn’t need to say anything more than an unpunctuated sentence or two. The longer he waits, the more thoughtful a response he feels the correspondence deserves. So he tries his hardest to respond to emails as quickly as possible so he can give the lowest energy answers possible.

I’m not sure I love the sentiment behind this stance. I also don’t run a multi-trillion-dollar wealth fund, so what the hell do I know. What I can tell you is that, after not publishing for six weeks, the idea of putting out a newsletter worthy of my absence grows more and more daunting every day.

Truth be told, this is (at least) my fourth attempt at a newsletter during those six weeks. I have three newsletters in various stages of “cutting room floor” shape. The reason you haven’t heard from me isn’t because I haven’t had anything to write about. The opposite is true: I’ve had far, far too much to write about and not nearly enough time to actually write anything decent. Again, I keep teasing the fact that this absence will make more sense in due time. But, for now, I’m stuck between having a ton of stuff to say and not nearly enough time to put it down on paper.

“Connor,” you might be saying to yourself, “you’re self-employed — you have as much time as you want. If you’re going to blow off the newsletter, at least be honest with us.” Fair. Although, not fair — I’ve been on the road 29 of the 42 days since I last published, and, right now, I’m en route to Belgium for DP First Stage. It’s been pretty damn busy.

The problem isn’t so much the time to write something good; it’s to write something that encapsulates the last six weeks. I’ve tried to do this three times. Unfortunately, “the last six weeks” keeps changing. I started a letter about being bummed out, and, before I was finished, I felt much better; I wrote one about feeling like the king of the world, and then I struggled with putting again. There hasn’t been a consistent, all-encompassing tenor to the last six weeks. Things change, as they tend to.

At the same time, a lot has happened, and I have a decent amount of stuff on paper. So here’s the plan: I’m doing an ensemble episode. I’m taking a bunch of cut up stuff, and I’m not going to bother stitching it together, and it’ll be in various states of publishable. Nor is any of it a comprehensive portrait of the last six weeks — a lot has happened besides this, too. But it’ll be published. And (assuming my audience hasn’t completely withered away like the spider plant in my bedroom) you’ll have something to read.

(Editor’s note: if you’re short on time, skip the first one — it’s first chronologically but the least fun.)

Without further ado:

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7/24/26

I’m not much of a crier, at least since I was 14 or so. I think that was about the age that I started “rationalizing my emotions instead of feeling them,” as a sports psychologist in college once told me, which has become one of those ghost-on-the-moor sentences in the three years since. For three years in a row, from 2023-2025, one of my New Years resolutions was to cry more, inspired by that sentence, a high school teacher, and that Jimmy V speech.

I hadn’t made much progress until last year, when I started crying after bad tournament rounds again, usually 2-3 minutes at a time in the car on the drive to lunch or dinner. Looking back, this was the first sign that I was starting to connect with the game emotionally again. I’ve learned that I need this emotional connection — if the game isn’t simple enough to bring you to tears after the fact, then it’s probably too complicated to be seriously effective.

Here’s a bit of an odd one to admit: the night I won my first check as a professional, and for 3-5 nights following that, I spent about an hour crying in my bedroom. This is a weird thing to admit, publicly; it embarrasses me, bums out the reader, and it exists on the internet for all time. The only reason I’ve even put it on paper is because I might not send this letter out at all, and so this is, for now, just a personal talk-it-through document that’ll probably end up in my computer’s trash folder.

I should also clarify that I’m fine. I’m good. I have it good. (Editor’s note: this is still true; I’m still good.)

Despite making it a personality trait of mine that I’m not on Instagram, I still check it from time to time. I’ve been checking it more recently. A lot of people are getting engaged and going on trips. A lot of people are spending weekends with their friends in beach towns.

As for my own friends. One is in Italy with a girl he’s been seeing. Another is in New Hampshire with his family and some friends. Another is in Ocean City with friends. Another is probably getting his nuts wrung out by his investment banking job, but he and his girlfriend just moved into a nice apartment together.

Professional golf might be the world’s cleanest case of “the grass is always greener.” Everyone who works a desk job spends all day at their desk wishing they were on the golf course. I do not spend my time on the golf course wishing I was at a desk. There are various annoying and/or difficult parts of my job, but anyone working a 9-to-5 is quick to remind me of the benefits. It’s easy to be grateful.

At risk of being an ungrateful prick, I want to talk about the other side of the coin for a moment. Because, after playing golf from 10-6 or whatever, I’ll get some dinner and come home, and then I’ll have roughly 7-11 to sit around and think. I’ll be by myself. I’ll mostly have been by myself while I was practicing, too. I spend a lot of time by myself, and that starts to weigh on a young person after a couple years.

Most people work jobs with other people. They get lunch with their work friends. They have meetings. After work, they might go home to roommates or girlfriends or boyfriends, and they’ll go to dinner with other friends, and on weekends they’ll go to bars, and they’ll take weeks off during the summer to go on vacations and stay up late making memories.

With July 4^th being the exception, I’ve spent my Friday and Saturday nights in June and July making my final preparations for tournaments. On Sundays, I drive 6-8 hours to an event. I’ll play a practice round and get a workout in on Mondays, and then I’ll compete Tuesday and Wednesday (and hopefully Thursday) before driving 6-8 hours home and doing it all again.

Golf is an individual sport. I also live on an island at least a thousand miles from all my closest friends, all of whom work real jobs that mean I don’t talk to them as much as I’d like. I saw my college friends for a few hours apiece in May. I’ve seen one high school buddy twice this year and the other just once, the most recent of any of those being in March.

I understand that people’s lives aren’t one long hangout with their friends, as social media or whatever would have you believe. Still, when considering the sum total of interactions most young people have with their close friends, I can’t help but feel that my job results in me being substantially under-indexed.

A part of me has thought that, if I couldn’t see my closest buddies much, then I should find a nice girl to come over on weeknights and make dinner for and watch movies together and chat. I drove over 100 miles a few times for dates, either to Jacksonville or Savannah, without finding much with legs. Then, since April or so, I made a real point of going out on the island whenever I could and fracking the scene for people my age. I saw someone a handful of times before it fizzled, and then I went on an awesome date, scheduled something for the next week, and never heard back. That’s probably the straw that broke the camel’s back, as far as things coming to enough of a head to write about it — feeling like I saw a way out of the loneliness, watching that door close, and realizing that “getting out” would be even tougher than I’d thought.

On some level, this is unequivocally a skill — despite whatever feelings I have, I’m going to stay focused instead of sitting around numbing it with Hostess cakes and pornography and vape fluid. This is what it means to be disciplined, and discipline grants you the freedom to ignore useless/unhealthy basal urges and live the life you want to live.

But it’s starting to weigh on me now. I guess it’s been weighing on me a while. I miss my friends, my family, my dog. The nights get lonely. I could really, really use a week with my buddies someplace. But I have a Q School this week, in August, in September, and hopefully a few more past that — after which point it’ll be late fall or winter and people stop going on trips for the year.

But it’s starting to weigh on me now. I guess it’s been weighing on me a while. I miss my friends, my family, my dog. The nights get lonely. I could really, really use a week with my buddies someplace. But I have a Q School this week, in August, in September, and hopefully a few more past that — after which point it’ll be late fall or winter and people stop going on trips for the year.

Just like a workout or playing hurt, the line becomes blurry between what’s good to play through and what isn’t. I used to see this time by myself as an opportunity. I pursue all the things that other people don’t have the luxury of pursuing. I know what happens when you change swingweight vs. total weight in a putter. I know how walking with a golf bag can make your left leg shorter, the consequences this has, and how to fix it. I know how to hold a knife if you really need to fight someone. I know what disagreements I have with Aristotle. I know the difference between a R2R and delta-sigma DAC and the benefits of each for high end audio equipment. I know why you have to grind Ethiopian coffee beans coarser than beans from other regions.

I’ve long held the belief — since I’ve turned professional — that, whenever my time playing is up, I’ll leave the game a more complete person than I arrived. I’d learn a bunch of interesting stuff, I’d learn about myself, and I’d learn to apply what I’d learned in order to be effective. Even at this young point in my journey, I feel like a new man, and I’m much more excited to bring this version of myself forward in my life than whomever I’d be without golf.

But I wonder: is there a cost? I think of how my friends are spending their twenties: working, living in cities, traveling to places with more than one McDonalds. Spending time with their friends, dating, strengthening social bonds, feeling valued by their age peers. Establishing themselves in communities, making memories early in the mornings they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives.

This morning, I sat in a sauna with a two time PGA Tour champion, and then we held our breath in a cold plunge until our brains released DMT, and I tripped absolute balls while watching a lizard do that neck-flare thing in the yard. I did all of this in the house of a former Tier One National Mission Force Operator — with whom I stayed in a house at last week’s event and will be staying with again this week, and whom I get to consider a close friend.

There’s no way to describe how meaningful it is for a young man to spend time with mentors like these. I’d be on a wildly different path without their guidance, among many, many others who are helping me grow into the man and player I’m becoming. I’ll undoubtedly be a better man for the time I get to spend with these guys, and it’s an immense privilege to call them friends.

In the cold plunge, the instruction is to dunk your head, hold your breath, and notice when you start to panic, then tell yourself, “you’re ok.” Keep doing this, over and over. Listen to your heartbeat, relax your muscles, tell yourself “you’re ok.” Don’t panic. Just stay underwater.

This is one of sports’ essential skills: being comfortable being uncomfortable. When you’re under the gun, your heartrate increases, you start to sweat, you start to think, you get nervous. If you can sit in a sauna for 25 minutes, watch your heartrate tick up, and keep your ass on the bench, you can handle the physical stress. If you can watch yourself panic with your head underwater in a 33°F tub, you can handle the mental stress. “You’re ok.”

The mechanism at play, here, is that the mind and the body tell you things out of self-preservation, but they don’t understand your limits. It’s your job to push past these limits, tell your body and mind that they’re safe to push further. “You’re ok.”

This is what I fall back on in times of stress. Including when I find myself lonely and crying in my bedroom ten hours after my greatest golfing success in half a decade. The body curls up. The breath shakes. The mind races, searching for a solution that it doesn’t find.

I’m not sure what the solution is. Maybe it’s closer than I think. Maybe I should skip an event and go see a friend for a weekend. Maybe this is what it means to be a professional, and this is something simply to endure — one more challenge to sit through and tell myself, “You’re ok.”

8/6/26

I was doing sprint training by the airport today. There’s a long sidewalk that runs parallel to the runway, and I’ll go here to sprint. I’ll bring two towels to mark distances, a water bottle, and a Theragun to help with anything that cramps up.

I parked in the lot across the street, like I always do. I had my car keys with me. I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget the Theragun or water bottle, so I tucked my car keys into the Theragun case so I couldn’t leave without them.

I do my sprints. I think I had 12-15 of them total. After the last one, I go on a little cool-down walk, then turn around. At this point, I’m probably 30 meters from my last towel, which means I’m 70 meters from where I started.

I see that a guy on a bike is passing by my start point, and he stops. I see him swerve around and reach down for something. Maybe he’s getting my stuff out of the way, which is odd, because it wasn’t in the way. I wave at him with both hands overhead. He looks me dead in the eyes. I yell, “hey!” He shuffles his bike around the other direction and rides off the way he came.

I run up to my stuff, and I see: my Theragun is gone, with my car keys in it.

I start running through what I can do for about 90 seconds, and I track him riding around the other side of the airport and towards the pier. At this point, by some miracle, I see my friends Ben and Laney driving by in a Ford Bronco with the doors pulled off. I wave at them with both hands to flag them down, and they turn around in the Winn Dixie parking lot. I run across the street, jump in (no doors), and tell them, “turn left, we’re chasing a guy on a bike.”

I explain to them that he stole my Theragun and my car keys. They ask where he went. I have no idea, I’d only followed him for a half mile or so, but we follow the main drag. Laney asks what I’m going to do if we catch him. I have no idea.

We get about a mile and a half up, looking down side streets as we go, before I see him: a dude in a grey t-shirt with a dark ponytail on a bike. “Holy shit,” I say, “that’s him.” He hadn’t left the main road.

With fifty yards to go, Laney offers, “what if he has a gun?”

Just as he’s about to cross the street via a crosswalk, we pull right up in front of him, cutting him off. I lock eyes with him from the backseat. I have no idea what I’m about to do next.

“Hey bud, did you find a Theragun?”

The guy is completely stunned. He thought he got away a long time ago.

“Yes,” he says.

He reaches behind him into the bike basket, pulls out my Theragun, and tosses it to me in the car. We drive off. He pedals off. I never see him again. Laney, Ben, and I go back to the parking lot by the airport, I unlock my car and get in and drive home.

8/20/26

In the last four weeks since I’ve released a newsletter, I’ve developed a near-all-consuming obsession with the Mercury astronauts. This isn’t an exaggeration; actually, it’d be closer to the truth to drop the “near” qualifier than to suggest that the “obsession” is in any way figurative.

This has been my travel schedule the last few months:

• Week of June 8th: High Point, NC

• Week of June 15th: St Simons

• Week of June 22nd: Vass, NC

• Week of June 29th and July 6th: St Simons

• Week of July 13th: Radford, VA

• Week of July 20th: Valdosta, GA

• Week of July 27th: Milwaukee, WI

• Week of August 3rd: St Simons

• Week of August 10th: Chatmoss, VA

I’ve been on the road for 6 of the last 10 weeks, and, in another month, I’ll have been on the road for 10 out of 15.

Not to mention, my “new hometown,” now, is a town of 12,000 people (where the median age is 59 and most people under 50 are temporary/seasonal). It’s also roughly 600 miles south of the Mason Dixon line, a line I’ve spent nearly all my life above. My car still has CT plates, and I’m not yet registered to vote in GA (I should probably get on that). After two years, I still feel undoubtedly “northern.”

But I live there because of my job — a job that also predisposes me to work weird hours, travel to lightly-populated places, and develop an intimate knack for packing a carry-on suitcase with ruthless efficiency. Most of my friends live in cities, where they work Monday-Friday (and some of the weekend) at jobs they (at most) marginally like, but they get lunch with their coworkers and call old college friends to try new restaurants and spend their Saturday nights in the company of a zillion strangers their age. I like my job more than they do theirs, by a lot, in large part because it’s objectively better. But the consequence is that, while they’re spending time with other 20-something’s and participating in society, I’m usually spending that time eating extravagantly seasoned ground beef and staring at my wall.

I’m a bit of a man without a home. I’m a bit of a man without a society. As such, I’m more a citizen of conceptual places, and I’ve had time to explore.

I’ve been reading Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff. The book follows the Mercury astronauts from their days as test pilots through their selection for the Mercury program and subsequent launch into space, and it’s primarily concerned with the following question: when you take the world’s most capable, most daring test pilots, and you strap them into a projectile and tell them to do absolutely zero piloting, what does that do to the egos/psyches of everyone involved?

I’m not there yet, though. I’ve been caught up on the first few chapters, which detail what life is like for Navy test pilots developing the first generations of ultrasonic jet-fighters. Even more so, I’ve been stuck on the concept of “Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving.”

In no way will this summary do the material justice, but the book talks about the selection process for these pilots, which starts in the classroom, moves to the airfield, and makes its way to aircraft carriers. The process first selects for qualities such as wrote intelligence, coordination, and flying competence. But, along the way, the process moves beyond the criteria that make objectively good pilots.

Instead, they begin selecting for the reaction to the following problem. A very good pilot can convince himself that he’s ready for a mission in one of two ways:

A) I’ve done everything I could do to prepare, and I’m going to react rationally to the problems in front of me, and I’m going to do the best damn job I’m capable of.

B) I’m basically fucking immortal, so fuck it.

Being a good pilot requires some level of (A), maybe even (A) in its totality, no matter what. But the difference between a good pilot and a test pilot is the capacity for (B).

A test pilot will be given the instructions: Nobody has ever flown this plane past (x) limit, and the engineers say it’ll experience a rapid unplanned disassembly if it experiences (y), so don’t do either of those things.

A good pilot will take the plane up and fly it according to those conditions. But you’re not really testing much, in that case. A good test pilot, however, will immediately take the plane up and start probing the things that he was explicitly told not to do. Sometimes he’ll succeed in proving the plane is capable of more than the engineers thought, if only you fly it properly. Sometimes they come back reporting that those limits absolutely are real, and they only got back by the skin of their teeth and the depth of their talent. Sometimes they turn themselves into rotisserie chickens or become suddenly very flat, and their squad mates will respond with some form of, “what a dumbass, making that mistake — good thing I’m a better pilot than he was.” And that’s the sort of sociopathic confidence you need to be a good test pilot.

This whole proposition becomes all the more absurd when you factor in that these guys were (allegedly — Tom Wolfe was a New Journalist after all) requesting immediate permission to land at like 3:50pm so they could get to the bar right when it opened at 4, then staying out until like 2am drinking, driving their cars home at fighter-pilot speed blackout-drunk, getting a woodworkers-handful of hours sleep at best, and then showing up at the airfield (probably still drunk) to fly these planes again at sunrise. Hence, as Wolfe puts it, “Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving.”

I was troubled enough by this development that I spent an entire hour with my sports psychologist talking about it, almost-entirely glossing over the fact that I’d just won my first check. Because, as I saw it, here are a bunch of guys who are near-impossibly capable, doing unbelievable things in planes, and, not only are they doing it while crossing from buzzed-to-violently-hungover in the air, but that their affinity to Fly & Drink and Drink & Drive is, according to Wolfe (and believably so), essential to their ability to do this stuff.

Holy shit, I thought. I don’t trust myself to drink and drive at all. I think that’s like the single dumbest fucking thing you can do. But that belief sets a ceiling on my own self-belief? That doesn’t sound very badass. One of these belief-systems has to go, and of course I’m not drinking and driving, but I also don’t like the idea of an upper bound to my self belief… What do I want to be thinking when I’m standing over a chip to win a golf tournament? Is that any place for rationality? Shouldn’t I be a bit of a psycho? A lot of a psycho? Shouldn’t I—

And the train of thought follows through to roughly the following thought:

I’m building a hell of a lot of self-confidence playing golf, but will I one day become so self confident that I kill an innocent person with my car?

The answer, it turns out, is pretty simple: there’s space between capacity and execution, and, while the job “test pilot” requires people so reckless that they don’t make any “can I/should I” distinctions, nothing prevents me from doing so, and this probably makes me a better person, if also being the reason I’m not a test pilot. Also, it was the 1950s. Both of these points are pretty indisputable.

In any event, I’ve been thinking about confidence. Specifically, the kind of confidence that seems completely nuts when you think about it rationally — anyone who believes they’re going to make a 25’ putt is statistically nuts, as is anyone who thinks they can do a low-probability thing at a high-probability rate. But, it does turn out, that these people with this reckless, irrational self-belief tend to execute these things at a higher rate — maybe not so high as they expect, but certainly higher than the base case.

This is the sort of self-belief I’ve been dabbling with. At first, I was scared that this was the exact same form of self-belief that people use to drink and drive. But self-belief brings with it the interesting realization that I’m the one who has it, so I don’t have to worry about whether this is theoretically/conceptually good or bad, because I am by definition always the one acting on it.

More practically speaking, to this example: it means I can continue deciding not to drive cars drunk, which I haven’t. But you can hit a 25-footer like someone who would drive drunk, and it’s this realization that, as far as I can tell, has completely changed my life.

I’ve cultivated this newsletter as a place to be unflinchingly honest about my deepest, most sincere insecurities. I’m therefore presented with a paradox: in the face of honestly discovering a deep, sincere confidence, I have to choose between: talking about insecurities dishonestly; or talking about confidence honestly. I’m choosing the latter.

I guess I’ll frame it as an insecurity, at first. Pro golf, as a lifestyle, is isolating. A while ago, I wrote a newsletter about feeling isolated and subsequently crying in my bedroom, and I chose not to publish it, mostly because I’d rather hit 200 more putts than commit to the editing process. At the core of this insecurity is something along the lines of: as I see myself undergo radical personal change on a day by day basis, I do so isolated from the rest of my world. On some level, I worry how I’ll be accepted by that world upon by return. This sounds insane, but hopefully less so once contextualized by the isolation itself, which in itself is known to drive people nuts. So that’s my excuse.

On Thursday night, I drove from Chatmoss, VA to the DC area, where I got dinner with a college friend and two of her friends. The three of them were spying on their boss, who was on a Hinge date. I’m not sure if this was accidental or premeditated. After a while, the two of them got up and left, and he texted my friend that he’d come back to our table to say hi once he dropped his date off at her car.

The date hadn’t gone as well as we’d thought — he’d been mostly entertaining himself, and the conversation was one-sided. He probably wouldn’t be calling her again. This led to the discussion that grinds my gears more than almost any other: the four of them talking about how much dating sucks in DC.

I’ve heard versions of this argument for DC, San Francisco, London, and fucking NYC. I respond to it the same way every time I hear it. You’re in a fucking city. There are more people in a ten mile radius who are precisely your age than I have total people in a twenty-mile radius. (Lots of italics this week!). What the fuck??

After about ninety minutes of various banter, the guy asked if I wanted a drink; he was getting a round. I said sure, and I told him we could find a seat next to a pretty girl and he could have a second chance at the night. He said he’d already done a sweep of the bar and didn’t see anything.

This was an excuse, because it’s always an excuse. I walked to the end of the bar and back, saw an open seat next to a really pretty woman more or less his age, and stood there to order a drink. He asked the woman if it was ok if we stood here to order drinks. She said the seat was open, which meant she was single. I struck up a conversation, he joined in, and it came up that he had just been on a hinge date that turned out to be a dud.

They agreed on that strange excuse everyone in the city seems to give themselves: dating in this city sucks. I said, “well I’ve met two normal people here tonight, and there’s an open seat next to one of them.” The guy said, “you motherfucker,” and he sat down. I said “cheers, y’all” and left. My friend found out through Microsoft Teams the next day that the two of them had stayed out until 1:30am that night, and they had plans to see each other again.

The whole thing took me about four minutes, max. Am I taking more credit than I should? Maybe. But, also, I don’t think I am. He said he didn’t see anyone at the bar, which I’m translating as “I was scared.” I started the conversation, which I’m translating as “I wasn’t.” And that, in a nutshell, is what professional golf means to me: putting myself in situations where I have to perform under the gun until I get good at it. The more I leave my apartment and trade my conceptual home for the real world, I learn that this sort of thinking is actually pretty rare.

A part of me wishes that I could take my newfound worldview and hunker down in one of these cities for a while — I think I could #mog the hell out of most people my age, if this is how they’re acting. Hell, I wish I lived in DC, because I’d have sat down next to that cool, pretty woman myself.

A couple weeks ago (note: letter #1), I worried that the time I was spending by myself playing golf was atrophying my social skills. Turns out, the opposite might be true — I believe in myself more than I ever have, and this is wildly helpful, socially. I also have to confront parts of my psyche most people don’t have to, as far as digging into how I operate and what I need to do to operate well, as well as having the time to think about these things. And I can relay my findings to my friends when they need advice. I have a lot of #perspective.

If there’s any tragedy here, it’s that I usually take this newfound confidence from the golf course to my kitchen, where I don’t get to use it much, socially speaking. But it’s in there.

Since writing this, I’ve had a couple opportunities to flash. I went to bars in NYC with my sister and some college friends, where I gave the lead singer of the band a rubber duck. I also got a solid dance circle going at my cousin’s wedding — a wedding during which I stashed four pints of my uncle’s favorite beer in the upper tank of the venue toilet, which we enjoyed as the night went on. Further proofs of concept, all of which have been fun.

I’ve decided I need to get out more. As of right now, this is just an ambiguous concept — I’m about to fly to Belgium, and I have KFT Q School in three weeks. But I’ll be getting out to civilization again soon after, one way or another.

****************************

8/28/26

Right now I’m on a flight to Amsterdam. So I guess all of this continues my “From Seat ___” series that I used to do (I’m in 36B).

I was scheduled on a flight from Brunswick, GA to Atlanta, where I’d have a 4 hour layover before flight from Atlanta to Brussels. A lot has happened since then.

Between a series of thunderstorms and some ground crew employee who didn’t show up, the flight was delayed three and a half hours, give or take, which was just enough time for me to miss my connection in Atlanta. There are a lot of things that I could label “if only ___ didn’t happen.” For instance, a foreign national with no luggage and no passport trying to convince the gate agent that his debit card was a form of federal ID because it was issued by Federal Credit Union (I shit you not).

We took off around 4pm, at which point I (a nervous flier) just sat with headphones in and my hands in my lap. I tried not to notice that the 85-year-old guy sitting in front of me, sitting next to his wife, was reading smut on his laptop in big old-guy font for the whole flight. Once I did notice, I tried to ignore this. I failed at both. We landed in Atlanta, they chose our flight to train the newbies how to operate the jet bridge, and we listened to someone yelling out instructions and telling some kid they were doing it wrong for another ten minutes, and a bunch of us missed our connections by a hair.

I find that customer service employees in the city of Atlanta are between 20-90% less friendly than anywhere else, and the help desk woman in Atlanta informed me that flight DL0074 was fully booked and had no seats left, despite the fact that I could see an open seat on the Delta app. This, of course, is the flight I’m on right now. I called my dad, who has flown a bajillion miles with Delta, who called a special high-mileage desk, who got me on this flight in about six minutes and was very nice (if anyone knows an Agnes at Delta, please give her a raise or a promotion or both!).

So I made it over to Terminal E, and I got an Arby’s cheesesteak^[1], and I waddled to E32, where I got on the flight sans-boarding pass (facial recognition is here, baby!), and now I’m on the plane.

I’ll wake up in Amsterdam tomorrow at 4am East Coast time but 10am local time, which will be both early and late at the same time, somehow. And then I’ll take a train from Amsterdam to Brussels, which I’m terrified to do — it seems like one of those things that I should be able to do easily, but people in my generation can’t do anything anymore, especially not in Dutch. And then, by the end of all that, I’ll be in Brussels, and I’ll be getting ready to play four rounds of golf for the rest of my life (or, at least, to get to Stage 2 of Q School).

But that’s later. Right now, someone keeps connecting to my wireless headphones, and my music keeps getting booted in favor of some movie that sounds really dumb. I’m hoping this only wakes me up a few times during the night instead of many times.

If you’ve gotten this far, you might be wondering how actual golf things are going. My response to this question has generally been, “well, I’ve regripped my putter three times in the last 72 hours.” I’m hitting the ball great, and from Monday to Thursday I spent probably 30-35 hours working on putting (and probably 45-50 if you count putting on my rug while watching TV). I’m going to live and die by the putter this week. If I putt Tour-average, I’ll probably make the cut by eight. If I lose four strokes a round, I’ll miss the cut by thirty. That’s the reality of the situation, and I’ve done all I could’ve, and all that’s left is to play my little heart out.

I mentioned being obsessed with the Mercury astronauts. This is ongoing, but I guess it’s still temporary; my more all-consuming obsession has been with the US Delta Force, of which Paresh was a member. This is more or less my conceptual stand-in for “guys who are better at their job than anyone has been at their job in all of human history.” Trying to summarize what got these guys there is obviously frivolous and dumb, but it’s some version of: all the confidence of a Mercury astronaut without the recklessness, and practice to a degree that makes the mere idea of failure seem “quaint” or “incorrect.”

I’ve spent a lot of the last year putting. I’ve spent a lot of the last year putting, since I figured out that putting is probably the primary thing standing between me and Everything I’ve Ever Dreamed Of Achieving. I’ve learned AimPoint, and I’ve learned I don’t putt well with AimPoint. I burned up a whole bunch of Claude credits reverse engineering PGA Tour pros’ speed control and aim variances from publicly available statistics. I can tell you a shitload about putting.

In doing a bunch of putting drills this week, my failure rates went down. But they’re still too high. I’m still not executing as well as I should. I don’t feel like I’m controlling the face well to start the ball on line consistently, and that makes speed control difficult, and none of it feels as good as I want it to. My success isn’t a foregone conclusion when I drop on the X on Tuesday.

I don’t know what to make of all of this. I’m not going to deny that this is how I feel like I would have in college, because that would mean I’m scared enough of the feeling to lie to myself about it, and I’m not. The feeling is the feeling. That’s it.

Sitting here in this airplane seat, I’m trying to imagine myself making a shitload of putts. I’m trying to feel how my body would move, how the ball would feel coming off the clubface, what it’d look like when I look up and see the ball rolling on exactly the line I chose.

It feels like trying to push two magnets of the same pole into each other. They resist, and they push each other off to one side or another, and, if you focus hard enough to push them dead straight at each other, they’ll push apart again the moment you relax. I don’t know how to describe my visualization other than to say that this is exactly what I feel. I try to feel the sensation of a really good putting stroke, and the sequence feels all wrong.

When you put a putter in my hands, it feels better. I can kind of do it. It’s not as automatic as I’d really like it to be — it doesn’t feel point-and-shoot, which would be really nice. I’m not sure what the answer is. I’m going to keep trying those visuals, and maybe they’ll get better. Maybe they won’t. In any event, if guys before me have had the balls to drunk drive airplanes at the speed of sound, then I sure as hell can roll a ball around.

Cheers, everyone. Good to be back.

^[1] “Atlanta airport Arby’s cheesesteak” was about as shitty as you can imagine. Also, some friends in a group chat informed me that eating airport Arby’s makes me a “pervert.”

I wrote about why I was deciding to play professional golf after graduation. I noted that my college career had been, by any conceivable metric, a failure. Usually this is the kind of thing that pushes a person away from pursuing a professional sport. But I noted a certain feeling that I’d been carrying around for years.

Enough failure congeals like cold fat in a jar, solid and tough to scrub out. Scar tissue is this kind of lingering doubt turned inductive: the notion that, after a series of steps forward that were never enough, why should this one get me there? Why should the next? After all the debriefs, retools, technical tweaks, workout programs, nutrition plans, performance drills, mindset shifts—after all these without the desired results, whatever problem remains seems that much more evasive, cunning, potent. Whatever’s left to be developed or adjusted or overcome or exorcized feels closer and closer to the core of the self, some vital part of the identity. That maybe it’s not something about me, or some part of me, but me.

I officially turned professional on September 18th, 2024 — 668 days ago.

For 665 days — a year, nine months, and 28 days — I carried around that feeling I described two years ago. I got a lot better at golf, at least so I thought. I woke up every three or six months as a better player than I had been prior. But I had nothing to show for it. I had missed every single cut in every professional tournament I played. Most of them weren’t even close. I would show up to an event feeling solid, shoot a front-nine 39, find myself nine shots outside the cutline with 27 holes to play, and I’d grind out whatever I could for the rest of the event.

Sometimes I’d find something late. I remember one event where, in the second round, I had it –6 through 12 holes with a chance to backdoor the cut. I think I missed by two in the end. Other times I wasn’t even close and finished near DFL.

In either case, the following logic would present itself:

• I had determined that I had played poorly at the previous event on account of [X], [Y], and [Z].

• I had worked very hard to fix [X], [Y], and [Z] over the past several weeks. I believed I had made substantial progress, and I was in good enough shape to compete in this event.

• I would play poorly in that event and be completely non-competitive.

• Repeat.

It’s pretty easy to make the logical conclusion that there’s one constant in all of this, and it’s the guy swinging the golf clubs. If the fixes aren’t working, and all this energy that I’m investing into my game isn’t producing any results — then maybe I’m just not good enough. Maybe the problem is me.

Yesterday — one day ago — I played the third round of the GPro tournament at the Pete Dye River Course in Radford, VA. This is significant because, to play the third round of a GPro event, you have to first make the cut.

Yesterday, after 667 days of playing professional golf, I cashed my first check as a professional golfer.

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I played in my first pro tournament at the 2017 Met Open. My flight north to play my qualifier was delayed, and the MGA was able to bump my tee time into the last slot. I rolled out of the car and onto the first tee, and I think I shot -1. When I signed my card, I was as surprised as anyone else to find I got through.

I played in that event, then qualified for the 2018 Met Am and 2018 Met Open. I remember thinking, “I guess I’m just good enough to play in all these now.”

In 2024, I decided I would try to qualify for the Met Open in the hopes of making my pro debut there. My last event as an amateur would hopefully be the Met Am. I showed up to the qualifying site in New Jersey, sat through a 75 minute weather delay, and turned in a bogey-free 68 to make it into the field.

I played three MGA majors in 2017 and 2018. From 2019 to 2023, I only played in one — the 2021 Ike. For that five year stretch, it ate at me to watch my peers play in these events while I sat on the sidelines. It took until I qualified for the 2024 Met Am to realize that, actually, qualifying for a Met major is really, really hard. It’s not something you can ever take for granted. It’s not something you’re “supposed” to do, in any regard. It’s just difficult to do, and it’s an accomplishment when you do it.

I didn’t qualify for the 2024 Met Open, and so I didn’t make my debut until September. But I’ve effectively been a professional for two years. Prior to that, I was a college golfer who could only crack the lineup once in his last two years, needing a 62 in qualifying to do so. Really, my last significant golfing success was a stretch of decent showings in college events my sophomore year.

And so, for the last four years, I’ve carried around a latent feeling of deep embarrassment. I haven’t talked about this much — or, if I have, I haven’t talked about how pervasive it can be. This is by design; you can’t acknowledge its existence, because it’ll eat you alive. But there’s some sort of stratification in your mind, and at the bedrock level there are two factors: the self-belief that you can fulfill your vision for yourself, and a deep discomfort that you fall short of this vision in the present day. These two feelings do bloody battle against each other nearly every moment of every day.

For four years, I have silently been deeply embarrassed to call myself a serious competitive golfer. I have learned to live with this feeling. I’ve learned to feed my self-belief such that it can grow and become real. But, for four years (two of which I’ve called myself a fucking professional), that self-belief has been under siege by a relentless onslaught of poor competitive results. Results, at the end of the day, are all that matter in this business. Results are ruthlessly credible. And, for four years, I’ve lied to myself over and over, telling myself “I’m pretty good at this game and I’ll figure it out,” and I’ve hung on as long as I possibly could as the evidence against myself stacked up stronger and stronger.

This morning, a transfer hit my bank account for $862. Mind you, I paid an even grand to enter the tournament, along with a few hundred bucks for an AirBNB and probably two hundred for gas each way of the 500-mile drive. The week was a net loss, financially — not even an insignificant one.

But it’s a huge win. For the first time in my career, I played well enough to take money from other professional golfers. It makes no sense to put a monetary value on that because there’s no way to buy it. You have to earn it by beating other professionals at golf. If you pull it off, you’re rewarded with the knowledge that this is something you’re capable of doing. You have made money playing professional golf, and there’s nothing in the world anyone could do to take that away from you.

In my case, I’m especially proud of myself, because I did this while shouldering four years of golfing failures without any discernible successes. What does this prove? That my powers of self-belief are stronger than my sources of doubt. And I can measure my sources of doubt as quantifiably huge.

I’ve learned so much more about myself than I ever could have if I’d come out of the gates hot as a professional. I’m like a weed. I don’t need fertilizer or soil pH or recent memories of success. I can just fucking grow through a crack in the concrete.

A cynical part of me feels silly for bat-flipping a net-loss T30 in a mini tour event. It’s been two years, and I should be onto bigger and better things by now. Maybe you’re thinking it yourself. That’s fine. I don’t need you to be impressed, nor do I need that cynical voice in the back of my head to be impressed. I did it. I can look back and see how hard it’s been to make money playing golf, and I did it. Riding this wave of confidence, the reified knowledge of what I’m capable of, I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Right now it’s 4:55pm on Friday. I’ve been sitting at my laptop since 4:10pm, and I’ll keep sitting here until about 5:20. At 5:20, I’ll be picked up and driven into Brunswick to AutoZone, then driven back home.

I drove the 9 hours home to St. Simons last night, during which time my maintenance indicator in my truck went off. I have another drive into Valdosta on Sunday, and so I have to change my oil in the next 48 hours. So, this morning, I drove into Brunswick to the AutoZone to pick up parts.

As I lay everything on the counter, I asked the kid behind the counter to idiot-check the parts for me on the computer. He said everything looked good except the oil filter, which I had gotten in the wrong size. He went out onto the floor, grabbed a different one, and handed it to me. I bought everything and left.

At 3pm, I went out to the parking lot, pulled my truck onto the concrete slab with the car wash hose attached, and started changing my oil. I had a new ratchet set and some instructions on the internet to help me with the parts I forgot, which were few. I drained the block through the drain plug, replaced the plug with a new gasket, removed the filter capsule, removed the filter from the capsule, checked it for debris (there wasn’t much), and put the new filter in the capsule to replace it.

Except the filter wouldn’t fit. I was holding the wrong size. I checked again, and I did have the right size before — the kid behind the desk switched my correct filter out for the wrong one.

So now I’m stuck here. My truck has no lube in it and I couldn’t even start it. I’m waiting for my buddy to get off work, so he can drive me 20 minutes to Brunswick and back to swap out this filter, a favor for which I’ll owe him a burger and a beer.

I say all this because, while it’s wildly frustrating to me, hopefully it’s funny to you. And — cynically, but honestly I might just be this cynical now — it’s a reminder that nearly everyone fucking sucks at their job, and it’s legitimately rare to find someone who’s actually good at what they do.

There’s a larger point that I want to make about personal identity. There are things we believe to be true about ourselves, good or bad, but — even if they are true, which is probably debatable in the first place — these are merely temporary qualities, and they’re subject to change. Personal development means identifying the good qualities and working to keep them, and also identifying the bad qualities and working to improve them. There’s no law that says that such things are immutable or they aren’t; nothing prevents each from moving in its own positive direction.

So it’s probably a cheap shot I’m taking at the AutoZone kid. I guess there’s hope for him.

But I want to make a larger point. Every day, I work with some of the most competent people I’ve ever met. I showed up to Sea Island to play professional golf as a failed college golfer with good hands and 190+ ball speed and nothing else to show for it. I couldn’t hit basic chips without chunking it. I had been hitting driver all over the map, even though I’d cut my teeth as a wildly accurate driver of the golf ball. I didn’t even have a reliable stock swing.

Over the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of working with astoundingly competent professionals who have given me the tools to reach this level of golf. They’ll remind me that it’s been my own work and effort that’s gotten me to this place, and I’m proud of that effort. But all the effort in the world will get you nowhere if it’s not properly guided. Golf is a complex game of complex problems, but the solutions must be expressed simply enough to stand up to tournament pressure. The team here has helped me identify, conceptualize, and solve a wildly diverse and intimidating set of problems, and this work has been immensely rewarding to me.

A word comes to mind, right now: Kafkaesque. When I reread the above paragraph from my article in 2024, that’s how golf felt to me. I would get better, and I would start to see a clearer picture of my success, and then the kaleidoscope would turn and the sand would shift beneath my feet and I was right back where I started, or worse. Golf felt Sisyphean. Golf felt futile. I was given two options: either accept that the world of golf didn’t make a lick of sense, or accept that I wasn’t good enough to play it. In choosing between believing in oneself or one’s own rationality, the choice isn’t always so simple — it’s more comfortable to be bad than insane.

But I chose neither of these. I bet on myself and the kernel of belief I had in myself that, surely, I was good at this game. I knew I was. Some part of me always knew I was good.

Again, maybe this is all silly, to be pimp-stepping a T-30 finish in a mini tour event. But the world makes a lot more sense today. My self-belief and my reality don’t run opposite each other today. I needed all the effort I could muster over the last two years to get here. But I also wouldn’t have had a prayer without the efforts of a lot of great people around me, all of whom decide that it’s worth their time to help me play better golf. I’ll keep telling everyone in person as I get the chances to, but, as a blanket statement: thank you all, so much.

I’m overwhelmed by gratitude. After 667 days, the good finally beat the bad. The belief beat the doubt. A lot had to happen to get to this point. A lot still has to happen to get to the next point. But I really needed the first domino to fall, a proof of concept that success in golf is possible for me. The journey ahead is lit a little brighter, and I can’t wait for the next step.

Being July 3rd, the start of Independence Day weekend, the club had replaced the usual pin flags with American flags, the symbol of our nation.

Usually, when playing golf, players will lay the flag on the green while they’re putting out. Sometimes it’s gently placed; sometimes its stood on its end and tipped over to land all at once with a thwack — which used to be one of my biggest pet-peeves when I thought this would damage the green, back before I knew how impacts delivered over feet become quite small. I’ll still usually opt to lower the flag onto the green with the head of my putter, placing it at the knuckle between the hosel and the topline, lowering it, and dumping it from a height of a few inches. It’s always felt pretty “tour,” to me. It’s one of golf’s many subtle, unacknowledged joys.

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But the American flag is not meant to touch the ground. As such, the club had put sticks in the ground, each with a little “V” cutout, near each hole on the collar. Instead of dropping the flag on the green, you’d rest it against this little stand, where it’d lie, elevated, until you’d putt out and were ready to replace it.

It’s a two-fold sign of respect: that you’d make sure your country’s flag did not touch the ground; but also that you’d break from your usual, unconscious golfing routine to find the stand and rest the pin into that little “V.” In doing so, you took a small, conscious moment to reflect on the symbol, what it stood for, and all the uncountable ways it had earned this small moment of reverence over the last 250 years.

I knew it would happen. We had gotten to the 12th hole, and I was deep in a sermon about stabilizing the shoulder through the scapula, and I was staring down a 12-footer straight up the hill for my fifth birdie of the day. I was finally putting well. I finally understood how to stabilize my shoulder through my scapula. My mind was on other things.

I lowered the flag to the ground. Decades of muscle memory had taken over. I knew what I’d done before it hit the ground, the moment I felt it slip off my putter, as it had tens of thousands of times before, before it’d even had time to fall the four or six inches to the green.

I immediately picked up the flagstick, gently cussed myself out, and placed the flag in the little “V” next to the green. I took my hat off and gave a little bow, subtle enough where I doubt my playing partner noticed. I did the same when I replaced the flag — took my hat off, gave a little bow, hoped that the flag understood that I was sorry.

I’ve been paying more attention to my instincts, lately. I think, a few weeks ago, after taking my hat off and bowing in apology to an inanimate object, I’d have walked away thinking, “well, that was kind of cringy — what the hell was that? Where did that come from?” A year ago, I’d have thought about it for several holes. I gave it no more thought until now, as I write about it a day later. It felt right — in the way that things that come from way deep down always feel right, it simply felt right. I haven’t questioned it once. I won’t.

The United States does have an official Flag Code: U.S. Code Title 4, Chapter 1. Specific provisions around the display and treatment of the flag can be found in 4 U.S.C. §§5-10. These provisions include when and how the flag should be displayed (§6), its position relative to other flags (§7), rules of respect such as never letting it touch the ground or using it as clothing or drapery (§8), proper conduct during raising, lowering, and flag-passing ceremonies (§9), and general guidance on civilian display (§5).

But these provisions hold an interesting place, legally. (Maybe their legal standing is totally pedestrian — I’m not a lawyer — but I found them interesting.) While these regulations are legally authoritative, they are explicitly not legally binding nor enforceable by law.

If you’re an American, you’re surely aware of the 1989 Supreme Court decision Texas v. Johnson, or at least of its general principles. You probably recognize them if you’re not American, whether you know it or not.

In 1984, outside the Republican National Convention headquarters in Dallas, Gregory Lee Johnson burned an American flag to protest against the Reagan administration. He was arrested by local law enforcement and tried under Tex. Penal Code §42.09, prohibiting the knowing or intentional desecration of a public monument, place of worship or burial, or (relevant here) state or national flag. Johnson maintained that burning the flag was protected expression under the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court sided with Johnson. Later that year, in response to the decision, Congress passed the Flag Protection Act, which banned flag desecration at the federal level, absent some more specific language included in the Texas statute. The day it was passed, Shawn Eichman burned a flag on the steps of the Capitol to protest the Act’s passing. A year later, in United States v. Eichman, the Supreme Court ruled that flag burning was protected expression under the First Amendment, and it has remained settled law ever since.

You’ve probably read a version of the above in one of a hundred think pieces run in various publications in the lead-up to our nation’s 250th birthday. At least, you know where I’m going already: to note that our flag inherently stands for the freedom to desecrate said flag, if you so choose, among all the other freedoms it represents.

I avoid politics and current events in this newsletter. If you only know me via this newsletter, you might think I’m an apolitical guy. That’s not the case. I try pretty hard to stay up to date on what’s going on, such is my civic duty and all.

I mostly avoid politics in this newsletter.1 But I’m breaking my rule today.

By and large, the “sentiment” based metrics in the US are at or near all-time lows: various approval ratings, consumer sentiment indices, predictions for the future of the country. The country is divided, yet even this sentiment has been commandeered by each side to blame the other and manufacture support for one’s own. I don’t hear much commentary that argues that things will get better anytime soon.

In both Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in support of one’s First Amendment rights. Both decisions were a single vote away from a ruling in which the nation’s symbology was held above the founding national principles for which the symbols stood. Yet, in both instances, our nation’s principles prevailed. And they continue to.

I can think of no truer commitment to our nation’s enduring freedom. After all, freedom would not be free if it were instantiated permanently and authoritatively. True freedom is to decide in favor of freedom, which is to decide to make this decision freely, over, and over, and over…

This is what our flag stands for. A government of the people, by the people, for the people — this inherently places total trust in the American people, no matter what shape their choices should take. Anything else would be undemocratic. Commitment to the democratic process must remember that, no matter how anyone feels about the country or its government or its people or its direction, our nation believes in us just as much as we believe in Her.

Through 250 years of challenge, our people and our process have led us forward. I see no reason — no matter what shape the present might take — to stop believing in it now. If anything, times of discomfort or distrust or fear are times to lean on our democracy more than ever.

If I personify the flag, I like to think that, after I apologized, it forgave me for dropping it on the 12th green yesterday. It understands that a nation governed by the people will be imperfect, because people are imperfect. Yet it knows that no better government exists, nor a better set of principles, nor a better nation. It knows that the system is strong enough to endure mistakes or times of challenge. I bowed my head in apology, and it replied, “It’s OK, I believe in you, I know you’ll get it right….”

Apologies for the lapses in writing lately. All will be clear in due time, I promise….

1

The reasons for avoiding politics in this newsletter are threefold:

1. All the “polarization” talk assumes you’re on one team or another, and that any single comment includes a mountain of that-team opinions on a whole bunch of other things. I’m a sucker for nuance; if I ever offered something political, it’d be a specific opinion about a specific thing that I found interesting, and that would be it. I can clarify against the wave of follow-up implications and assumptions in an in-person conversation. Not so in a newsletter.

2. I remember seeing the following chart, from Axios, at the beginning of this year, showing interest in various topics/stories throughout 2025. Most political commentary is fleeting. Most weeks I hope to get at something a little more evergreen.

3. Maybe most importantly, with the amount of political content out there today, I find myself more frequently needing a break from it all than trying to find more. I hope Into the Weeds can serve the former role.

That was this weekend. Unfortunately, I don’t write the newsletters as their contents unfold. I write them on days like today.

I’ve been sitting inside since about 10:30 this morning. I had an early workout this morning, the last workout of the week, which means the toughest workout of the week. I had a great playlist queued up, and I was vibing my face off in the gym, and I crushed it, more or less. Then I stopped at the grocery store, got some food for breakfast, threw in some smoked salmon because I was hungry as hell and it sounded good. And I ate my usual four-eggs-one-avocado-kimchi-siracha breakfast and a whole pack of smoked salmon while watching the US Open.

That was as good as my day has gotten. It’s been pouring here. I’ve been sitting inside mad as hell. Looking at my schedule through the rest of the season and into Q School, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get as many reps as I wanted unless I played next week. So I am. And, after declaring an Official State of Emergency with regard to my putting at the end of last week, I had a lot of work to get done this week.

I drove back here on Monday. Tuesday, after workout, I spent the day looking through all 27 Q School sites for this year and ranking them according to my preferences, then finalizing my schedule leading up to it. By the time I was done, it was 4:30, and the summer rainstorms had hit. So I shut things down on the early side, turned on the footy, and thought about golf. Wednesday, I got another workout in, and then I spent five hours on the putting green. I think I figured some stuff out. I also decided that I would learn AimPoint. I think my green-reading sucks right now (which is odd, because growing up I’d say it was my #2 skill behind my distance), which impacts my confidence standing over putts — and if you don’t feel good standing over putts, you can ball strike the hell out of it and still score shitty, and that feeling sucks. So I’m going to learn AimPoint.

On Thursday, I got to the course at 10:30, at which point the Real Feel was 107°F. I have sweat stains on hosel of my putter from sweat dripping off my nose. I used up half a bottle of liquid chalk on my hands and it didn’t do jack shit. As for the putting, the greens are mostly recovered from being punched, but they can’t get them quick yet — and, with the heat, they were rolling at stimp 7, maybe. And so I tried my best to AimPoint calibrate based on a bunch of educated guesses, and then I couldn’t tell if I was really holding my fingers the same length from my face every time, and I couldn’t get the damn ball to the hole for the life of me, because into the grain they were running at like 5. And after two hours of putting like shit I shut it down and stopped my drill early and head to get lunch.

Well, it’s been raining for the last 28 hours or so now. I’ve been sitting inside, stewing over the fact that I cut that drill short, and now I only have one day before I have to get back on the road and put it all to the test.

Even today, I figured, I’ll get the newsletter done, and I’ll get my apartment cleaned up and my laundry done, and I’ll get the rest of my work done and clear my slate to go absolutely ape-shit in practice tomorrow. But I haven’t. I’m working through it all, sort of, but really I’ve just been sitting in my living room pissed the hell off.

On Wednesday, after practice and before dinner, I ran into a buddy who used to play and just got a job doing wealth management. We talked for a while about a bunch of stuff, including the fact that people say around his office, “this is a business; we compete around here.” They’re saying this in reference to things like taking advantage of German interest rates using a method someone else figured out. They pack things up at 5pm and go home.

The thing he said that’ll stick with me is, “man, people have no idea how hard it is.” Because he’s right. A lot of people have misconceptions about my job. They think it’s all super fun, because my job is what they do for fun on weekends; obviously what I do is different from what they do on weekends, and a lot of it isn’t all that fun. Other people think it’s glamorous — these are the people who ask, so “what’s the coolest place you’ve traveled to?” and don’t realize I’ve just come from Dothan, AL or Vass, NC.

Lots of people think that, because it’s challenging, it’s rewarding. This is largely true. But it’s not always true. There’s a lot of challenges that are menial and annoying and kafkaesque and bullshit (see: I can launch a ball 340yds down a fairway in the wind, but I can’t roll a ball along the ground ten feet into a fucking hole). I have no idea why I’m putting poorly. This is also the time of year when coaches are either booked out for three weeks or on vacation, and adding another event means I have to cancel lessons and reset the clock by a few weeks. And so I have to teach myself AimPoint and try to figure it out myself, knowing that I know more about putting than 99.99% of golfers anywhere, but that for whatever reason I can’t actually implement to the tune of losing four fucking strokes a round on the greens last week.

This is what I’ve been thinking about, all day, stuck inside, as it’s rained two whole inches outside and I’ve been helpless to do anything about it. I wouldn’t train it for a goddamn thing in the world — except, of course, a sunny day and being able to go to work. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but sometimes it kinda sucks. I hope that makes sense.

A lot of the lessons I learned on this week’s retreat are the things I need to implement right now. They’re hard, but I need to stay on top of them. I’d love to tell you more, but, to be totally honest, I need to focus all my energy on implementation right now.

I’ve got some fun stories to tell you later. Hopefully soon. Hopefully with a paycheck in my hand. It’s coming. Until then.

The TV won’t be turned on during my stay. I’ll have my laptop, but it won’t be connected to the internet. My phone will stay in my backpack aside from sending a couple texts to let people know I’m still alive. I’m bringing my own food, which I’ll cook in the house. Otherwise, I’m bringing a music player (more on this later), a meditation cushion, a couple books, and not much else.

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The plan is to do nothing for two days. There’s two kinds of “doing nothing.” One is to sit around and watch TV all day and revel in the fact that you’ve cleared your schedule of responsibilities. I like doing this. But that’s not what I’m doing this weekend. I’m legitimately going to try to do nothing.

I guess this isn’t quite true, so I’ll be more specific. I was inspired by Neil Schuster of NLU doing something similar a while back, where he brought a non-internet-connected laptop and his dog into a secluded AirBNB and spent two days thinking about the big stuff. He spend 2-3 hours writing, then a couple hours on long walks, and repeated the cycle for two days. I remember him coming up with such goals as “don’t get fat” and “don’t get divorced,” two items which almost read as sarcastic as I write them, but they’re undeniably important, and it’s worth some thought as to exactly how to make sure neither happens.

The whole thing reminded me of Buddhist solo retreats, where monks will go off into the wilderness or up into a cave for a year. Similar retreats exist for people who don’t have a year to give, usually a couple days or a week, usually under the guidance of a meditation teacher in a group setting. I’m interested in these, but I’m a bit to cynical to pick one teacher based on information I find on the internet, so I’m going at it solo.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. So, on the back of the tournament I just played, I booked this AirBNB two hours from St Simons and I’m headed up there today, pretty much whenever I hit send on this newsletter. I have a list of big questions that I’ve been keeping in the notes app of my phone for a bit, and I’m going to see which ones feel important enough to answer.

I’m also going to be sitting and meditating a lot. Meditation was once described to me as a glass of water with a bunch of sediment in it, and it’s all stirred up and cloudy; your mind is the water, and your thoughts are the sediment. Meditation involves focus on something (in my case, the breath — a popular choice) such that the mind is still enough for the sediment to start to settle to the bottom. Thoughts still arise (they always still arise), but you return to the breath before you get lost in them and they shake stuff up. At the end, you’re left with clarity, and clarity is cool. I intend to sit around and do nothing such that contemporary life’s sediment settles to the bottom, and then we’ll see what clarity I find.

I mentioned I played a tournament this week. I missed another cut. This time, however, I’m pretty clear on what my next steps are, which is a great feeling. I know exactly what I want to see more of from my body, and I’m going to work in the gym to support those movement patterns, and I’m going to make some simply swing tweaks, and everything’s going to work out. I’m already striking the ball pretty damn good, so I’m confident in where this is heading.

(For anyone curious: The gym/body stuff is to push more laterally off my right foot instead of getting up onto my right toes too early. So pushing more out of the arch of my foot than the ball. This will give me more room to keep the club in front of me and swing it out along the plane line vs. pulling it inside. I’m also going to work on my right hand staying more square rather than turning the club down in the downswing, which will keep the clubface squarer. I’ll also present more loft this way, which means I’ll finally have to schedule that iron fitting and find a lower launching shaft to hit my windows better. As for the swing stuff, I’m once again getting quick in transition when I’m under tournament pressure, so I’m going to get more stable at the top — maybe even just do the Cam Young pause move, which he does to solve the exact problem I face right now.)

But I missed the cut by a bunch, and you might be wondering how that happened, if I’m hitting it so good. I’m here to declare an Official State of Emergency with regard to my putting. The greens at Colonial CC (the NC one, not TX) were running 13+ with a ton of slope and some nasty pins, which explains some of the troubles, but not nearly enough. I had 35 putts in the first round, including a chip-in— so 35 putts in 17 holes. Round two I had 38 putts. I lost something like 8-9 strokes on the greens alone. There’s a mental toll when you putt this poorly, and that resonates back through the bag — so I’m confident that, if I was putting Tour average, I make the cut this week.

I hit a shitload of putts in the two weeks leading up to this event. I changed some stuff with my setup, I weighted my putter differently, I did a whole bunch of stuff to set myself up for success. I did not succeed. So it’s back to the drawing board.

We’ll see what I come up with, but I think there’s one solution and one solution only to this problem: hit a billion putts. I don’t think there’s much left to do besides that. I like the shape of my stroke right now; I’ve started getting the ball to start on line with some setup tweaks. Green reading is bad and distance control is abysmal. I don’t think either of these gets fixed without hitting a billion putts. I’m probably going to learn AimPoint for the sake of understanding the system better, and I’ll keep messing with the weight of my putter, and maybe I throw in some distance control drills. But I think the main thing is just playing a shitload of drawbacks and hitting a billion putts until I start rolling it better. I don’t think there’s any alpha to find that’s not simply dug out of the dirt.

I have a theory about money. It’s completely dead obvious, but for some reason it feels significant right now, especially on the back of some stuff I said last week.

Money is what we use as a store of value to exchange for goods and services. Everyone knows this. I don’t hear many people asking “what sorts of goods and services?” mostly because this is so obvious it’s not worth answering. Economists will say something about “utility.” Really, I think the answer is simpler and two-fold:

1. Things that you want.

2. Things that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t buy them.

This is dumb, but bear with me. You don’t buy things you don’t want. You also don’t buy things that you don’t need to buy. Both of these are obvious. You want running water in your house, so you pay the utility company for it. You don’t pay a utility company for breathing air, because it’s already there. You don’t have the Balenciaga sock-sneakers, but you don’t want them, so you don’t buy them.

Really, money is a store of value such that you can make your life go subtly in a direction that it wouldn’t have gone on its own.

In the 2010s, when I was in middle and high school, I was super invested in following the latest tech releases, specifically Android phones. I was an Android kid, because I was a geek, and I liked doing weird shit like building custom homescreens and stuff. But Android was also an exciting space, because a whole bunch of phone manufacturers were trying to out-do each other to win your business. I had a phone with a retinal scanner as a passcode in like 2015. Us Android people would laugh about which features had finally made their way to the iPhone after nearly a decade in the Android ecosystem, and how these features were touted as “innovative.” It was legitimately fun wondering what everyone would come up with next.

I don’t feel any of that today. My smartphone is a 6”x4”x1/2” box in my pocket that I fucking hate. I also don’t think my life would function without it. It fucking sucks. I think about this tweet basically every day:

I don’t remember where I saw this idea, so I can’t give proper credit where it’s due, but someone was talking about the above recently. Tech used to be cool, and we used to follow it because it was cool and we thought it’d make our lives better. Now we all understand that our phones are how big tech mines our attention for money, and we’re not all that interested in what comes next, because we don’t think it’ll be good.

I just spent a whole bunch of money on in-ear monitor headphones, a souped-up iPod, and a bunch of really high quality digital downloads of my favorite albums. I loaded these albums onto a micro-SD card, put that micro-SD into the audio player, and plugged in the IEMs. It’s an iPod. It’s a really nice iPod with amazing sound quality.

The device theoretically connects to the internet for a couple functions: streaming music (but only on Tidal or Qobuz), wireless file transfer, bluetooth. I will not be connecting it to the internet. After this first batch of file downloads, if I want a new album, I’ll order the CD, and I’ll rip the CD onto the SD card and keep the disk as physical media. And then I’ll throw the SD card back into the player. That’s how it’ll work.

My phone gives me access to any music I could ever want for a monthly subscription that’s basically the price of one album. It can play this music at basically the same quality as the stuff I have downloaded. It does everything that this device I just bought does, except better.

But it also does a whole lot of other stuff, like ping me with advertising emails and giving me access to a bunch of bullshit I’m too dumb not to look at instead of focusing on my mission. And I hate it for that. And I want to carry it less so it has less power over me.

For this reason, I spent real money on a system that does the exact same thing but worse. Because that’s the direction I want my life to go right now.

This sounds dumb, but, the more I think about it, the saner it feels. A decade ago, we wanted more cool tech, so we paid for it. Now, cool tech is all around us, and we’re the products. I want to use my phone less, but the tech market is so big and makes so much money off our phone use that they’ve made it really hard to stop. Now I’m spending money to use my phone less — but I can’t think of many better things to spend it on.

I’m going into this retreat with a list of big questions. One of these is to reexamine what role meditation has in my life. I haven’t been meditating much. I know I feel better when I do, but I haven’t been. This is tough to square, and I’d like to square it one way or another.

I know that retreats like this, especially in a Buddhist context, usually have a pretty rigid schedule. That’s not really how I want to do this, but I figured it can’t help to check some stuff out and see if I get any ideas. I looked around online, found a lot of stuff from “wellness experts,” and generally stopped looking. Instead, I asked Claude.

My interpretation of AI is that it remains a data-aggregation and -interpretation tool. There’s no magic entity in the box that gives us wisdom, nor is it plotting to end the world as we know it. Humanity still bears total responsibility for our utilization of this tool, as it does not have entity status to have responsibility itself.

In this case, I figured, screw it, I’ll write up a little blurb about what I’m looking to do, and I’ll mention a specific Buddhist slant, and Claude will comb through a bunch of Buddhist texts and essays and advice and aggregate all of that into some advice, and I can either take that advice or leave it.

Probably 90 minutes later, I found myself with a far more insightful approach to this retreat than I expected to have. I went back and forth with the thing about my approach and how I was thinking about things, and it told me how this would be interpreted in various Buddhist traditions. Along the way, it flagged when my intentions conflicted with teachings, or when I contradicted myself when talking about my intentions. In the end, I got to the bottom of some stuff I had questions about, and I had a clear direction for how I was going to approach meditation for the weekend (of course, with the requisite willingness to experience whatever arose).

I wrote the previous section in a pretty tech-doomerist way. AI is the dominant force in today’s tech, and you might expect me to feel similarly doomerist about it.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty about AI that makes me nervous or uneasy. I think there’s plenty of potential to use it for ill, and the job displacement stuff is going to stink real bad for people my age, and AI slop sucks. I’m sure there’s plenty of ways that this can all go horribly wrong.

But I was pretty surprised with my experience talking to Claude about my meditation practice. To be clear, I don’t think Claude is going to replace monks, or that Claude should be everyone’s therapist/priest/guru. There were multiple instances where I told Claude it was dead wrong on something, or that I wasn’t going to do something and here’s why. But I think there’s still plenty of opportunity to recognize that these systems can be powerful tools, and that a thoughtful back-and-forth with an LLM can bear fruit.

As with all things, I think it has everything to do with the “how” of it all. Meditation is an intensely personal thing, as are plenty of things that people use LLMs for. It doesn’t know you, and it isn’t an entity, and nobody should confuse the system that picks the next word over and over for any sort of authority on anything personally/spiritually important. But that doesn’t eliminate the possibility for a person to engage with the tool and use it for something useful.

All of this is to say, I was surprised by the quality of my experience, and maybe tech isn’t all bad.

Until next time.

In the meantime, I’ve still been losing a shitload of shots every time I do a simulated putting round. Putting poorly makes golf really hard. I thought, for a while recently, that I’d been just playing bad golf. Turns out I’m striking the absolute shit out of the ball, but I’m just not making any putts. Golf feels really hard when you feel like you have to hit it inside of 8’ to make a birdie, especially when you just keep hitting approaches to 15’ all damn day and feel like you’re doing a pretty decent job.

So I’m going to go putt. As we get deeper into the season, the prospect of a weekly free newsletter is getting more and more precarious. But it’s still important to me to have something going on here, so I’m going to get varying degrees of creative. Hence, here’s something of a notebook dump: a few disjointed, random thoughts I’ve had this week.

I was sent a tweet this week from MyGolfSpy, the third-party golf-equipment testers:

This, to me, is extraordinarily silly. MyGolfSpy does extensive golf club testing, and this is admirable — how do you know how something performs if you don’t test it? But their business model is predicated upon these tests finding “the best equipment,” and that’s why people visit their site and view their advertisements and whatever.

Golf clubs are tools. Golfers are unique individual athletes. To say that any one player plays better with any one club because of “its inherent goodness” is silly. Obviously different clubs work better for different players. Obviously my mom shouldn’t use my driver and I shouldn’t use hers — this is why we get fit. Why are putters any different? Some people get fit for blades, some for mallets, some for zero torque. Sometimes players get fit into a mallet to help the face rotate open more on the way back, and then sometimes they learn that they start the ball on line way more consistently when they keep the face more shut going back, and they switch back to a blade. Sometimes they start putting a lot better for doing this. Sometimes they’re putting better, but they’re still not putting well, so they either need to practice a whole lot or identify something with the equipment that could help them putt better (I’m doing the former right now).

Without belaboring the point, this is my best direct translation of that MyGolfSpy tweet and how you should interpret most stuff you see on MyGolfSpy:

In 2026, we gave 79 cars speeding tickets on Florida state highways total:

26 souped-up Japanese sedans
29 German luxury cars
24 pickups

That added up to more than 50,000 speeding tickets.

- The average Japanese sedan was going 36 over the limit
- The average luxury car was going 22 over
- The average pickup was going 19 over

So, on average, pimped out Honda Civics didn’t just go faster than luxury cars. They didn’t just go faster than pickup trucks.

They were in their own tier.

In fact, only one car out of the entire conventional field went as fast as the average Honda with an Instagram sticker on the rear window: the Ram 2500 👀

I’m about to say something that’s been said a billion times before, and I’m not going to say anything remotely insightful about it, but:

You see a lot of people on their phones in public places, and I’ve started wondering, “what if they were vaping?” It’s not far off, I don’t think; there’s a lot of open-mouthed scrolling, and people look pretty zoned out while they’re doing it.

To be clear: I DO NOT say this because I think I’m above it. Actually, the direct opposite is true — once I started noticing it in other people, I started noticing that it’s actually mildly uncomfortable to leave my phone in my pocket while I’m waiting in line or eating a meal. I find myself wanting a hit of my phone. It feels compulsive and dependent and shitty.

I understand that this is an accepted part of contemporary life, at this point — to the degree that parts of my life would cease to function if I got a flip phone. I was an Android kid in high school and early college, and I can attest that the amount of shit you get from people for “green texts” makes a non-iPhone pretty untenable in my circles — it would have a tangible negative effect on my social life, which is fucking stupid, but it’s also true. Also: swing videos, a metronome, stat-tracking. Also “being reachable,” which is a shockingly high bar to clear these days.

I have a whole bunch of timers and hurdles and content-blockers and whatever else on my phone, and it makes the thing tedious to use (on purpose). I get a lot of shit when I’m talking with someone and mention something that we need to google, and I say “I can’t get on the internet on this thing right now.”

But none of this really actually works. I find myself scrolling between news apps where I’ve already seen all the headlines in the last ten minutes. If I’m really stuck, I’ll get on google maps and look at aerial views of golf courses. It’s not even the content that’s on the device at this point — I’m dependent on the dopamine hits from the device itself, and I feel it sucking the life out of me.

To be clear, this isn’t to any “holy shit he’s not doing his work because he can’t get off the phone” sort of thing. I think it’s a very normal (if not better-than-average) level of device dependence. But I do wonder: when did this become an acceptable way to live your life?

Right now, I’m running: OneSec, which makes you wait thirty seconds or complete a puzzle or something before you can open an app; Brick (actually “Normal,” a free clone of Brick), which makes you unable to open certain apps without tapping your phone on a physical object first; Screen Time timers on Twitter, etc. that strictly limit my Twitter use to 15 mins/day (I don’t even know my Screen Time password, my mom set it, so I couldn’t bypass it if I tried); Blank Spaces, a home screen that’s more minimalist and theoretically less appealing to use. In my kitchen, I’ve got a Pelican case with a hole drilled in the side, and I’ve routed a charging cable through the hole, and I’ve fashioned a combination lock to the outside with duct tape — when I go to sleep (ideally, when I get home at all), I put my phone on the charger and lock it inside the box. I’ve read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and have implemented that protocol twice.

So it’s not like I’m not trying.

You can see the problem when you look at the Mag 7 stocks right now:

• NVIDIA is worth $5.2 trillion for making chips

• Alphabet (Google’s parent) is worth $4.6 trillion for an array of mostly-free services tha make money for gathering your data

• Apple is worth $4.5 trillion for making the iPhone in your pocket and all associated services

• Microsoft is worth $3.1 trillion for making software for your devices and cloud-hosting web-services to support your scrolling

• Amazon is worth $2.8 trillion for getting you to buy stuff on your phone, but also for AWS, again web-services for (among other things) scrolling

• Tesla is worth $1.6 trillion for… promising robotaxis and not delivering them

• Meta is worth $1.5 trillion solely for getting you to scroll on your phone for as long as possible to serve you ads

After some quick (highly-flawed but directionally accurate) AI research, there’s roughly $16.5 TRILLION dollars of market value that’s directly predicated on getting you to use your phone as much as possible. The entire economy is set up to make this possible: social media platforms are deregulated under Section 230, supply chains for iPhones source 2,700 components made of 75 elements (2/3 of the periodic table) mined in 30+ countries and get it to you for (sometimes under) a grand; in 2025, I’m pretty sure there was more AI capex spending than on all consumer spending combined.

$16.5 trillion dollars and ~5.8 billion smartphone users. That means that that nearly $3,000 of market value is predicated on you using your device. For US users, throw in our consumer premium and you get over $14,500 (I think this figure is similar for a lot of the developed world). Make that the top half of US earners (I assume most golfers and therefore most ITW readers), and that number goes to over $20,000.

Put another way: if you stopped using your phone today, the market loses it’s $14,000-$20,000+ stake that its invested in your phone usage.

Not to mention, most of the features that keep us hooked (new features, more addictive scrolling feeds, etc.) can be deployed at nearly zero marginal cost. If these features are developed for one person, it costs next to nothing — not even pennies, way less than pennies — to serve that software to the next person, and the next, and the next. It’s not just that our attention is being bought — it’s being bought in bulk at a steeply, steeply discounted price.

So that $14,000-$20,000 stake is a bit misleading in this sense. Really, you’re up against all of tech capex — all the money spent on honing these platforms for maximum profit. For 2026, the Mag 7 alone are expected to spend $725 billion in capex, all of which is deployed at you at little more than the cost of electricity.

So you’re up against hundreds of billions of dollars of spending to protect the market’s $14,000-$20,000+ stake in you continuing to use your phone — a stake which they’ll deploy those hundreds of billions of dollars to turn into $22,000, then $25,000, then $30,000, then $40,000….

And we wonder why it’s so hard to stay off the damn things.

There’s a stat that I’ve heard (but haven’t vetted) that depression and anxiety rates are increasing among kids and this correlates pretty well with tech/social media adoption — but that the most depressed and anxious kids are those who don’t use social media. They feel left out as they watch their friends and peers using the services. I wonder if this isn’t only half of the problem — if there’s a population who finds life online unfulfilling and tries to avoid it in favor of the real world, but who finds that, after so much of the world has been sucked online, there’s not as much real world left to experience. If the real world they seek doesn’t really exist anymore.

All of this is basically a thought experiment designed to make me sad — basically, this:

— which is a pretty dumb way to think about and go through life. So I’ll ask instead, if anyone’s found some good ways to stay off their phones, keep me posted.

I talked about my putting earlier. It hasn’t been good. And I’ve been addressing this the best way I can: hitting a shitload of putts.

The game is called drawbacks: you hit a putt, and then, if you miss, you pull your next putt 3’ further from the hole than it ended up. You end up hitting a lot of 4’-6’ers, and hitting a lot of these gives you a lot more confidence in the putter. I play a bunch of holes of this, and I keep some stats to see if there’s any patterns.

I’ve been thinking about Zen in the Art of Archery, a book by the German professor Eugen Herrigel. Herrigel went to Japan for six years to study Zen Buddhism, primarily by studying Kyudo, a form of archery. The book, according to Wikipedia, “is credited with introducing Zen to Western audiences in the late 1940s and 1950s.”

The advice seems almost stereotypically simple most of the time: the goal is not proper technique but to have no technique at all, let go of your entire concept of self, etc. etc. I’ve only read the book once, and the whole thing seemed so simplistic and difficult that I couldn’t even comprehend what was going on.

Flash forward today, and I’m saying, to hell with everything I’ve learned and/or taught myself over the last year with regard to putting — I still suck at putting, so clearly it’s not helping. And I’m trying to stand over putts and focus on my breathing and the hole, and I have no technique or process beyond this.

I still go through the same routine I’ve always gone through, because that’s deeply engrained by now. But, if you asked me any “how do you” or “how are you” questions, I’m trying not to have an answer for you. Except I’m not trying, because trying anything would be a technique….

My college teammates used to call this “the tingle.” It developed as a sort of countercultural push to some of the statistics-based strategy advice we were given in college; instead of doing what the numbers told you to do, you’d “tingle it.” “Tingling” a putt can be considered directly antithetical to AimPointing a putt. You might not even bend down to read a putt you were tingling. Or you might. Who knows.

This is one of my favorite videos in the history of the internet:

Please watch it, because I think Will Sennett captures the essence of “tingling” better than I ever could. It’s also a core part of my subconscious (one of my most listened-to playlists on Spotify is called “Murder and Sprinting”, and I say “listen to the wind” at least once a week).

But, in any event…. Technique be damned, I’m tingling all my putts now. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

More relevant to the story here, I was told that I had one of the two genes for non-Celiac gluten intolerance. Celiac disease is a condition whereby gluten in the gut causes your immune system to attack the gut tissue itself — eating gluten can take literal years off your life. Non-Celiac is different. Your body simply stops making the enzymes that break down gluten as you age. Gluten, as an un-broken-down molecule, causes inflammation in the gut, and gut inflammation can lead to a variety of icky feelings.

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A few weeks ago, I ate a shitload of pasta, and my stomach started acting up. My stomach had been acting up once-in-a-while for months, if not years. My best guess was too many seed oils. But, after the pasta, I started putting the pieces together: that fried chicken was one of the worst offenders, that I started getting sleepy and nauseous after 3-4 beers (after twice breaking the 30 barrier in college), and that I’d been feeling a lot better as of late for switching my primary source of carbs to potatoes. There was no denying it anymore. It had caught up with me.

We had Princeton Reunions last week. This is why you didn’t hear from me; I was preoccupied doing my part in consuming the second largest private alcohol order in the United States.

Reducing myself to the way tangential acquaintances know me, I was known for a couple things in college, especially my Senior year. I was known for having a robust catalog of random hypothetical questions. I was known for wearing jorts and no shirt while playing beer die in the backyard. (Aside: more adults should play dye — if you’re unfamiliar, get familiar.) And I was known for really, really liking beer. Maybe this makes me sound like an alcoholic — I should clarify, I wasn’t known for drinking a ton of beer, but I was known for enjoying the beer I did.

Guys who drink seltzers instead of beers tend to be made fun of. I know this because I’ve ruthlessly mocked guys who drink seltzers instead of beers for my entire life. So I was presented a dilemma: I could either be a hypocrite and drink seltzers, or I could drink beer, protecting my dignity but detonating my stomach and my ability to enjoy the weekend.

I found a remarkably simple solution to this problem: Wild Turkey.

The first time I went to a bar after going gluten free, I ordered a Jameson neat. Jameson, to me, is fine for mixed drinks, but it’s not what I’m looking for when I drink whiskey by itself. We ended up going to another bar, and I flagged the bartender to order another drink. I hesitated, then ordered a peach High Noon. As soon as the words left my mouth, two things happened: I got a sense in my stomach that I’d violated my principles, and I saw a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 on the second shelf. I called the bartender back and changed my order: Wild Turkey neat. He gave me a look to say, “those were the two you were deciding between?” and went and got a tumbler glass, which he filled nearly water-cup level with Wild Turkey. I’ve learned this as well: whiskey is more expensive on a per-glass basis, but you get more bang for your buck.

A woman next to me, horrified, asked if I was going to take that as a shot. I assured her I absolutely wasn’t. I told her that I’d just gone gluten free, and that people would make fun of me if I started drinking seltzers, so I started drinking bourbon instead. She admitted that she definitely would have mocked me for drinking a seltzer. I asked if she wanted to mock me for drinking bourbon. She didn’t. We’re getting dinner at some point soon, so it’s working out for me pretty nicely.

Halfway through this booze talk, I realized it was a lot of booze talk. I’m not sure if a disclaimer here to say “I really don’t drink that much” makes it sound better or worse. Really, there’s two things going on.

First: I didn’t write a newsletter last week, and, in all honesty, this was because I was spending my Thursday, Friday, and Saturday hanging out with my college friends and consuming roughly 1000ml of Wild Turkey 101 from a frequently refilled hip-flask.

Second: I’m not sure what to write this week. At all. This is probably worth some further discussion, because I’m starting to realize that having a job, playing pro golf, and also writing a newsletter is really, really difficult. I keep trying to massage time such that I get all the work done I want to, but, at some point, addition is addition, and you don’t get more than 168 hours in a week.

Further harsh realities emerge when you look at the work product output. My paid work is easily measurable: I either get done what I was paid to get done or I don’t. Similarly, this newsletter is either published or it isn’t. Golf practice, on the other hand, can be more ambiguous. I’m not much one for measuring all my practice, as I’m a recovering left-brained psycho, so I usually go practice until it’s time to go home and make dinner and get to bed. Which is to say, there’s not a finished product that emerges at the end, so it’s more ambiguous whether you “got it done” or not.

In the past few weeks, I’ve done a bit of an audit of my time, specifically relating to golf, and I realized just how difficult it is to get done all the things I want to get done. It’s really difficult to get done all the practice I want to get done while working on multiple different writing projects. And so I’ve been half-assing a bunch of newsletters, putting off that one longer project I want to dig into, and sometimes not writing at all.

I’m not folding Into The Weeds. It’s not going on any sort of prolonged hiatus either. This is mostly a look into the current goings on in my life, as well as an extended explanation for why you just read as much as you did about me drinking Wild Turkey.

I’ve discovered that this newsletter works better the less I plan it in advance — it’s at its best as a more conversational thing cooked up in the moment. However, it’s getting harder and harder to justify spending a full day cooking up a newsletter on Fridays. I’m going to figure out how to solve this problem, and the newsletter will keep coming out, and hopefully everyone is happy.

In the meantime, aside from the talk about Wild Turkey, I have three more Things That Are Worth Your Time. I promised that I’d have one of these every week, at the end of each newsletter. I’ve then promptly forgotten until three minutes after I hit send on the last two editions. You’re owed Three Things, and so here’s three things.

1. Lamb Over Rice, Action Bronson

Action Bronson is probably my favorite rapper. I’m in no way a rap aficionado, but I can tell you that listening to Action Bronson makes me happy and is a hell of a good time.

Bronson (aka Dr. Baklava) released a new LP, Planet Frog, a couple weeks ago. I really enjoyed it. But I still can’t recommend any work of his above Lamb Over Rice, which I find difficult to describe other than “a rollicking good time.”

Without spoiling too much, here are the opening lyrics to “Tear Away Shorts”

The falcon feather 250 got me looking like Lorenzo Lamas
Long trench, shotty in it, at least I'm honest
Six flips into the whip like a Russian gymnast
The tear away shorts, it's back to business

as well as to “Descendant of the Stars”

They tried to sign your boy to a deal like a Japanese pitcher (Uh)
I heard Barkley bought a Mazda for a stripper (Uh)
Yo, what a shitty tipper, that's where we differ (Yes)
I hand her the keys to the Bimmer to uplift her

It’s a damn good time.

2. The TrapDraw, “Project Año – 1959”

I’ve done some work for the NLU guys in the past, so maybe this seems corrupt, but damn did I love this episode. DJ and Neil dug around whatever sources they could find to give us a breakdown of what happened in the year 1959. Why 1959? Because it wasn’t the 60s yet, but it’s also not that long ago.

At some point, while listening to this episode, I got some weird looks in the grocery store as I audibly gasped when I heard the words “Dyatlov Pass Incident,” which I’d completely forgotten about but that I’d dug into a couple late nights in college. If you’re not familiar, and if you’re at all interested in weird unexplained Russian bullshit, this episode is for you (though DJ’s conclusion of “slab avalanche” is irresponsible and I’ve told him as much). Also, a bunch of random history and a damn good time. Fire it up.

3. Joshua Rothman, “Why Is It So Hard to be Ordinary?”

I got a New Yorker subscription recently, after I was sent an article about Infinite Jest, which is about the best way I can think of to get me to shell out seven bucks to get past a paywall. And, as I try to ween myself off all things phone (as I’m doing literally all the time, in a Sisyphean-boulder sort of way), I figure reading more longform stuff is a step in the right direction.

I read the above article last night. I’m not totally sure what to make of it. On the one hand, my job requires that I try very hard to be exceptional, because that’s the only way I make any money. So the whole premise of “ordinary” is one I’m conditioned to reject on its face.

But there’s something in here that resonated with me, specifically in that not every moment is supposed to be extraordinary. There’s supposed to be a lot of ordinary stuff in our lives. This is by definition. I’m also intrigued by the whole idea of “good-enough-ness,” even though I hate our contemporary practice of reifying random phenomena with made up terms, as if we’re the foremost experts in a burgeoning field of “the shit I just cooked up in my head.” I long for a day when an idea can be good enough without needing a term coined and a definition established.

In any event. I read this article, and I’m still thinking about it. I’m not sure if any of it is wrong or right — I haven’t arrived at any conclusive evaluation of its merits. But I also wonder: what if we don’t have to? The whole world seems to be complaining about polarization, siloed thinking, absolutism — maybe our foremost mode of resistance is to read something, think, “Hm,” let it simmer in our heads a while, and ultimately never decide what to do with it. Maybe that’s good enough.

This is usually an odd question. Most people wouldn’t ask a chemistry student who their favorite chemist is. I guess that people assume that it’s like asking an English student their favorite author, or a music student their favorite composer, or an architecture student their favorite architect. There’s the assumption that the humanities deal with matters of taste, and that matters of taste say something about a person. Of course, philosophy, as a discipline, detests matters of taste, and the branch that deals with such matters (aesthetics) spends most of its time trying to be objective enough about taste-stuff to explain it away.

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That’s not the problem, though, because asking a chemistry student who their favorite chemist is wouldn’t be that weird. It’d be esoteric and difficult, and the answer probably wouldn’t be all that illuminating, but it’s fair enough. No, the reason that “Who’s your favorite philosopher?” is a weird question is because, every time, it’s asked with a look to imply, “Out of everyone in human history, who’s work sums up how you think we all should live our lives, all the time?”

It’s way too big a question. I’ve been asked probably fifty times, and I still don’t have a prepared answer, because I don’t know how to prepare one. If you’re asking whose work most significantly changed my whole worldview, I’d say Sarah-Jane Leslie, my thesis advisor in college, whose work on generic generalizations and psychological essentialism is, without exaggeration, what allows me to fight my overthinking demons and be a better version of myself every day. This would be an insane answer. It’s a bit like saying that Rhein Gibson is your favorite professional golfer — it’s an esoteric enough choice that you’d never make unless you knew them personally. I guess another answer could be Alva Noë, a philosopher at UC Berkley whose book The Entanglement I picked up a couple years ago and really, really enjoyed (and recommend). I guess that’d be like saying your favorite golfer is Paul Waring.

Both of these fail for being too niche — they’re people whose worldviews and perspectives I really enjoyed, mostly because they gave me a perspective on the world that I needed at the time I found them. That’s what I think it’s all about, anyways — “how we should all live our lives, all the time” and such. It pretty obviously depends on what you’re looking for.

If you want me to take your question more seriously, then I’d pick someone who leans into this ethos itself, in a meta sort of way — that everything is changing all the time, that seeing and interpreting the world dogmatically leads to imprecision and suffering, and that the best we can do is to pay attention with an open mind. So my answer would be the Buddha. But nobody wants to hear that, either.

So, while I search for an acceptable answer, I say Hegel. And that’s become my answer.

I never studied Hegel formally, but I have a funny story about him. The department threw a party for us when we turned in our theses, and my professor joked that “remember, your oral exams are on all of philosophy, so make sure you study up.” I had downed five Budweisers with some classmates in the basement bathroom (this was before we walked in, saw the professors were serving Martinelli’s, and realized this wasn’t a boozy event), and so I was loosened up enough to play along: “Oh my God, even Hegel?” The professor turned to a colleague, they looked at each other, and they laughed before saying, “God, which one was he again?” In a discipline that prides itself on its breadth, nobody can know it all.

But Hegel is great. Primarily because you can fake it pretty easily with Hegel. He’s the best philosopher in history for completely butchering what he said and still coming away with something interesting.

The primary idea is the “dialectic,” which works like this. You start with an idea, called the thesis. You have a good deal of evidence to believe that your thesis is at least mostly true. However, you have another idea, called antithesis, which also seems true but totally contradicts your thesis. This seems like a problem: you think each thing is true on its own, but they can’t both be true, because each one falsifies the other. But, with some ingenuity and creativity, you can come up with a new idea, called the synthesis, that satisfies the truth of both your thesis and antithesis. At which point, your synthesis becomes a new thesis, which is then susceptible to a new antithesis, and the whole thing follows like so:

The funny thing is that even this brief summary of Hegel wouldn’t satisfy Hegel himself, because he never liked the terms “dialectic,” “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” — because “Dialektik sometimes stands for the entire movement of the self-articulation of meaning or thought, this term refers more specifically to the self-negation of the determinations of the understanding (Verstand), when they are thought through in their fixedness and opposition.” To which I say: nah, screw you Hegel, we’re using our words.

At this point, you’ve seen a diagram and read a sentence that makes zero sense, and you’re probably assuming this is one of those newsletters that’s not about golf. Not so fast! All of this is about putting.

When I was in high school, I went six or seven weeks1 once without missing a putt inside 10’. This sounds nuts, but I swear it, at least in spirit. I couldn’t have possibly seen the line more clearly, and it felt like the ball was in a groove going to the middle of the hole. Golf couldn’t have been more fun.

That was eight years ago. Since then, I’ve produced a lot of good putting. But I’ve also produced a lot of shit putting. And I probably haven’t focused on my putting as much as I should — in my head, I’m a good putter, and I practice putting a lot, and both of those should end up being good enough. But, statistically speaking, I’ve put like total shit pretty much since I’ve turned professional.

At some point last year, 19 of the top 20 putters in the world used mallet putters. The lone exception was Ben Griffin, who used a blade. In November, Ben decided that he was tired of guys putting better than him, and everyone better than him was using a mallet. So he switched to a mallet. The first week he used it, he won at the World Wide Technologies. And then all 20 of the top 20 putters in the world were using mallets. As best I can tell, as of writing, 49 of the top 50 players in SG:Putting are using mallet putters (the lone exception: Jordan Spieth). 2

So I switched to a mallet. I had been putting like shit, and I figured switching couldn’t hurt. I continued to putt like shit. I went back to the blade, and putt like shit. And then, a month ago, I went and got another mallet. This mallet is face balanced, meaning that the center of gravity is on the same axis as the shaft with respect to the target line, promoting some stuff to do with face rotation during the stroke — allegedly, at least. Anyways, I’ve still been putting like shit.

Intermission:

In the middle of writing this, I had a bunch of milk crates deliver from Amazon, and I took a break to organize my trunk. I moved my stuff from cardboard boxes into the milk crates, then took the cardboard boxes to the dumpster, and…

…why is there a snapping turtle in my driveway?

The nearest pond I can find on a map is a couple hundred yards from my complex. What the hell is going on?

Anyways, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I had gone back to my blade at some point: I’d complained about feeling like I never felt lined up right with my old mallet, and a coach confirmed that I had trouble aligning myself. I went back to my blade, and I could line myself up great. But, over my next two events, my speed control started to suck. And I figured: mallets are more forgiving than blades, and, if I have a more forgiving putter, the ball will come off more consistently, and my speed control will be better. I was also told that I should try something face-balanced (see above), and so I got myself a new mallet to see how that would work.

When I picked up that new mallet, I told myself that I was free to experiment with it however I wanted. I ended up buying a couple different grips and as many weights as I could find, both head weights and counterbalance weights. And I did a test (with the help of my friend David): we marked a line on the ground at 20’ on a flat putt, and I rolled two balls at the line with a bunch of different weight combinations. For each combo, we saw how close the balls ended up to the line — and you only hit two putts, so you couldn’t get use to anything and it stayed purely reactive. Generally, I hit it past the line with heavier weights and left it short of the line with lighter weights. We found a combination where it felt super natural to stop balls right on the line, and then we measured the putter.

Two numbers are important here. First is total weight, which you measure in grams. But that’s only part of it. Imagine two clubs, both the same weight, but one had a really heavy head, and the other had a super light head but a bunch of weight in the grip. The heavy head club would feel heavier when you swung it, even though they’re the same weight. So you need to measure the “swing weight,” which measures where the weight in a golf club is distributed — effectively, how heavy the club will feel when you swing it. And you measure it on a device that looks like this (though usually something way more professional-looking):

Swing weights are measured on a “swing weight point” scale, measured from A-G and subdivided with numbers. My driver, for example, plays at D2, while my irons play at D4 — which means that my irons feel heavier than my driver. Both of these are pretty standard. Most swingweights are probably in the low-mid Ds, but I’ve seen a couple people play stuff at E0-E2 (usually wedges). Though that’s not always the case for putters.

Here’s my specs that I settled on with putter, the one I did the weight testing on:

Scotty Cameron Phantom X5 33.5” (face balanced)
Total Weight: 561.4g
Swing Weight: D8.4

I measured up my blade, the one I’d putt with for 12 years before toying around with mallets. Here’s what I got

Scotty Cameron Newport 2 33” (2014 — my OG)
Total Weight: 548.2g
Swing Weight: C9.7

I don’t have a great feel for how significant those 13g of total weight are, but I can tell you that 9 swing weight points is enormous.

I played real shitty this week, to an extent that I don’t really want to talk about. This is especially true because, in the last three days, I’ve been working hard on some new, really simple stuff, and I’m feeling really, really confident in how it’s going. So I’m deciding to focus on the positives more than the negatives and spare you the details.

But I had an eight hour drive home, a long time to think about all the putts I stood over that I never felt had a prayer of going it. I might as well have been putting blindfolded. And I decided, with the wisdom that comes only when you’re really, really fed up, that I wasn’t going to hit a putt with a mallet for a long time. Fuck it. I’d never putt well for any extended period of time with a mallet. I’d putt well in the past with a blade. We’re going back.

I didn’t have the heart to gut my longtime gamer, adding length and changing out weights. So I went to Edwin Watts and got another Newport 2 blade, this one an inch longer at 34”. I also found an identical grip to what came on the putter — Edwin Watts has a 90-day return policy, and, worst case, I’d throw the original grip back on it and nobody would be the wiser (my sister claims this is in the time honored tradition of “wearing the dress with the tags on”). I threw a Ping grip on it that felt nice, checked the weights (a little light, but decent — something I could hone in with some tape), and went out to putt.

I’ve spent a lot of time practicing my putting in the last few months. I have my own version of aimpoint to check my reads. I have an alignment stick to measure out my feet at address and keep it consistent, and it’s marked with ideal stroke lengths for a bunch of different putts. I found these ideal stroke lengths by building a model in Claude Code with some ideal physics. I’ve learned a shitload about putting in the last few months.

I went out to put with the new putter, a familiar shape I’d looked down at for 12 straight years, with some better weighting — and, suddenly, it all clicked. It all collapsed into one singularity. I was hitting putts that I knew, straight off the face, were going in the hole. I’d under-read one, and I’d know off the face that it would miss a hair low. I felt like I’d completely unlocked my ability to use all the skills that I developed.

I hit 100 4-footers in a row, a drill I do to practice my start line. I made all 100. Then I did a drill where I hit five 4-footers, three 6-footers, and two 8-footers from all sides of the hole. The goal is to make nine of the ten. I misread one, made the other nine, went back to the one I missed and drilled it in the center.

Without giving too much detail, I feel very similarly about the rest of my game right now: I’ve gotten some advice on how to practice and what to work on that really feels like it’s opened things up for me. And I’m excited about the future. We’ll see how it all goes — nothing counts until you’re able to pull it off in competition, after all. But I’m walking around with my head higher than I would’ve thought at the beginning of the week.

I said Hegel is my favorite philosopher (ish) because he’s the easiest to misinterpret effectively. As I’ve told the story, here, I’m realizing: there’s not much thesis-antithesis-synthesis going on with my putting. More accurately, I had two putters, I putt badly with them for two different reasons, and, once I isolated the variables and built a putter that works for me, I no longer feel like I’m putting terribly.

You see where I was trying to go, right? That each idea I had was contradicted by poor play until I was able to come up with a more universal solution?

Luckily for me, even Hegel wasn’t big on technicalities, it seems. He was dogmatically anti-dogmatic. Maybe. Even some of my professors didn’t know. But, at least, I hope he’d be glad I found an answer.

To be honest, I haven’t done all that much this week besides try to get better at golf. Which is definitely working. I’m not yet sure if it’s working enough, and that’s really what matters, and I’ll have to reevaluate that in the near future. But I have US Open Locals on Monday, so we’re really just focused on that right now.

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I’ve been putting like crap for a long, long time, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do about it. (Which is why this note is going to be another short one — because I have to figure out a way to have a prayer of a plus putting day on Monday, and I’ve gotta get out there and get to it.) This week I’ve: painted a longer line on my putter; set up with my shoulders more open; set up with my elbows more closed; set up with my left foot an inch behind the right one; gotten my eyes square over the ball; moved my eyes closer to the ball; taken 10g of headweight out; taken 25g of counterweight out. I’m not going to bother with the thought processes behind all of those — maybe I’ll update everyone once it starts working. And it sounds more complicated than it is; I’m just setting up differently to a slightly different putter, which is basically just going back to my old setup from high school.

In any event. That’s putting. As for approach play, I’ve gotten like 10 yards longer with every club in the bag over the last few weeks — which might sound cool to you, but really it means I have no idea how far the ball is going, and my best swings are launching balls well over the stick. Which is super, super, super annoying and unfun. I don’t like feeling like I’ve stuffed one and then standing over a tough up-and-down over the back of the green. It’s one of the more demoralizing feelings in all of golf.

So, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll be at the golf course, hitting a ton of short putts to get my stroke feeling decent again and seeing if I can produce consistent ball speeds with the wedges. But we have a deal here, and so I’ll get something in your inbox before then.

This week is golf-y again — I haven’t been thinking about much of anything besides golf for a while — but I think there’s some implicit stuff about how we should engage with and interpret data, which might say something about our broader society and what it means to be human. Or something. I’m not totally sure yet. Anyways, here goes.

The Debate: Should you leave yourself a 60 yard wedge?

Plaintiff: The Data

Here’s a useful chart from Lou Stagner, my former assistant coach and the guy I turn to with most questions data:

This chart shows the average proximity to the hole on the PGA Tour from distances in the fairway, rough, and bunkers, divided into percentiles of outcomes. Some examples:

• 90th percentile outcome from 60 yards: 3.9ft

• 50th percentile outcome from 60 yards: 12.4ft

• 10th percentile outcome from 60 yards: 31.0ft

Hopefully this is fairly easy to interpret. We’re going to be focusing on the fairway column here, so the left third.

Here’s another chart from Lou that shows expected strokes to hole out when putting from different distances:

As you can see, if you’re closer to the hole, you are more likely to get the ball in the hole in fewer putts. Going back to those previous examples from 60yds in the fairway, you’re expected to hole out in:

• 90th percentile outcome from 60 yards: 3.9ft —> ~1.18 strokes

• 50th percentile outcome from 60 yards: 12.4ft —> ~1.73 strokes

• 10th percentile outcome from 60 yards: 31.0ft —> ~1.99 strokes

From this, it’s easy to see that hitting it closer to the hole is better than hitting it farther away from the hole, which should be obvious, but is nice to see borne out in the data. (Aside: the data guys are adamant that these relationships hold regardless of how tough the putt you have is, and that a 6’ slider is always easier than a 9’er up the gut — we’re going to make this assumption as well, for now.)

I’m going to do some pretty basic translation magic and combine the two charts above, so we see that percentile-proximity chart, but measured in units of expected strokes instead of feet:

A couple things to note about this chart. First, it assumes that every ball is on the green, which clearly isn’t true — you have my personal guarantee that everything I’m about to say applies to shots in the fairway and rough as well, and, for the purposes of all the points I’m about to make, this is good enough. And I stopped the chart at 150yds, because that’s all we’ll need right now.

I don’t want to belabor these points too much, because the more interesting stuff is yet to come and I need to go practice. But you’ll notice that every single value on the chart is larger than the one above it and smaller than the one below it.

The Golf Data perspective goes like this:

1. Across the data set, any way you’d like to slice it, you are expected to hit the ball closer to the hole on a shorter shot than a longer shot.

2. If you hit the ball closer to the hole, you will finish the hole in fewer average strokes.

3. Therefore, if you want to make the lowest possible score, you should hit the ball as close to the hole as you can on every shot.

That sounds obvious. The important bit is that, if you’re laying up, you shouldn’t lay up to your favorite number. You should lay up as close to the green as you can. If your favorite number is 100yds, and you can hit a 3-wood up to 60yds without risking any trouble, then you should hit the 3-wood, because you’re expected to make a lower score from 60yds than from 100yds.

Maybe you’re asking, “well, what if I’m better from 100yds than 60yds?” You probably aren’t. There’s a bunch of ways to “prove” this:

• If you have a data-set of any size, unless you legitimately have the yips from 60yds, you’ll have hit it closer from 60yds than 100yds, on average. The data guys can nearly guarantee this. The chart doesn’t vary much individual by individual.

• Basic trigonometry at play: if you hit the ball from 100yds vs. 60yds, that’s 40% farther that the ball is traveling. If you hit it 1° offline, the 60-yarder will be 3.14ft offline, whereas the 100-yarder is 5.24ft offline. Said another way, for the same degree of tolerance, you’ll be 40% farther from the target.

I’m going to leave it at these two for now. The problem is just simple enough to have been nearly completely “solved” by the data guys, but just complex enough to keep discussing edge cases and whacking them with numerical mallets — which means it’s the gift that keeps on giving as well as Twitter engagement and dunking on boomer idiots who don’t know what a standard deviation is. At any given moment on Twitter, there’s a guy telling one of the golf statheads that some prospect stinks because his girlfriend is ugly, and Billy Beane gets to point at the guy’s OBP and look smart in front of the internet.

I’ve been skeptical of this hardline approach to statistics for years, where you consider the statistics as ontological bedrock from which all true golf knowledge flows. You can read more about this in a piece I wrote for No Laying Up in 2024, where I argue that there’s an a priori/a posteriori distinction — statistics are inherently descriptive (based on what happened in the past), and it doesn’t automatically follow that their predictive nature (that what happened in the past will happen again in the future) that statistics become prescriptive (inform what a player should do in the present). I make this point by appealing to the fact that golf shots are experiential and have associated emotion/sensation/qualia, all of which can impact the shot that’s actually being hit.

But the fact remains that the data are pretty conclusive: players hit it closer from 60yds than they do from 100yds. I, as a professional golfer, have a financial obligation to make sound decisions on the golf course — when presented with data this strong, it’s probably in my best interest to abide by its instructions.

That is, as with all things, unless I have a really good reason not to.

The Prosecution: 2x PGA Tour winner Michael Thompson

A note here to say that, while Michael gave me some great stuff to think about yesterday, I’m the one who’s putting those ideas in conversation with this statistical perspective. The parallels I’m drawing here are mine. So I’ll give him all the credit for anything good that comes of this and I’ll take all the blame for whatever doesn’t.

To properly dig into everything Michael’s told me on this subject would take a whole dissertation-length thing that I’m straight-up refusing to write right now (see: I need to practice). But I think there’s two relevant points to start with:

1. PGA Tour players, according to Michael, have two stock shots with each club: something full, and something that takes a little yardage off. This is especially useful is the “little off” shot falls halfway between your stock shots with two clubs (eg. full 8i 170, 3/4 8i 162, full 9i 155). Importantly, very few people have more than two of these swings with each club, simply because it takes too much time and effort to get really, really good at more than two swings. So: the vast majority of Tour players have two stock swings, and that’s it.

2. The way to hit a good golf shot isn’t to try to make a swing that produces the proper shot; it’s to visualize the shot you want to hit and let the vividness of that visual produce the swing you need. Trying to make a certain golf swing doesn’t work. You need to be absolutely focused on the golf shot you’re trying to hit.

Put these two together, and get:

• Have a short list of stock shots that you’re uber comfortable hitting, and be intimately familiar with how these shots look/feel, and utilize this list of shots (and the vividness with which you can visualize them) almost exclusively while playing golf.

This seems pretty sound, on its face. As I’ve been heeding this advice more and more, I believe it even more.

However, at the same time as this has been going on, I’ve gotten like 8yds longer with each club in my bag. Meaning that a full 60° wedge goes 112yds. A 3/4 60° now goes 105+.

So: I don’t have a “stock shot” for anything inside 105yds.

I asked Michael about this, how he thinks about short yardages with a 60°. He said he has one more swing with a 60°, that he only uses with 60°, that goes a little shorter than the 3/4 60°. That get’s him to ~65yds.

But, outside of that, it becomes a course management issue: simply never hit it to a spot where you don’t have a stock swing from that number.

Maybe you can spot the tension, here, between the two perspectives. Michael Thompson has won twice on the PGA Tour and he’s telling me to lay back to a stock yardage. The data say that I should be hitting the ball as close to the green as I can, all the time. There’s a conflict here, obviously.

I previously mentioned that “the data” are pretty conclusive in terms of what they suggest works and doesn’t, and so I’d need a very strong reason to go against it. The best thesis should win, and “the data” thesis appears very strong. So a thesis that would supplant it would have to be similarly strong while exposing weaknesses of the former thesis.

Again, I could probably write 10,000 words really digging into this (and would need to, to get to the bottom of anything). But I need to practice, and I don’t think that 10k words of theory is actually going to get me that far, compared to actually just trying this stuff out in practice. So here’s my best, briefest effort.

1. There’s only so much time in the day to practice golf. As such, it’s a lot easier to get really, really, really good at a couple stock shots than to try to get that good at a whole bunch of shots. If you can spend all your practice time on those stock shots and not have other things on your plate, then your stock shots get even better — and then playing only these stock shots on the course means you’re only hitting shots you’re really good at.

2. You also only have so much energy in a day. As someone who hasn’t been the most visualization-heavy in the past, visualizing every shot in vivid detail is surprisingly exhausting. Now consider: visualizing a stock shot you’ve hit a million times is easier to visualize and feel yourself hit than a touchy 60yd wedge you don’t have a stock swing for. As such, hitting only stock shots (and leaving yourself only stock shots) is an energy conservation play.

3. You can apply the energy-conservation stuff to the decision making process as well: just hit whatever club off the tee/laying up that gives you a stock number. That’s just (distance to the pin) – (stock number). Very easy.

4. A second-order effect on par-4s: if, instead of hitting driver to 60yds, you hit 2i to 100yds, you’re going to hit more fairways and keep more balls in play. If you think that you’re better off hitting your approach from 100yds than from 60yds, and you’re more accurate with 2i than driver, then you win on both fronts. There’s no trade-off.

These are strong ideas. It’s not strong enough to say, conclusively, that the data guys are wrong. I’d need a lot more work to do that. In fact, none of this really attacks the data-driven thesis at all — it’s simply an alternative viewpoint.

However, the PGA Tour ShotLink dataset is not infallible. PGA Tour golf is a wildly unique animal. It’s not some universal dataset of every conceivable shot hit by all the best players. There are some abnormalities. I’ve talked about one of these in the past: if I hit my approach shots at a PGA Tour average level on the golf courses I play on, I’ll be wildly behind them. PGA Tour courses are so firm and the pins are so tucked that players have to play away from the pins; mini tour golf courses are soft and you can fire at everything. So you need to add this aim-difference radius to the PGA Tour data if you actually want to compare apples to apples.

Emphasizing, here, that this is just a theory. It’s totally untested. I haven’t dug into this at all, and I have no numbers to support it.

But:

In WWII, the US military analyzed its bombers that returned from combat and documented where they’d been shot. They ended up noticing the pattern above: damage was mostly to the tips of the wings, the interior of the wings and midsection, and the tail flaps. Planes appeared not to be shot in the cockpit, the engines, the midpoints of the wings, or the thinner parts of the fuselage.

Some engineers recommended adding armor to the areas where planes were frequently being shot. However, the statistician Abraham Wald noticed that these patterns were being observed on the planes that made it back. As such, this was a map of all the places a plane could be shot and still make it home. The US military instead armored all the places that weren’t shot up, thus reinforcing the areas that were actually most devastating to be shot.

Everyone on the PGA Tour is there because they’re really good at playing their game. Emphasis on their game. Some players are probably very comfortable hitting 60yd wedges, and so they leave themselves 60yds and hit it close. Other players are probably less comfortable hitting it to 60yds, and so they don’t lay up to that distance, and they don’t hit 60yd wedges. The result is that the only guys in the dataset hitting 60yd wedges are the guys who are comfortable hitting them.

Is there a survivorship bias here? Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t have enough access to PGA Tour data to really dig in and figure it out. Even if I could, the data doesn’t account for those external factors like energy conservation and such. I have no way of knowing if a given player would play better golf if they hit it to 60yds than to 100yds.

All I know — I have to assume — is that everyone is doing their best to play the best golf they can. And a player who’s won twice on the PGA Tour is telling me that a lot of guys aren’t hitting it as close to the green as they can, no matter what the data says. Isn’t that interesting enough to consider?

It’s odd, if you think about it. The newsletter, for all its merits, is actually a fairly impersonal form of communication. It’s intimate, I guess, but it’s not personal, simply because of the mechanism involved. You get an email in your inbox and you read it, and you’re aware that the author is in no way writing to you, specifically, as yourself. He’s writing to a general audience. The notion of a greeting becomes fairly diffuse, in this sense.

You might consider this and believe that yours is the lonelier end of the transaction. I think you’d be wrong. You, the recipients, together, are the audience. You’re a group. I’m just some guy who types some stuff up, hits “send,” and goes about the rest of his day. It’s just me, on this end.

Once in a while, someone will hit “reply” on one of these emails and send me a note. This is always a massive thrill for me. I think I’ve responded to nearly all of these notes, though I must confess a bit of a bad habit: sometimes, I’ll read your message, mark it as read, and leave it in my inbox to find again later. I think there have been some casualties in this process, some notes that I never replied to. I should remedy this soon.

Know this: if you’ve sent me a message as a reply to an Into The Weeds newsletter, I’ve absolutely read it more than once. If you sent me a pre-tournament well-wish, I can promise you, with 100% certainty, that I’ve read your note on the way from the putting green to the first tee. I owe you all a response, but, in the meantime, please know that your notes did find me.

It’s thoughts like this that make me scrunch my eyebrows and tilt my head when I open a newsletter with “howdy.” The nature of our relationship is quite strange. It might seem, given the unilateral mode of communication, that I’m not really here. I am. So, in a sense, I guess “howdy” makes more sense than I give it credit.

So: Howdy.

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None of this has anything to do with the newsletter, by the way. I just like to ramble sometimes.

I’m punting another week on the project I teased last time. I’m taking some shots at a rather prominent figure in the golf ecosystem, and I’m hoping it might get some legitimate traction in the broader golf-media landscape (fingers crossed — a guy can hope). It’s the kind of thing where I think I best come correct.

So this is another filler episode, of sorts. I’ve wanted to do a version of this concept for a while, and it’ll probably be a weekly feature moving forward, but I’ll kick it off with a bang this week. Without further ado, here’s—

Five Things That Are Worth Your Time

[All links are clickable]

1. Lingus — Snarky Puppy

In any such list, this was always predestined to get top billing. The jazz-fusion band Snarky Puppy recorded their album We Like It Here in front of a live audience in the Netherlands. I like the record enough (“What About Me?” and “Outlier” are probably the other standouts), but “Lingus” is the clear reason to involve yourself in any of it.

My opinion: nobody has ever been deeper in the pocket/zone than Cory Henry is on the synths in the back half of this song. It’s the most mind-blowing live musical performance I’ve ever seen, bar none. Maybe someone will fight me on this, but that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.

There’s a lot of music stuff I wanted to throw in here, so here’s some runners up in the shred division:

Drums: Para — Baard Kolstad (Rendezvous Point)

Drums: Parhelion — Clark McMenemy (Ihlo)

Bass: Prayer Position — Nolly Getgood (Periphery)

Guitar: Dots — Keshav Dhar (Skyharbor)

2. “On Self Respect” — Joan Diddion

I’ve mentioned this essay in probably 25% of my newsletters over the last six months. Writing this good needs no introduction, so I won’t give much, aside from two notes.

1. The piece was famously written to fill a layout gap in Vogue magazine after another writer failed to turn in a piece — as such, it was written to an exact character count. Not a word count — a character count.

2. I enjoyed it well enough the first time I read it, but it really opened up for me the second time. Other people have expressed similar sentiments to me. It’s quick; it’s worth reading twice.

3. Algorithmic Redistricting: Elections made-to-order — AlphaPhoenix

AlphaPhoenix is the YouTube handle for a guy with an physics PhD who does a bunch of cool shit in his spare time. He’s done things like weigh a 737 as it was flying overhead and record a beam of light from a laser in his garage (as in, literally recording the beam of light moving across his garage — it’s wild.) But my favorite video of his is, for whatever reason, the Gerrymandering video.

The above might seem like a politics video. It’s not. It’s a computer science video. Fear not!

In the above video, you’ll learn how a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulated Anneal algorithm works. I can’t tell you why knowing this will make your life better. I can only tell you that it will. It’s super geeky shit, but I think it’s fascinating. Plus, you’ll learn that our politicians can’t even do Gerrymandering well, which is very cool.

4. The Enchiridion — Epictetus

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations gets a lot of run. I have nothing against the Meditations. I also think that the wrong book got popular, because the Enchiridion exists.

Epictetus was born a slave in what’s now western Turkey, and he grew up in Rome as the servant to one of Nero’s secretaries. Education was his best means for upwards mobility, and he studied Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus, later gaining his freedom and teaching philosophy for the rest of his life. His writings include the Discourses and the Enchiridion, the latter of which translates to “Handbook” and is meant to summarize his teachings.

The Meditations are a series of disconnected journal entries compiled over a decade or longer; the Enchiridion is meant to be more comprehensive. Epictetus’s writings have influenced figures from US Presidents to French Enlightenment thinkers. But his most famous influence was on Marcus Aurelius himself — in fact, Epictetus might’ve been the most influential philosophical influence on Aurelius, and Aurelius cites his ideas in his Meditations.

The Enchiridion is roughly 5,000 words and can be read cover-to-cover in an hour. But it’s divided into sections that make for easy sporadic reading. I’ve since gotten more invested in Buddhist thought than Stoic thought, but I’ve re-read some recently, and I remembered just how well put together it all is. It’s incredible. Certainly worth your time.

5. Stanley Tucci’s 15 Minute Bolognese

I don’t know much about Stanley Tucci aside from the fact that he’s Stanley fuckin’ Tucci. I’m not sure if this is an age thing or what. I saw him in Conclave. I remember him being in a Mission Impossible movie even though I’ve confirmed he wasn’t. Otherwise, I know very little about the guy, for whatever reason.

That is, aside from the fact that he makes living an interesting life seem remarkably accessible, if you’re willing to put in a hair of effort, and this is the essence of some Tucci-esque swagger. You can wear a turtleneck and make a great mixed drink and have opinions on things, and none of this needs to be difficult or a big deal, both of which qualities increase the cool-factor of already cool stuff. The result of all of this is that I consider Stanley Tucci a personal inspiration while knowing next to nothing about the guy himself or any of his professional worth — it’s all just an ambiguous perception of an ethos that I really dig.

In any event, I make his bolognese recipe all the time. It takes 15 minutes. At this point I can do it in 12. A real bolognese takes hours to reduce, and so you might call me a shitty Italian and a fraud, but I have the backing of Stanley Tucci. I call it a “fauxlongese” and I like it. I’ve been adding a clove of garlic at the beginning and a splash of red wine at the end, and it makes it even better. I’ll keep workshopping it probably until the day I die.

If you can handle throwing vegetables in a food processor and boiling pasta water, you have the culinary expertise to get this done, and it’s well worth it.

Bonus: When We Cease to Understand the World — Benjamin Labatut

This is a novel, and it’s not accessible online (at least, not for free), so it doesn’t feel entirely fair to include on the list. But I absolutely adore this book. Labatut, a Chilean writer, is easily my favorite fiction writer presently working, and his more recent The MANIAC was quite good. But When We Cease to Understand the World is next level phenomenal, and it remains my second favorite novel of all time, and it’s my favorite that’s under 1,000 pages.

The plot more or less follows theoretical physicists at the turn of the 20th century as they realize that classical mechanics is doing a poorer and poorer job of making sense of the world. The physicists grapple with a world that they (ahem) cease to understand. It’s beautifully written (and translated, from Spanish) and deeply personal.

It’s so easy, in our contemporary age, to overestimate our grasp on our reality. There are things that we can be expected to place monolithic trust in, “The Science” being one of them. But it’s worth remembering just how little we know about the world, with two upshots: to continually and rigorously examine situations/results/recommendations/paradigms on their own individual merits, and to get comfortable with not-knowing things beyond our limits. After all, if the world wasn’t confusing, then we would have no need for art, human connection, or the things that make us feel alive — the things that guide us when we’re called beyond the limits of what we concretely know. More than we often realize, we are responsible for making our own sense, and responsible for doing without sense when sense can’t be made.

Some housekeeping. This is going to be one of my shorter posts, though it might be one of my most popular, for the golfers. I’ve started work on next week’s already, which will also be golf-y (though I think also entertaining to non-golfers) and which (I have a hunch) will be the most popular thing I’ve ever published. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I published this article last week:

Into the Weeds

Runaround

On Thursday afternoon, I drove a little over 300 miles up to Atlanta, GA, to see my friend Jeremy. Jeremy is largely indescribable beyond making your most “golden retriever” friend seem like a rabid mountain lion — but, as far as Xs and Os, we were college teammates for three years, and we were in a band; I played drums, and he played guitar…

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4 months ago · 4 likes · Connor Belcastro

This came out on a Monday, so you might’ve missed it. But I think I really put a finger on something. So, for this week, I’d really appreciate if you went back and read it, if you missed it the first time around.

Now, who wants to get better at golf?

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I have taken great pride, over the years, in not turning to the internet for golf advice. I have plenty of friends whose entire Instagram Reels page is swing breakdowns. These guys will tell me about the coaching philosophies of guys they’ve never worked with, most of whom live halfway across the country.

This might come as a shock to you, but: I have a really tough time recalling other people’s golf swings. If you told me to picture a Tour pro’s golf swing right now, in my head, I could probably do it for like ten guys, maybe — ‘97 Tiger, Rory, Scottie, Cam Young, Xander, Gotterup… Fleetwood maybe? Reed? That’s all I’ve got. Most of those are stretches, by the way — I can sorta picture them, but I’m not sure I could tell you anything useful about any of them.

In this respect, I’ve always found the accusations that I “overthink golf” to be kind of funny. I’m doing some algebra to guess how a ball is going to roll across a hill. You’re claiming enough working knowledge of biomechanics — and how they translate from someone else’s body to your own — to make actual decisions about what to do with your golf swing. This is from people who can’t even name the four muscles in their quad.1 It’s wild!

As a result, I’ve avoided any internet golf advice like the plague, and I’ve only listened to my swing coach. This has served me very well, and I recommend anyone else who’s reading do the same.

However, this week on the putting green, I started talking with another pro about the grip, and he recommended I watch the following video:

Even this video, I think, overcomplicates the core principle at hand — so I’ll simplify it here. But it talks about some stuff that’s so blatantly obvious that it’s clearly genius.

Essentially, different people are built in different ways, including how their arms hang when they stand in a golf posture. You can see this for yourself if — you can do this right now — you stand like you’re going to hit a putt, you tuck your elbows into your sides, and you hold your hands out in front of you (kind of like you’re going to grip a putter, but without putting your hands together). Are your palms facing slightly up, or slightly down, or are they pretty neutral? The goal is to do this as naturally as possible so you learn the way your body likes to hang.

When we’re putting, we’re trying to keep the putter face as square as possible through the stroke.2 Put another way: we’re trying to avoid twisting the face. This seems easy/obvious enough. All you have to do is put your hands on the putter and not twist them during the stroke.

But: what if you’re gripping the putter in a way that’s predisposing yourself to twisting?

For years, I’ve tried to grip the putter with my elbows in my sides and my hands mostly under the grip. But, when I do that standing thing and check my hands, my palms face slightly down. This means that my left hand, placed somewhat under the grip, wants to roll on top of the grip — which, in turn, opens the face. My right hand wants to do the opposite, rolling on top to close the face. The result is a lot more complicated than “those cancel out” — my stroke loses its arc, and the face stays pointed at the target too long, and everything gets super inconsistent.

There’s a longer version of this discussion where I tell you everything that happens from this point forward — the left hand dominates, keeping the face open, which means the arc gets inconsistent, which means I need to make little corrections to hit the center of the face, at which point my speed control goes to absolute shit. The part that matters here is that, for a while, putting has felt, way, way too hard.

Here’s what I did earlier this week. I sat on a putting green for a long time, and I hit a ton of one-handed putts. I started with my left hand. I hit five putts with my hand on the putter the way it normally is, and then I hit five with my hand more on top of the putter, and then I hit five with my hand more on the underside. And then I did the same thing with my right hand only.

Notice which grips make it easiest to hit your start lines. Make special note of how much the face wants to rotate: if the face is pointed at the hole at the end of your stroke, that’s too open; if its pointed way shut, that’s too shut. It should roughly follow the same arc as your putting stroke. (If you have a Visio mat or similar — something with an arc to follow — this is a great time to use it.) Mostly, you should feel like it’s easy to start the ball on line without much effort, and that the putter is helping you instead of you having to wrangle it.

For me: I realized that my hands want to be more on top of the grip rather than underneath. So I rotated my hands on the grip so they’re a little more palms-down, and I found a spot that was comfortable.

And I haven’t had so much fun putting in years. I felt like I could just hit my start lines without thinking about it, and I could focus all my energy on speed and hitting cups. I had been wondering forever why it felt like so much effort to get the ball started on line. Now I knew: I was fighting against my own forearms on every stroke. And I could just go around “putting to the picture” and running a whole bunch of putts right at the hole. I’ve never made or nearly-made so many 30-footers.

If you’re a reader who plays golf, go experiment. Hit some one-handed putts rotating your hand on top of and under the grip, and do this until you find a spot that makes hitting your start line feel sort of effortless. There’s a sweet spot in there that you’ll find. Then, just do your best to put both your hands on the club in a way that matches the angles you just found, and the ball should start on line without you doing too much else.

Happy camping!

Jeremy graduated a semester later than he was scheduled to, and he’s the only person I know to have a cool reason for this: he took a semester off school to shoot a TV show for Amazon Prime called The Runarounds. A project by the Outer Banks creator, The Runarounds centers around five kids who start a band. I could tell you more, but actually I couldn’t, because I haven’t watched it yet — which is embarrassing to admit, because it’s a show on a major streaming service (that I actively subscribe to) that co-stars someone in the upper pantheon of my best friends. Jeremy assures me that I’m not a bad friend for this fact, though we both admit he wouldn’t tell me if I was. I can, at least, tell you that the music is fun.

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That’s the important commercial angle of the enterprise: The Runarounds is a TV show, but it’s also a touring band. The goal is to create both a successful TV product and a successful touring musical act, and for both of these enterprises to support the other. Recently, it was revealed that The Runarounds, the TV series, had not been renewed for a second season — but the musical act is viable and healthy, and so the diversification ultimately did lead to the project’s success.

Back in 2023, before the show aired, The Runarounds (I guess I’ll stylize the TV show in italics and the band in regular type) played at Princeton’s Lawnparties, a single-day music festival celebrated as one of the only days the student body finds a way to let its hair down. And they actually let me hop in on drums for a song. So, when I found out that they were playing The Tabernacle in Atlanta on a day that I was free, and that Jeremy could get me a backstage pass to see everyone again, it couldn’t have been more obvious how I’d be spending my Thursday afternoon.

Being backstage at a rock concert with same-age peers is one of the rare moments in my life that a solid outfit is less of a decision in itself and more of an outright obligation, and I’d thrown on my favorite XL thrifted t-shirt, a Memphis Chicks hat, some baggy jeans, round tortoise-shell sunglasses, and my boots. I’d still be wildly outdressed by every single member of the band (as I’d hoped — anything else would be against the order of the universe and indicate something wrong with one of us, or both). But, ducking into the venue through the back entrance, I apparently looked showbusiness enough to get some murmurs from the crowd that had built up outside — a statement that’s far cooler to consider without knowing who this cohort actually was.

I’m about to reference a subject matter that’s both totally essential context and absolutely zero-win for any writer who’s ever broached it — with the potential exception of Nabokov, which works in the (far creepier) inverse direction and holds contradictory distinctions as both a near-unanimous top-20 work of English fiction and something too stomach-churningly perverse to even consider actually reading. But, as a sheer matter of demographics, the audience at a Runarounds show is overwhelmingly female, of which seemingly half can legally drive and a third could vote. And so the commercial viability of The Runarounds is predicated on selling a feeling that its primary audience can experience but won’t understand (or even be able to name) for a couple years.

Jeremy had asked if I’d prefer to watch the show from backstage or head out into general admission. I’m of the belief that live music is meant to be experienced on your feet, shoulder-to-shoulder with as many people as possible. I told him, walking in, that I’d be fine watching this one from stage left.

You might think that the primary boon of backstage passes is the backstage access itself, bringing you into the rock-and-roll orbit such that you have a laminated card that denotes, by proximity, tangible coolness. This, while tangentially accurate, is actually almost antithetical — it’s much easier to wonder if you’re sand in the gears of an otherwise well-oiled rock machine, worrying that you’re standing in people’s way even after multiple band members have assured you that you aren’t. The added “cool” that you feel mostly comes from walking past people paying $13 for a tallboy as you go backstage to get a fresh beer from the band’s stash. (Even better: pouring from the bottle of Japanese whiskey you brought the band before the show, bringing it in front of the barrier, and drinking it in front of someone choking down a flat Mich Ultra Lime.)

But that’s to do with how cool you feel, perceptibly, which is totally separate from the coolness of your experiences in themselves. These are cool precisely by your proximity to the band, chief among which is that you get a definitive, first-person answer to the age-old question: “but what are they really like?”

The Runarounds run onstage to a sound that’s exclusively produced at boy-band concerts, the same way that there’s no other place in the world that you can hear an authentic Masters roar. Two of them wear tight t-shirts; two wear baggy t-shirts. All of them wear hair that touches their collar. They play two songs back-to-back before they introduce themselves, led by Will, their alleged frontman. I say alleged because of their other frontman, Axel, who’s a couple inches shorter, a couple feet more animated, and appears to be the act’s real center of gravity. Will and Axel are, in this sense, foils, such that a majority of the audience can prefer Axel while still feeling subversive for doing so — though maybe I’m reading too much into it.

A better explanation, given that this was the only Runarounds show I’ve seen (TV or concert), is that Will was sick and Axel picked up his energetic slack. As they introduce themselves and launch into their third song, Will says, “I’ve been feeling pretty sick today, so I’m going to need your guys’ help singing this one. Can you do that for me?”

This line is almost comically contrived for exactly the kind of audience reaction it successfully elicits — except that Will genuinely feels substantially unwell. I was told this when I met him backstage, during which he gave me a brief-but-warm welcome before ducking into another green room to practice something. An hour later, he walked up to me apologizing. He explained that he was feeling under the weather and was sorry for being antisocial earlier. He’s completely off-base, in that he was nothing but pleasant earlier and has nothing to apologize for. But this is only tangentially the point; the point is that he’s completely earnest in saying this. He wants me to have a great time at his show, and, even as he’s somewhat compromised by a cold, he takes his part in everyone’s good time seriously.

A colleague once christened me “The Earnest Boy,” a moniker that’s so wildly accurate that I have no hope of ever transcending it. So I find extra comfort in the fact that Will, along with the rest of the band, are also, bang-on, “Earnest Boys.” These two words describe all the similarities between us, to a degree that we all legitimately got along and enjoyed a pretty great backstage hang.

But, at 9pm, the band went out on stage to be ogled, and I went to the fridge to grab a Peroni and ogle. These paths are indicative of some tangible differences between us — the obvious of which is one of medium, that they are literal rock stars who draw substantial paying crowds to watch them onstage, and I’m a writer, a title most commonly associated with verbs like “contemplate” or “skulk.” But I think this is lazy; what we’re really looking for is the underlying characteristics that made some of us rock stars and some of us writers. And I think that has to do with “stubbornness.” Or “dissatisfaction” — though the two might be identical.

This is the part where I do some blade-running between “seeming pejorative” and “using excessive self-deprecation as a hedge against seeming pejorative.” Will is a rock star, and I’m pretty happy with my life — I have nothing negative to say about either. But the two are essentially different. And I think the reason we excel at totally different things has to with Will’s — the whole band’s — ability to be nothing besides a rock star.

To be clear: you can’t be a rock star. I can’t be a rock star. Neither of us can be rock stars the way that real rock stars are rock stars, because real rock stars are able to, actively, not be anything beyond a rock star.

I’ve met Will twice, and both interactions were fairly short. I can’t claim to really know the guy beyond some small talk and a 90-minute set. For all I know, he’s doing peptide-sequencing research on the tour bus. I doubt he’s reading Anna Karennena in the native Russian. Both of these are besides the point — it doesn’t matter what he does when he’s not being a rock star. What matters is that, while he’s at the venue, he’s a rock star, and being a rock star entails the totality of one’s personhood being channeled towards rock-stardom.

Here’s my thesis: Rock-stardom is essentially a quality of being watchable, which is near enough to self-evident that I won’t make a further case. The better line of investigation is to ask where this “watchability” comes from, and I think it’s this: watchability is directly proportional to the portion of itself that the watched thing is able to project in the moment it’s being watched. And so: rock-star-level watchability entails a near-total projection of one’s self and personhood onto an audience, all at once.

At this point in the show (with respect to the notes I took on my phone), Will yells, between songs, “Guys, the DayQuill just kicked in, and I feel great!” The group proceeds to banter about drugs and how they make you feel better, except about over-the-counter drugs, which is hilariously positioned as edge-adjacent enough to get the kids in the crowd riled up while legitimately providing nothing of substance for an adult to be upset about. It’s a perfect bit of show-banter, so much so that it’s impossible for it not to have been staged — except that I know for a fact that it wasn’t, because I was backstage when such a staging would have occurred. Like a great magic trick systematically eliminates the mechanisms by which the trick could have been done, seeing behind the curtain backstage leaves me with only one plausible thing to believe: that these kids are simply geniuses at these sorts of things, and this genius — and the fact that it’s genuinely not lab-grown — makes them rock-star watchable.

The DayQuil stuff is a segue to Axel, the edgier, wilder frontman (I’m trying hard not to say “sexier,” though Axel himself is 23, so maybe that’s fine) who’s apparently become a bit of a teen sex symbol. And so I guess it’s possible to view Axel in the context of various moral panics about teen sex symbology — which is hilarious to think about, as you realize the level of genius that’s involved.

Axel’s primary skills are two-fold: being a very good guitarist, singer, and performer; and being at least 50% over-the-top in all his on-stage mannerisms/gesticulations/expressions, but without seeming like he’s doing it on purpose. Whether any of it is on purpose has more to do with how cynically you view boy bands and is totally besides the point (my money, personally, is on it being USDA organic). What matters is that it all plausibly could be real, which is very much non-trivial.

I’ve always been a strong public speaker. This has been true since I was really young. I’ve been comfortable getting behind the drums in front of crowds, including one time when we played in front of a couple thousand people. But, if you put a microphone in my hand and told me to riff about DayQuil, you’d be able to see from the back row that I was full of shit. My fear of non-descript public embarrassment would bubble up, and the façade would crack — something that everyone would instantly see on my face, which would make me feel more full-of-shit, at which point the cycle would go super-critical and everyone in the room would die of embarrassment’s equivalent of radiation poisoning.

But Will and Axel are able to do this, flawlessly. Think about yourself in these shoes, what’s asked of a person in this role. Think of the psychic double-backside-1440 you’d have to land just not to get shelled with crowd-flung tomatoes. Now think of the precision required for that audience to actually have a good time. Any questions of “are these guys for real or is this an act” become very instantly moot when you recognize the degree of difficulty involved. Furthermore, it becomes obvious that there’s enough latent talent required to be wildly impressive, whether it’s conceived or otherwise. (And all my experiences backstage suggest that these guys were cast for their pre-existing talent — nature dominates nurture, here.)

There’s an additional layer to the whole operation; the underlying logic applies to Will as well, and to the whole band, but it’s most obvious when talking about Axel. My understanding is that Axel’s character (again, haven’t seen the show) is the obligatory character to cut class to smoke pot on the roof (for some reason, in this context, it has to be “pot,” right?). But he’s not the nihilist escapist edgelord who stereotypically fits the archetype. He’s a peppy, upbeat guy who’s more interested in general hijinks than anything truly subversive. His role is more philosophically constructive role than philosophically destructive, and he stands for certain things rather than the stereotypical edgy fingerless-gloved stoner who stands against everything.

All of this adds up to a fascinating artistic prospect: Axel is able to affect the feeling of subversion without the downsides of genuine subversiveness. He has long 80s hair, he wears tight t-shirts, he plays a guitar slung way down low. His onstage chemistry with Will is a bit Abbot/Costello-ish — Will generally sticks around the mic, and Axel’s running-and-jumping antics almost present as a challenge to Will’s authority. He, again, is undoubtedly a rock star.

But there’s something almost funny about this when you take into consideration who Axel is, as a person. He’s, in my head, like 5’7”. I say this with uncertainty, because I’m awful at guessing heights, even though I’ve stood next to the guy within the last 48 hours. He’s one of the more non-threatening human beings I’ve ever met. He, technically speaking, is “the dangerous one” in the group — but this is laughable, because if you actually had to fight him, you’d kick his ass with a strong nasal exhale and some tickling.

Axel (or his character, at least) will smoke weed on the roof of his house but won’t cruise around town batting-down mailboxes at 2am. The kids in the audience don’t know the difference — they’re like fifteen, so it’s all edgy. But, to the parents, this distinction is everything. They’re concerned with adult matters of right and wrong w/r/t raising their kids, and none of Axel’s antics arise to the level of true moral wrongdoing. Not even close. And so the upshot is twofold: Axel (1) seems subversive to the target audience, scratching the adolescent itches for rebellion, mischief, and chaos, while (2) being obviously “good” enough for these kids’ parents to deem him an acceptable quasi-role-model. He presents the illusion of total recklessness to the kids while projecting an ethos of total safety to the parents. And, from here, the commercial implications are obvious: the kids want tickets to the show, and the parents are happy to buy them.

All of this — everything I’ve laid out in the last 1800 words — only works if all of this information is transmitted, in its entirety, by moment-to-moment affects on stage. These are wildly valanced, layered phenomena, all of which must be embodied by five individual performers in such a way that they create a larger whole. The parts and the whole must be continuously presented in their totality for every single moment of the show. Any crack, and the illusion shatters; but there’s never a crack, and you realize there’s no illusion at all. The card really disappears; the coin was behind your ear. These guys are who they appear to be. It’s all real.

This is what it comes down to: Axel is able to be only and entirely Axel while he’s onstage, in the same way that Will can be only and entirely Will. Alongside the other performers, they’re only and entirely The Runarounds. The essence of their watchability — their compellingness — is their ability to be nothing more than the thing they are in that moment. Nothing gets in the way. They are completely The Runarounds, and you believe that that’s completely themselves.

I have an ex who’s achieved some minor celebrity as a professional athlete. She’s also achieved some apparently serious regional celebrity, though I’m not from that region, so I don’t actually know. My feelings about this have been simple to experience but are tougher to state outright.

Here’s what happens. I’ll be on my phone — redownloading Instagram to see a message someone sent me, looking for a photo of something that happened in college, or scrolling Twitter (always especially jarring, since I don’t follow her on Twitter) — and her face will pop up. It’s usually team-PR stuff, so it’s professionally done to make her seem likable and competent and impressive — a highlight reel, a cool photo, a short interview, etc. I’ll stop and watch for a sec, usually the first 2/3rds if it’s a video. Then I’ll turn my phone off, drop everything else I was doing, throw on pre-worn golf clothes, and go putt until ten minutes past sunset.

I think nearly all US males can recall something that happened when they were nineteen that, in retrospect, took them far too long to figure out and process. Usually to the extent that it’s wildly embarrassing that you were hung up for that long. This was mine. And yes, it’s still enough to piss me off enough to putt for hours while seethingly fantasizing about standing in front of everyone who’s ever beaten me at golf and whalloping them with croquet mallets. But, by now, I understand the dynamics behind these feelings — the why of it all — to the extent that the what can just be a catalyst for putting.

During COVID, I took the year off school while campus was shut down, and I lived down here, alone. I practiced golf and misinterpreted stoic philosophy. Nineteen-year-olds don’t do well when they’re unsocialized for eight months, and I went pretty close to insane. But I also got really good at golf. There wasn’t much else to do.

I started my sophomore year playing some damn solid golf. Pretty quickly, the whole ex-thing (I hesitate to even call it a relationship) spontaneously combusted at the same time that my best friend told me he didn’t want to hang out anymore. Then I got in a pretty bad scooter crash. The golf season wrapped up, the post-COVID-lockdown social scene was somewhere between tepid and crippled, and I was suddenly having a pretty bad time.

Any “explosion” metaphors vastly overstate the magnitude of the situation — I was, all things considered, fine. But it describes the mechanics of the situation almost perfectly.

While I was seeing this girl, I was playing some of the best golf of my career, and I’d thus constructed an identity as a quality athlete. This, naturally, qualified me to date other strong college athletes, among other such boons as wearing t-shirts almost-exclusively and carrying a general affect of nonchalance. And the resulting self-image was tidy: “athlete.” Through this, I made sense to myself, and I felt I made sense to others: I had other interests (drums, writing, random esoteric bullshit, etc.), but all of these were qualities qua athlete. “Athlete” was the pivot point for the rest of it.

So, when a bunch of that fell apart before the offseason and the sun started setting before 5pm, I found myself without a clear center of gravity. In plenty of ways, this was great; I had always had a wide variety of interests, and I was pushed to go out an explore these. I got more involved in the music scene, I transferred into the philosophy department, I started writing again. This breadth-first exploration is what college is for, after all. But, at the same time, my sense of self got more and more diffuse, until I didn’t have a simple answer as to precisely who I was. The whole thing had gotten a lot more complicated.

When I see a video on my phone of an eight-year-old kid asking my ex for an autograph, I’m reminded that sports — just like rock music — is predicated on “watchability.” We pretend that sports are this unique meritocracy where competitors are rewarded proportionally to their skill and aptitude, and this is largely true, but it doesn’t reflect the reason for sports in the first place. Sports are played to be watched, and their funded by people who pay to watch them. And people watch for the same reason they watch The Runarounds: they want to watch an athlete perform so well at their craft that, in that moment, they are nothing more than an athlete. They are only and entirely an athlete, and they’re asked for autographs entirely qua-athlete — that’s the way the audience knows them, precisely because they’re able to embody themselves entirely in athlete-dom. The whole essence of their being can be focused into a single craft at a single moment in time, and watching someone’s essence be so focused is wildly, wildly compelling.

I’m leaving out an essential part of this equation that’s worth adding in, now. Because being compelling isn’t desirable for making a person watchable — this is too audience-focused. Sure, there’s a certain human joy/affirmation/pleasure in having other people pay attention to what you’re doing while you’re doing. But this characterization neglects the fact that all of these qualities that make us compelling to others are also a total drug when experienced by oneself. You’re acutely aware, the entire time it’s happening, that you are manifesting and embodying a vastly high order of human function. It doesn’t require an audience to be aware of this, though one certainly helps.

However compelling it might seem to others, they’re only paying $40 for a ticket or a monthly fee for a TV package — the people who dedicate themselves to a lifelong, often-tedious dedication to the craft are paying a far steeper price, and it’s worth every cent and then some. If I recall the ten best competitive rounds of golf I’ve played and the five best shows I played on the drums, and I think about those, I can probably ascribe 98% of my day-to-day choices to a direct attempt to experience those feelings again, as soon as possible.

And this is precisely why, whenever I see that ex’s face on my phone, I throw on a collared shirt and putt until my back hurts. I remember what it felt like to be nineteen and playing great golf and walking around thinking you’re the man. I remember these feelings being validated by my brief involvement with a similar kind of person. It didn’t matter who this was, exactly, so long as that person stood for similar things and provided some positive resonance for my self-image — that I was some more intimate form of watchable.

Surely this is a vast oversimplification, to portray this as some perfect halcyon period — I can actually assure you it wasn’t. I was wracked by late-teen existential angst that I’m very glad to have matured past. But I remember one feeling above all else: knowing that, qua athlete, I was only and entirely who I wanted to be.

Life isn’t so simple now. Maybe it should be — after all, there’s not much in my way right now, and maybe I’m a moron for not leading a simpler life. But, along the way, I found myself attached to the idea of a diffuse, jack-of-all-trades identity. Some of this is surely a genuine interest in a bunch of things. Some of this is surely a psychic hedge, such that, if one thing is going poorly, I have other things to buoy myself. Some of it might be a genuine uncertainty about what I want to do with my life. It’s probably a little of all of these, and then some.

I do a lot of stuff. I play professional golf. I also work for a golf media company and write a newsletter. I keep up with a bunch of global news, my knowledge of which has no import on my life or the events themselves. I vibe code a proprietary fantasy baseball model, which I claim is to protect my future employability but really is because I’m secretly a little slut for numbers and have ungodly fun doing it — and focusing on baseball keeps me from getting bogged down with putting simulations and statistical nonsense that, I’ve learned, usually gets in the way of the golf more than it helps it.

I also try to make it off the island and get to Jacksonville or Savannah as much as I can. Driving an hour and forty minutes each way to engage in young-people nonsense probably runs counter to the lofty goals I have for myself. But I know from experience that, when I lock myself completely in my work, I tend to go insane, and I’m acutely aware of the fact that I’ll only be 25 once — I’ve never met anyone older than me who regretted the fun they had in their 20s. And being a fun person is probably my best chance at getting married and reproducing one day. So I feel an obligation (that I’ll gladly accept and carry out) to do dumb young-people shit like drink $5 beers and beat up Punch-o-Matics and create material to tell my kids about.

So, on Thursday — a workday — I drove 5.5 hours up to Atlanta to see one of my best friends play a rock show. I had a fantastic time. And I realized just how badly I’ve missed music — enough to seriously consider ordering a set of electronic drums and starting to play again. Which, for those keeping track, is yet another thing I’m doing that isn’t “practice golf so you can separate people from their money in competition.”

I try to keep a mental note of where I’ve led the reader over the course of an essay. At this point, I’ve probably convinced you of the following: that I clearly yearn for a simpler, more golf-oriented version of myself; that these side-quest are getting in the way and I could easily just stop doing them; that this is all silly and I’m making poor use of my time in relation to my values; and I should stop writing immediately and just go chip and putt.

I’m here to say that it’s not that simple, for a couple reasons. First, as the person living in this body, I really like being this way — I enjoy my interests, the variety of which make it more fun to hang out with myself all the time. Just as kids who specialize in one sport usually get lapped by kids who play a half dozen sports, my experience has been that my variety of interests create positive feedback between them. I think being a generalist is to my benefit.

Second, as a recovering type-A golf-perfectionist lunatic, “just do nothing but deeply intense systematic practice” is a rake I’ve stepped on with both feet enough times to know better. And, as such, having hobbies is to some degree a golfing boon that keeps me from obsessive-compulsion. From a strict golf perspective, there’s a degree to which hobbies save me from myself.

But really, there’s a detail that complicates all of this beyond all reason, and I should share that with you.

On Thursday night, I went to a rock show, and I saw a group of people having an awesome time being only and entirely rock stars. It made me miss the days when I played live music on Thursday and Saturday nights in college. We wanted to be good, and we focused on playing as tight as possible; we even tried playing to a click track for a show. I only realized after graduation why the click track was such a disaster: it added a robotic, cold, unfeeling presence that had no awareness of three kids simply being as much of themselves as they could muster. The nights we played our best were the nights we were the most us.

Halfway through The Runarounds’ set, the gas station candy bar I’d eaten on the road declared a hot war against my stomach, and I headed backstage to engage in some porcelain diplomacy. My friend had texted me an Instagram post, and I logged in to see it. The first thing I saw when I opened Instagram was a post by that ex. Being a couple miles from my golf clubs and a few hundred from my golf course, I couldn’t just go putt, and I was left to sit with the bare feeling, remembering a time when the golf felt briefly simpler.

Here’s the thing, though: these things happened at the exact same time. I was in that band at the same time as I was playing my best golf. I was also in college, so I was spending far more time being social, and I was doing 35-40 hours of coursework each week. I was running around all over the place. So any claim that my ability to be “only and entirely myself” back then was a direct result of focus and time spent practicing — this would be totally false. If anything, the opposite was true.

And so we arrive at the all-too-common realization: that life’s big questions can’t be answered simply by locating one’s position on a single-axis sliding scale. My epiphany that I should simplify my life cites, as its best evidence, a time when my life was more complicated. The times when I’ve spent the most time practicing have been when golf felt the most complicated; conversely, when I haven’t practiced enough, great golf feels too complicated to grasp. Considering this basic single-axis continua, there’s no clear direction I can step that goes directly towards what I want.

Much like Gauss and Argand needed an imaginary axis to solve certain polynomials, introducing feelings and emotions into any mental equation requires us to let go of the confines of simple, first-order logical problem-solving; these problems reward the courage and wherewithal to wade into murkier conceptual waters.

I haven’t written directly about golf much, lately. I think this newsletter is most compelling when it digs at the hard questions, and I’m trying to keep golf relentlessly simple. I’ve more or less been quarantining golf from my writing for this reason. Maybe I’ll give you the lowdown soon; but, for now, I’m not risking complicating anything.

Past the golf itself, there’s these matters of self-expression, to collapse the complex reality of one’s existence into any single, focused act. Which, of course, is both massively complex and massively simple, impossible to put down on paper yet experienced by us all. Often, these moments sneak up on us. In rare moments of competence, we can manifest it ourselves. And my job — qua golfer, qua person, qua anything else — is to do exactly that, as consistently as I can, to express this singularity of being. Sometimes I find it on the golf course. Sometimes it’s behind my keyboard, or behind the drums I’ve just ordered. Sometimes it’s on the back of a mechanical bull in Savannah. I’m sure it’s out there in places I haven’t looked yet. I’ll follow it wherever I can, gathering as much as I can carry, running around wherever it leads me.

Other: How do you think about X? [The question is golf related.]

Me: I need to improve X. And I think that my deficiencies in X are due to Y. So I’m working on Y to get better at X.

Other: What about Z?

Me: Well, that’s related, but not quite the same thing. You’d think that would fix X, but really it’s another symptom of Y. So I’m focusing on Y, and in the process I’ll improve both X and Z.

Other: I really think you can just Z.

Me: [At this point, I give my best breakdown of X, Y, and Z, trying to outline the whole interrelation as comprehensively as I can. This takes roughly 3-5 minutes, or until the other person gets frustrated or loses interest, at which point they say—

Other: I think you’re overthinking this.

It’s not always “I think you’re overthinking this” — sometimes it’s “you’re overthinking this,” without the “I think qualifier.” Sometimes there’s a “by a lot” or similar. But somewhere in that response are the three words: “you’re overthinking this.”

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Maybe you’ve had a conversation like this with me recently. Don’t worry; I’m not talking about you, I’m only talking about the other conversations. You’re cool. It’s everyone else.

I’ve been enjoying the first week-and-a-half of Yankees baseball. During that time-span, he’s hitting below the Mendoza Line and getting on base at a sub-.250 clip. Prior to the season, he declared that his goal was a 50-50 season — 50 homers and 50 stolen bases, something that’s only been once in MLB history, by the best player who’s ever lived. Jazz has only hit more than 30 homers in a season once.

I’m a big fan on Jazz Chisholm. I think he’s very good ballplayer who’s unfairly cast as overrated while being a top-10 second baseman. But I’ve watched him play enough baseball to know what I want to see from him: Jazz is fast and athletic, the Yankees have plenty of aging slug on the roster, and I want him to be a contact-first bat. I want him to get on base. The best I’ve seen him hit is when he’s making disciplined swings at good pitches. The worst I’ve seen him hit is when he’s obviously trying to pull balls to the short porch.

So, as a moderately-active New York Yankees fan, I consider myself having an informed opinion of what I want to see from Jazz Chisholm. Hearing him say he’s trying to hit 50 homers scares me, because I think that’s the wrong thing to do — I think he should have a contact-first hitting approach. I feel pretty strongly about this.

The New York Yankees are a nine-billion-dollar franchise making $750-million-plus in annual revenue. By my best estimate, there are between fifty and a hundred people whose entire job is to figure out ways to win on the field, and that includes helping Jazz Chisholm hit. There are guys with math PhDs on staff pouring over analytics that are incomprehensible to me — as in, I literally could not comprehend them. All of these very smart people are paid good money to work as cogs in a machine that tries very hard to find razor-thin edges that might result in the single run over 162 games that wins a pennant.

I think about what would happen if I walked into the Yankees analytics department and started asking about Jazz’s approach. I’d assume that they’d tell me about a minute tweak they’re making to his bat path that will help him against certain breaking pitches, such that the opposing pitchers throw him more fastballs, such that his swing decisions are simplified enough to get his A-swing off a couple percent of the time more, such that his exit velocity numbers go up, such that his OBP and SLUG increase simultaneously, such that….

If I responded, “yeah, but I keep seeing him swing too hard and strike out, so I think you guys are overthinking all this,” then I imagine I’d be like that guy with the big sword in Raiders of the Lost Ark: I’d be shot dead with dismissive contempt while the team went back to things far more important than dealing with me.

(Author’s Note: if any of this sounds dismissive or rude, give me about 3-4 more paragraphs and then the whole tone shifts a good bit.)

I have a friend who’s a hedge-fund trader. You might be aware that most NBA players wish they were rappers and most rappers wish they played in the League — there’s an identical phenomenon by which finance guys wish they played golf and golfers are fascinated by finance. And so, once in a while, I’ll have him walk me through the high-level thinking behind how he trades a certain news event. He’ll tell me about how an event in one part of the world has a nearly direct effect on a seemingly-unrelated supply chain on the other side of the globe. He sits around thinking about these things, build mathematical models to support his ideas, and let these two processes support each other until he feels confident enough to put a whole bunch of money on his conviction. That’s his job, to understand his domain in the most robust possible manner.

Imagine if I told him, after hearing about one of these trades, “I dunno man, I think you’re overthinking all this.” That’d be ridiculous.

I like to think I’m a reasonably smart person with a solid mental grasp on the game. I have fantastic coaches who give me quality information on stuff beyond my expertise, and I interpret this information (with their help) into as robust and comprehensive an understanding as we can muster. All of this, by the way, is to create the simplest possible mental model to improve my game in the simplest and most-direct way possible. So I find it really odd that, when I say something like “it’s not that I’m ‘just swinging too hard’, it’s actually a reaction to bad sequencing getting my hands above the plane line and trying to correct, and it has more to do with tempo than actual swing-speed” – that, when I say something like this, the most common response is “you’re overthinking it.”

I mean, this is literally my job. I promise you that I understand what I’m doing better than someone who’s seen me play 18 holes of golf (if that — if any). And then, let’s unpack what “overthinking” actually means: that someone knowing less than I do gives their perspective a position of rhetorical authority. What kind of sense does that make?

Regular readers might be surprised to seemingly see me using this platform to shit-talk a bunch of people I know. Especially considering that these people are probably readers, that they care enough about my game to have opinions, and that they’re probably rooting for me. (All of these qualifiers, for the record, are true of everyone involved.)

To be honest, some of this does bug me — but it especially bugs me because, most of the time, these people are at least sort of right.

This week, I was told that I was swinging too hard and looked tense over the ball and should just relax. I gave the spiel about sequencing and tempo and the plane, and I was told I was overthinking it and all I had to do was “not swing as hard.” Which, like, isn’t really how anything works.

Except for the fact that, when I went to the range the next day, I tried letting my arms hang off my body when I set up to the ball, reducing as much tension as I could — and I started hitting it great. My tempo slowed down, my sequencing got better, and I found the slot more easily. I could mostly stop worrying about what I was doing with my golf swing and focus on what I wanted the ball to do — the real secret sauce that precedes all great golf, whether you call it “top-down attention” or “external focus” or “playing loose.”

It wasn’t quite this simple, in reality. I did a lot of rehearsals to try to get the feeling down, and I was practicing with a metronome in my ear so I didn’t get quick, and I hit a bunch of one-handed shots to try to get the club tracking properly. It took all of this to add up to a far more consistent move than I had the previous day.

But, of course: the guy was still mostly right. I really didn’t need to do much more than relax.

The etiology of this whole thing is something I think I understand better than maybe anything else about myself, and I can blame it squarely on Aristotle.

For those not familiar, Aristole’s primary claims to fame are the following ideas: 1) that humans are separated from animals by our ability to think, and, 2) that the act of thinking is the only human action that is inherently good for its own sake. The upshot here is obvious and also literally presented in the Nichomachean Ethics: that the greatest human good, and what makes for a good life, is to be very wise and spend as much time as possible thinking about things.

Take a moment to consider just how fixated modern US society is on thinking. We think all the time. We try to get to the bottom of things. We all have takes. We’ve christened this “The Information Age,” but that neglects the fact that we’ve been obsessed with thinking for basically ever, probably going all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, if not longer. We are, famously, a country founded on ideas on paper.

And so I internalized this. Given the value our society places on thinking, I, from a young age, tried to think as much as I could about everything. I thought this would serve me well.

In a lot of ways, it has. Thinking has gotten me a long way. Golf is sometimes included here: I do think that being able to look at an approach shot, understand the statistical metrics well enough to know what matters and what doesn’t, and quickly choose a target and a shot based on that analysis — I think this does serve me well.

But there’s another sense in which Aristotle — and Western Society at large — consistently lied to a young kid about the value of thinking and then pulled the rug. I am, in a sense, a living social experiment; I was educated to believe that life is primarily an intellectual endeavor, brusquely told that this has always been false, and left on my own to reinvent the truth from first principles. I’m a modern equivalent of King Fredrick II’s experiment in the 13^th century, when he left a bunch of babies alone on an island to see if they’d “naturally” grow up to speak Greek, Hebrew, or Latin. (Expectedly, none of them grew up at all.)

That’s why the “I think you’re overthinking stuff” bugs me. Because, on one hand, I’m not: it’s my profession, and details matter, and who in the world knows too much about the scope of their work to be good at their job? Who is too well informed to be effective? Do you hear how nonsensical that is?

But, at the same time — fucking of course I am. Can’t you see that I’m trying as hard as I can not to?? Fuck!

“The Reason I Play Pro Golf” is multifaceted, in that it can be described in its entirety by multiple mutually-inclusive perspectives. But it’d be entirely accurate to say that my professional golf career — outside of it being fun, that I think I have the talent, that I’m good at it, and that I enjoy getting out of bed in the morning — is that it’s a graduate degree in learning when and how to turn my brain off.

It’s hard for me. I spent like twenty-two years conditioning myself to do the exact opposite. There’s a lot of myelin going to and from my pre-frontal cortex in order to use it as much as possible. I’m learning other ways to get the job done. I’m getting better — more and more frequently, the signal goes somewhere else, to the “just trust it” zones I didn’t learn about in my neuroscience class. It’s working. But it’s slow. But it’s working. Bear with me.

On Friday night, I got a text in a group chat that’s almost never active that people were interested in going out. I was planning on getting to bed early, but I hadn’t been out with these guys in like six months — mind you, the guys on the island here — so I rallied.

The night out was mediocre at best — good company, but it’s not the best bar scene here. Despite our best efforts to rip it up and take it deep, we all shut it down around 11:30. But a few of us went to Waffle House. I got an All-Star Special with scrambled eggs, grits, and bacon. We ate, mostly quietly, tired from a night we’d hoped more from. And then we parted ways and I walked the half mile home.

The way home was well-lit — there aren’t street-lights over the wide sidewalk, but the moon was almost completely full.

Right now, there’s four astronauts headed towards that moon. That moon is traveling 2,288 mph relative to Earth. We used five different defense contracting companies to design and build a rocket that uses two different rocket fuels to get out of Earth’s orbit, and we’re aiming at a point in the sky that, like a QB throwing to a receiver who hasn’t turned his head yet, we know the moon will be in the future.

A lot of thought went into that mission. A lot. But, in the end, the point is fairly un-intellectual. You look up at the moon, and you know where headed there, and you feel something difficult to describe but astonishingly simple to feel. And you look up a while and stare, at the largest celestial body you can really sit and stare at, and you’re glad to.

You didn’t get a newsletter from me last week. When this happens, it’s for one of two reasons. The first is that I simply didn’t have anything to write about — I think this has happened once, though I forget when that was, and it actually might’ve never happened at all. The second reason is far more common. This is the opposite problem: I have too much to write about. You see, for a good newsletter, I need to have interesting things happening in my life, but I can’t have so many interesting things going on that I don’t have time to write about them. There’s a necessary balance to the whole thing, like a solar system’s Goldilocks Zone or a surviving cell in Conway’s Game of Life.

Usually, if a newsletter doesn’t come out, the reasons are more mercurial than saturnine. There’s too much sun, or too many nutrients. A sort of digital eutrophication, and the pixel blacks out until the nutrients dry up.

I’m back in West Palm Beach visiting Harry, now. I played a Minor League event on Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday, I went to a coffee roaster in the warehouse district and filled up six pages of a full-size legal pad getting a plan together for Q2 ’26. And today, among a couple other errands, I’m writing this newsletter. Tonight, I’ll go to a line dancing bar with Harry and some friends, and then tomorrow we’re checking out the Palm Beach Boat Show.

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A week ago, today, I was driving back from Dothan, Alabama with mixed feelings. I was glad to be leaving — Dothan is my go-to example for a city I can’t stand, whenever someone mistakes lower-level pro golf for any sort of glamorous lifestyle. I can tell you, as I tried to cook eggs at 4:30am on a lukewarm hot plate in a run-down Residence Inn, that it is not glamourous.

And, for that reason, I was glad to be leaving. But I wasn’t glad about much else.

It’s six hours from Dothan back to St. Simons. It’s another five and a half from St. Simons to Palm Beach. I did the first on Friday and the second on Monday. Both of these days are bad podcast days for me — lots of podcasts come out on Monday, but not quite enough to accumulate the backlog needed for a long drive, and I’ll have worked through any backlog by that Friday.

Usually drives of this length are perfect for one of my all-time favorite games: Phone Roulette. Phone Roulette involves opening your contacts, starting with the As, and scrolling down until you see anyone’s name who makes you wonder, “what are they up to?” Then you call that person.

If you get lazy, you end up catching up with some old friends — but the real spirit of the game is to make real-life, context-less voice phone calls to people you haven’t seen or thought about in five-plus years. This is beyond thrilling. It breaks nearly every unwritten rule of modern Gen-Z electronic communication — none of us expect cold calls, much less from high school classmates — and you sit, white knuckling the steering wheel, wondering what the hell you’re going to say if they actually pick up the phone. It’s a perfect excuse to see who peaked in high school, or to check if old crushes are engaged yet, or to learn with shock and horror that that guy is going to be a surgeon. Any initial awkwardness dissolves almost instantly, because the game’s absurdity is its own cover, and now they’re also wrapped into the thrill of it all. I’ve never had anything less than a great phone call. Even if they don’t pick up, you can learn something: four rings before the voicemail means they weren’t near the phone, while five-and-a-half rings means they saw your call and declined to pick it up.

But, for those twelve hours in the car, ten of them were during normal business hours, so Phone Roulette was a no-go (the timing matters — you don’t want anyone thinking you’re unemployed). I listened to a few of my favorite albums, of which I can usually get through three before the high wears off, and I was stuck going 84 mph (15 mph over the speed limit is a different ticket bracket and an extra point) on the interstate with nothing going on.

So I listened to Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur. I’m a sucker for a great essay, though I find merely good ones nearly unbearable. Luckily, Klosterman hasn’t written anything sub-Top-Gun-Maverick-level entertaining in his career. Usually he’s writing about something I don’t care about at all — not that I’m not familiar with, but that I’ve actively decided not to care about — and then I’m listening to a 5,000-word essay on a reality TV show I’ve never watched, and I’m entranced.

I’m actually worried you figured this out a while ago, that I’ve been listening to Klosterman’s work in family-size portions, because the internal monologue that reads these words back to me as I type them has been nasal and red-headed for weeks.

Listening to a collection of essays as an audiobook has the same essential problem as freebasing: you just get too much way too quickly. I can tell you about the epiphanic feeling that accompanied each essay. I can give you a single-sentence summary of each, and each summary would be fairly encompassing — I can’t tell if this is a massive testament to his work or a shortcoming, though I think it’s the former. But I’m at a bit of a loss to tell you much about any essay’s actual contents. It all simply happened too fast.

The last essay I listened to before pulling into Harry’s building was “T is for True,” which is tangentially about Werner Herzog and Ralph Nader, but mostly it’s about the front man of the band Weezer. The central slant is that Weezer’s frontman, Rivers Cuomo, is simply so literal in his songwriting, and so incapable of anything else, that Weezer fans (who allegedly do exist) constantly feel like Weezer is fucking with them with every new album release. “Beverly Hills” is about wanting to live in Beverly Hills. “We Are All On Drugs” is about being on drugs. Maybe you can guess what “My Best Friend” is about.

I went back and listened to all three of these tracks, and I was blown away. There is not one single thing left unsaid in a Weezer song. I mean, take these lyrics from “My Best Friend”:

When everything is wrong, I’ll come talk to you
You make things alright when I’m feeling blue
You are such a blessing
And I won’t be messing
With the one thing that brings light to all of my darkness

You’re my best friend
And I love you (love you)
And I love you (love you)
Yes, I do

There is no other one who can take your place
I feel happy inside when I see your face
I hope you believe me
‘Cause I speak sincerely
And I mean it when I tell you that I need you

You’re my best friend
And I love you (love you)
And I love you (love you)
Yes, I do

Here’s my honest reaction: I’m shocked that this doesn’t piss me off. Truly. Don’t get me wrong, for better or for worse, I don’t enjoy Weezer. But it doesn’t offend me.

I’m a certain kind of person: my favorite novel is genuinely Infinite Jest, my favorite bands are hyper-maximalist contemporary progressive metal acts, I spend ten minutes brewing specialty coffee each morning and drink almost exclusively Japanese whiskey. I would show up to parties in college with a sixer of a citra-hopped IPA and I’d unironically tell you I’d “been into it lately.” Some people would call this kind of person “a douche,” and so I’ve gone to great lengths to combat what it all says about me: I’ve grown my hair out middle-infielder style, started wearing oversized t-shirts from fast food restaurants, say “fuck” a lot, and will smoke a cigarette if offered one.

But I know the truth, just as all people with pretentious interests (real or synthetic) know the truth: we just have a harder time finding satisfaction with life. For whatever reason, we insist on our lives being more profound than the standard-issue. We require complexity for its own sake, because one of two things must be true: either Ezra Pound is a genius beyond our comprehension or a bullshit artist, and we’d rather live in a world where The Cantos contains something to justify the fact that I know Pound’s name instead of it all being stolen valor. In Pound’s case, it probably all is, stolen. But once you’re drawn into the moth’s-light of complexity, you can’t help but hope it leads somewhere.

Rivers Cuomo should stand against everything I believe in. He probably wrote “Beverly Hills” in fifteen minutes, and it’s at best a caricature of our most vapid desires, and it doesn’t even bother to fucking rhyme. And they’ve sold thirty-five-million records doing exactly this and nothing more. If country music pisses people off for pickup trucks and beer and pickup trucks drinking beer, then I’m not sure how Weezer doesn’t cause riots in the goddamn streets.

But I’m OK with all of this. On its face, Weezer jeopardizes my whole worldview — I probably should be plotting some kind of holy war against Rivers Cuomo (whose name is fucking Rivers — plural!). But, despite a few hundred words of shit-slinging, I can honestly say that I’m perfectly cool with Weezer. I’m somewhere between that this is the case. I don’t even like that this is the case. But I’ve been listening to The Blue Album while writing all this, and it’s perfectly fine.

I think this indicates some profound form of spiritual growth. I don’t know when this happened — I certainly can’t take personal credit for any of it. But I think it demonstrates some nascent capacity to simply enjoy something. It doesn’t need to reward a deeper listen or justify its own complexity. To the contemplatives’ dismay, some things are just decent as they are.

You’re probably wondering how Q School went. As I mentioned, I’m of two minds.

I should mention off the bat: my elbow is completely fine. Maybe better than when I started.

I had a 7:25am tee time on Tuesday morning for round one. The overnight low on Tuesday night was 31°F, and it was going to be 34° when I teed off. I showed up to the golf course ready to play at 6:00am, but the back of my mind I was nearly certain there’d be a frost delay, on account of the ground literally being frozen when I got there. But we had a 156-man field playing one golf course, and PGA Tour Americas was clearing half-a-million dollars off entry fees at this site alone. So we went off on time.

I hit a good drive off the first tee, then hung a 7-iron right of the green into a 5’-deep collection area. My first chip rode up the face, landed on the collar, and rolled nearly back to my feet into a wetter, grainier lie. I putt the next one up the 5’-slope to a pin at eye level, hit it past the hole, watched it run 30’ down into bowl, two-putt, and wrote down a 6. I blew a drive right on two, chipped out, hit a wedge 45’-long, lagged one to a couple inches, and tapped in with the back of my putter. My approach on the third needed to pitch about five paces past a slope to hold the top tier without going in the water long — but I landed it on top of the slope, and it rolled back to the front edge, where I three-putt from 75-feet.

Needing to stop the bleeding, I came to the fourth (excuse the Google Earth screengrab), playing 227-yds with a 34° wind blowing 15mph in off the right.

I felt the face roll shut on a 5-iron, watched one fly long-left of the green and splash. I made double. After another three-putt from 65’ — up another four-foot bowl I’d found myself in — I was +7 through five holes, and my chance at a card was all-but-squashed before 9am.

I’ve had a week to think things over since I turned in a non-competitive 72 in round four and started driving home. Nearly all of those thoughts can be sorted into two groups.

1.

Showing up to the first tee at 7:15am, I was cold, nervous, and had spent the last three months purposefully prioritizing work in the gym over hitting range balls. My swing felt good in the weeks leading up to the event, and I was unencumbered enough to mostly look at targets and make swings that felt right (I call this “throwing bean bags,” in the sense that cornhole might be humanity’s least technical activity). But, once I got cold and nervous, my tempo got quick. Once my tempo got quick, two things happened: I got out of sequence, and I lost confidence in my ability to produce specific ball speeds (and thus carry numbers). And, once your tempo gets quick, you lose your feeling of sequence, you lose your confidence to hit a carry number, and it’s blowing 34° as you’re playing for your livelihood, the wheels come off.

If you ask me if I believe, earnestly, that my quick tempo cost me 30 shots last week, I’d say that I wouldn’t put it past myself. If my quick over-the-top move and my horrible distance control are both direct results of getting quick, then unequivocally yes. I’m not sure that line is quite so easy to draw, but it’s at least close, and working on any one thing helps the other two.

You might wonder, “well shit, Connor, it seems like a hell of a lot has to go right for you to not DFL a golf tournament. What the fuck is wrong with you?” My quick answer would be an analogy to cars. A lot of mini-tour golfers are the equivalent of well-tuned Subaru WRX. It’s a great car that can put up a solid lap time. It can hit a bunch of mid-irons stone dead and make some putts and win a mini-tour event at 21-under, and it might get hot at the right time and get Americas status one year. It’s also not going to win you a Grand Prix or a PGA Tour event.

I, meanwhile, have spent the last thirty minutes trying to think of the right car analogy for myself. I’ve been trying to bolt different engine blocks into different cars for a while, but none of them felt right — the closest was a Ferrari V12 in a BMW 320i.

But then it hit me: I’m the Dodge Hellcat Minivan.

For those unfamiliar, someone took a Chrysler Town & Country minivan and installed a 1000hp Dodge Hellcat SRT engine. The thing did a quarter mile in under 10.5 seconds. It’s fucking awesome. I’m also sure that, if I tried to drive it to the grocery store, I’d do a full burnout and end up in a ditch. With that said, if you took that engine and built a real car around it — chassis, powertrain, aerodynamics, etc. — you could legitimately win some big-time races. In the current package, the talent (power) probably hurts more than it helps — but it’s there.

I can hit driver 193mph. I hit a shitload of fairways at this speed, too. But, if I’m not tuned up really well, I dump power over the top, the leading edge digs, I start fatting wedges, and everything goes up in a cloud of burnt-rubber smoke.

So what’s next? A lot of what I’m already working on. My plans in the gym are even more ambitious for the next three months than they’ve been for the last three — this is building a new chassis and drivetrain, something with better aerodynamics and the capacity to handle at high speeds. Then comes a shitload of practice hitting exact carry numbers with wedges (this is tuning the car, unlocking the latent potential to use it on the road). And then continuing to play a lot of golf — getting on the road, being familiar with the car, knowing just how far I can push it.

In this sense, everything I’ve been working on has had its desired effect. I was plenty fit enough to play four rounds on a hilly golf course. I felt largely in control of my body. Now, in Q2, I work like hell on distance control and tempo, and I’m sure I’ll come out of it a lot more competitive.

And so in this sense I’m fairly unbothered. My plan for the last three months did what it was supposed to do, and I have a good plan for the next three. What more could I ask for?

2.

I was in the second group for the last two rounds, meaning I was in the bottom six players of the field after 36 holes. I woke up knowing I’d be playing with guys I could beat. And I showed up to the first tee feeling a bit cocky — I was going to blow these guys out of the water.

On the thirteenth tee of the third round, I learned that the two of them could bond over being in near-fatal car accidents in the last 24 months. To my understanding (I didn’t press them much), each had lost north of 15mph of ball speed, and they were simply glad to be back on the golf course and not bedridden. At the time, I was losing to both of them.

The second category of thoughts is a deep sense of embarrassment.

I’ve yet to make a dime playing professional golf. This sentence hurt to write after six months of playing professionally, and it’s been a year since then. I can tell you that I’m a lot closer, and I can say that I truly do think I have the talent to get to the top of the mountain once I harness that talent, but 82-89-76-72 and a bottom-10 finish in a 156-man field doesn’t really justify those words, does it?

I like to think of myself as being fairly grounded in reality. So, when I tell myself that I have all the talent in the world and that I’m going to be a PGA Tour player in the next couple years, I mean it. I’m not pulling that out of my ass — I have legitimate reasons for believing that. I have a team of people who believe it, too, and I don’t think they’d blow smoke. I’m fine. I have what I need, and the rest is just noise.

But isn’t this all getting kind of sad? Because one of two things is true: I have all the talent in the world and I’m managing to blow it, or I don’t have it and I’m chasing a delusional fantasy. Aren’t both of those kind of sad? Have you, reader — without having seen me play golf, or only having seen me play bad golf — have you started to wonder, “what the hell is this kid doing?”

None of the above is exactly accurate, because I don’t really care what you think of me as a golfer. Your opinion doesn’t matter, in the same way that mine doesn’t matter — at the end of the day, there’s a score, and that’s it.

But, regardless of any outside party’s opinion, there’s something deeply embarrassing about dedicating more than half your waking hours for months to a pursuit that ultimately ends in a horrible public failure.

I’m fine. I have plenty of belief that I’ll get where I’m trying to go, and I have plenty of belief that I’ll be fine if I don’t get there, and I have plenty of belief in the process as a valuable end unto itself. I have six legal pad pages worth of a plan, and they give me a lot of hope for what’s to come.

But still. I’m a professional golfer — playing golf is my job — and I was +7 through 5 holes during one of the 3-4 weeks a year that matter. That’s pretty damn embarrassing. Isn’t it? It sure feels it.

My buddy has a pair of Leupold binoculars sitting on his coffee table in his living room. This fact makes more sense once I tell you that the coffee table is two paces from three floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a marina in the unfortunately-named Lake Worth Lagoon.

There’s a series of super-yachts docked in that marina, the closest of which are a chippy 9-iron from his balcony. They’re the sorts of yachts that only exist to be rented and used for social-media photo-clout — there’s simply no other reason for a charter yacht to exist that’s that large and that beautiful. I can see Anawa, Luna, Podium, and — I shit you not — Infinite Jest. There’s usually a couple more, though the Boat Show is this weekend so a bunch of them are elsewhere.

When we have nothing else going on — which is about half the time either of us is in the apartment — we pull out the binoculars and see what we can see. Often times this is nothing. The super-yachts all have privacy glass windows, and the docks are usually mostly empty. But often enough, especially in the mornings, there’s a ton of activity. It takes battalions of people to staff these boats. (Bonus: many of them are pretty blonde women.) It appears that significant portions of their jobs involve carrying singular planters off the yachts, through a maze of docks, and to shore, only to quickly return those same planters, seemingly unchanged, back to the yachts.

It’s utterly fascinating in ways that I don’t know how to describe — except that I do, because I listened to a Chuck Klosterman essay on the way down here. From his Eating the Dinosaur collection, “Through the Glass, Blindly” talks about a couple Hitchcock movies, his neighbor in Fargo, ND, and the fact that he “spent a lot of his free time [in Fargo] sitting in parked cars and being weird.”

But mostly it’s about watching people. Specifically, the fact that watching real people who don’t know they’re being watched — people who are doing absolutely nothing of note — is far more entertaining than reality TV, an entertainment product which is meant to replicate this voyeurism. As Klosterman comments about Hitchcock’s Rear Window, “it does not feel like [Jimmy Stewart] is watching strangers; it feels like he is watching a collection of one-act plays.”

Compare this to Brian De Palma’s Body Double, a film that Klosterman describes as “not half as good as Rear Window,” but that gets the thrill of people-watching far more right, in that “[Craig Wasson] doesn’t question [his neighbor’s actions] at all. It makes no sense, and—somehow—that seems more real…there’s no elucidation whatsoever.”

This is exactly what makes these planter-carriers so fascinating: I have no idea what they’re doing. I don’t know if they’ve changed out the planter for a new one, or if they’ve modified it somehow, or if they made a mistake and are simply bringing it back to the yacht where it should have never left. And I never will know. I just get to see a glimpse of someone else’s life, totally devoid of context — something that should be entirely boring but is, in reality, utterly fascinating.

Klosterman wonders, towards the end of “Through the Glass, Blindly,” if the core of voyeurism’s appeal isn’t antipodal to the two most common abstract causes of modern depression: “the possibility that one’s life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence.” Voyeurism’s appeal seems to be in that the watched person would not want to be watched — indeed, if asked if I’d want to be watched by strangers without my knowledge, I’d say “no.”

But, with the roles reversed, the concept of voyeurism defeats both aforementioned causes of depression. Our lives cannot be wholly unimportant, because watching someone else carry a planter to and from a yacht is fascinating, and I spend my days doing things no less interesting than this. Similarly, as mundane as our lives may feel at times — for instance, when I’m on my third hour failing to complete a putting drill, or when I’m gearing up for the third round of a golf tournament when I’m two-dozen shots out of contention — there’s comfort in knowing that someone else might view this as spontaneous and captivating. And so voyeurism and its appeal are reductio ad absurdum proofs against contemporary depression. We are unpredictable, and so we matter, QED.

I met Harry and his work friend for dinner last night, after which they had to go back to work. I didn’t, so I went to a bar. As the Arizona–Arkansas game came on, I started talking to a VP of a boat loan firm, during which — as tends to happen in bar conversation — I learned more about his life than I know about many of my friends’: his father’s life story, including two Olympics in swimming and a 61-year professorship at Harvard Business School; his short-lived golf career, in which he hit one drive over 280-yards but threw out his back; the evolution of the American bar from the center of the village to a brick-and-mortar Yelp review. After about 40 minutes, he pulled over an associate, a mid-20s blonde woman whom I promptly bought a drink.

She asked if I’d gotten Phil’s whole life story, sarcastically. I told her, earnestly, that he’d told me where he was conceived. This seemed to make the point. She asked what I did, and I said I was a professional golfer, and she didn’t believe me, so she asked what she’d find if she looked me up. I told her she’d find some bad tournament results if she scrolled enough, but mostly she’d find a bunch of my writing.

And here’s where the debate started. It came up that I believe two things are true of every writer: that we got good at writing because we were insecure, and our insecurity required us to make good written sense of our experience to find comfort; and that nobody writes about anything they’re absolutely certain of, because all writing exists to convince the writer themselves that what they’re saying is true.

She disagreed. She considers herself an introspective person, and she can’t think of many things more terrifying than writing those feelings down for the world to see. I clarified that not all introspectively people are writers, but all writers are introspective, and at one point they were insecure about what they found. If they’re self-confident in the present day, then that’s a more recent development than their skill at writing. Saying this out loud made me realize two things: that I was grateful to have writing as a means of self-actualization to recover from playing soul-crushingly bad golf, and that her non-writer-ness — someone introspective, but whose thoughts she can handle without an audience — was more than a little attractive. I hoped that the inverse was the same.

I learned she lived close enough to me to offer to buy her dinner, at which point she told me she had a boyfriend and that she was very happy. I ordered another round of drinks, pulled a business card out of my wallet, told her to bury it in a desk drawer somewhere just in case, and toasted to things with him and her working out and “to her never calling me.” We touched glasses and drank. At which point Harry got out of work, so I finished my drink and left.

I’ve spent most of the day writing — in fact, I’m delaying our night out as I type this final paragraph. At first, I lamented the fact that I didn’t have more to say about the golf. The two statements “I feel embarrassed” and “I have a plan I believe in” really do sum it up, as much as I wish I had something more profound. But, the more I write this newsletter, the more I think that that’s not a golf newsletter at all. To whatever degree it’s readable, it’s a contract that, as long as I’m doing something interesting enough to read about (whatever that is), that’s enough to justify another week of not applying for a stable office job. The golf will come when it comes, and I don’t need to feel any guilt in the meantime — as long as it’s all at least as interesting than carrying planters around, hopefully that’s enough, in itself.

“How much of a dumbass, Connor?”

Well, exactly this much of a dumbass:

You might be aware of a muscle called your “triceps.” You have two of them. One in each arm. More specifically, you have one group in each arm, each of which has three heads (tri-ceps), for a total of six. Six heads. Each of which is attached to a separate muscle or bundle or something. At this point you’ve realized that I don’t know much about anatomy, which is both true and perfectly fine.

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As I was doing some ab rollouts on Monday morning, I noticed that my left elbow hurt when I released tension on the roller — at the top of the movement, which should have been when I was under the least stress. I thought that was odd. I wondered what that could possibly have meant. Then, on Tuesday (arm day), I very quickly noticed that my elbow was pretty damn uncomfortable through about two sets of the thing. I thought back to every other time I’d pushed through this sort of pain during a workout, realized that it was usually accompanied by about a month of sitting around wishing I wasn’t hurt, and decided to shut down the lift before anything got worse.

I still couldn’t figure out: what the hell happened to my elbow? I didn’t do anything in the gym that could have messed it up. It had come on too suddenly to be an overuse thing, and I’m not sure how I’d have been overusing it anyways. I was stumped. And then it hit me.

On Sunday morning (the 8^th), I woke up on a couch 35 minutes from my car after two hours of something between sleep and Sunday-scaries panic.

I should back up.

I have PGA Tour Americas Q School this week (starting Tues the 17^th). I’ve been home in St. Simons for the last two weeks getting my game in order. The first weekend, around the 1^st, I tried to find some buddies to get dinner or watch sports or play poker with, but the “small island” principle here bucked its head, and I spent both weekend nights watching too many episodes of Terminal List: Dark Wolf. I woke up Monday wondering when the weekend would come around before realizing it had passed me by entirely. I felt stale and stuck. I did not feel fresh for the week ahead. I didn’t like this at all.

I spent most of Monday stewing in this feeling, and then Monday night I sat down with a journal and tried to come up with a plan of action. I find few things help me get out of a rut better than sitting down with pen and paper and being totally, brutally honest with myself. I asked myself, “what had me so upset? Life’s pretty good. What’s wrong?” And I discovered that that was exactly the problem: life was pretty good, and I felt stuck inside instead of taking advantage of it. I’ve been working out, I’ve been taking care of myself, I’m hitting my wedges pretty well (which is always a scarily [and troublingly] accurate barometer for my self-esteem) — I felt awesome, except for the fact that I felt trapped inside instead of having the opportunity to be awesome. I missed my friends, who are scattered around the country by now. None of the bars here got me excited enough to go out by myself. I felt something between underutilized and trapped.

So I made plans to get to Savannah that weekend. I’d have a fun night out, and I’d have ten days to recover and prepare for Q School. A good plan.

I set up a date and drove up to Savannah on Saturday night. I got a cheap hotel room after the city to come back to and crash, and I tried to Uber to the city center, only to realize it’d take 45 minutes for that Uber to arrive. So I had to pivot. I got back in my car and drove to the Liberty St Parking Garage, a garage I’ve parked in plenty in the past, and one that I’m confident I could sleep in my car in without getting stabbed, if worst came to worst.

The date was solid. We had a nice time. I found some more Japanese whiskey at dinner, and we went to a barcade, where we didn’t set any high scores, though we had some quality showings at ski-ball. And I set a personal best on the punch-o-matic. (I do understand how cringe-worthy it is to beat up a punch-o-matic on a date, but there was a whole group of guys doing it, and they were having a hell of a time… and man, I’m a complete sucker for the punch-o-matic. That’s my shit!) By 10:30 I walked her back to her car and that was that.

At this point, I was 10:45, and I felt like I’d come up short of the blowout night I was looking for. So I went back to my car, grabbed some floss to get the stuck Genghis Kahn beef out of my molar, breathed a sigh of relief, and went back out.

I hadn’t been in Savannah after dark before. I sent around some texts asking about good bars, but it was late, and I knew I wouldn’t get anything back. So I went out on my own, walking back towards the restaurants to see what I could find.

I did a lap without seeing anything with a ton of promise — a couple quieter bars with mostly seated older folks, two loud places with lines out the door that I can never handle without a friend or two. So I went back to the restaurant where I got dinner, where I could’ve sworn there was a speakeasy-type lounge in the basement. I went inside, realized I was underdressed, and walked back upstairs.

In the street outside the restaurant, a woman in a red dressed yelled:

“Who the hell ate all the hot dogs?”

I responded, “Yeah, who did eat all the hot dogs?”

“Did you eat all the hot dogs?”

“Yeah, I did, sorry.”

“It was him! He ate all the hot dogs!”

I held up my hand to apologize for eating all the hot dogs.

Then I asked, “wait, are there actually hot dogs?” I would’ve loved one. Maybe there was one more.

She pointed at the ground, where there were a half-dozen trampled hot dog buns in the street, no dogs in sight.

She looked back up. “You didn’t even eat the buns?”

“Nah. No need. Just meat missiles.”

The phrase “meat missiles” broke the standoff, and they — a group of five, a bachelorette — asked who I was. I said I was Connor. They asked if I was here alone. I said yes. They wondered why the hell I was out by myself, wasn’t that kind of sad? I said I was having a nice time. They asked again why I was out alone, and I said a date had ended on the earlier side and I had come back out to check things out. They said “aww,” which felt patronizing, but it got me an invite in their Uber to some other bar, and I was thrilled to accept. Act two had commenced.

The rest of the details don’t matter[1], except for three things:

1) It was daylight savings day, so bars technically stayed open until 3am.

2) As previously mentioned, I didn’t get to sleep until 6:30am, and that was on a couch 35 minutes from my car on an island I certainly didn’t anticipate going to.

3) At 1:48am, I rode a mechanical bull.

I think, as a general rule, if you find yourself signing a waiver after more than six drinks and after 1am, you should probably not do what you’re about to do.

I’ve been an overthinker my whole life. Maybe you don’t understand the extent if you’re a new subscriber[2], because I think I’ve gotten out of my own way reasonably well recently. But go back and read some of this stuff from a few months ago, or even some of the early stuff, and you’ll see that I’ve been pretty stuck in my own head.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s more than evidence enough that I even have a weekly Substack. Anyone who writes consistently is someone who has, at some point or another, been uncomfortable enough with their reality to feel the need to describe, interpret, and analyze it. Those who write reasonably well are self-selected in two ways at the same time: they find they have a knack for it, and thus they find escape from whatever they find uncomfortable enough to write about instead of merely enjoying in itself. I feel grateful for golf every day for teaching me — in numerical golf scores — that no amount of profound descriptive accuracy can save you, that the only true salvation is at the other end of the spectrum in the simple enjoyment of the moment you’re in.

But I’ve only just started buying into this[3]. Which is to say, I’ve lived 24 years as someone who’s been convinced that there’s a set of rules out there by which you can abide and not get anything wrong — and, even if you do get something wrong, you can just say you were following the rules.

I’ve been meaning to write about the legendary Joan Didion “On Self Respect” piece for a while now, because I think rereading that a few months ago was what started turning this ship around, however slowly. It’s supremely relevant to early-AM drunk mechanical bull-riding.

You can decide not to ride that bull because you don’t want to ride the bull — which is a perfectly acceptable reason, but the only one. If you choose not to ride the bull because “that’s stupid, you’d be an idiot to do that,” then then that’s bullshit — of course you want to ride the mechanical bull. You’re trying to rationalize reasons not to ride it because you’re scared. But you’ve been drinking, you’re running a 1-v-5 with pretty girls you don’t know, you want to keep the momentum going, you’ve been working out and you feel stronger, and you think you could definitely do this. And you want to. Yeah, it’s fucking dumb — that’s why they make you sign a waiver. But don’t you want to see what could happen?

This is the essence of my takeaways from Joan Diddion’s “On Self Respect.” “Self-respect” means taking responsibility for yourself and your actions. If you try to insulate yourself from your actions’ consequences by constructing a set of bubble-wrapped rules by which nothing can ever go wrong, then you’re not taking responsibility for yourself. That’s not self-respect. Nothing can go wrong, but there’s a hard cap on how much can go right. It’s a loss minimization strategy, which is a perfectly reasonable way to live your life, but I’m not sure it’s one that shows any respect to your own personal ability to suck the marrow out of life.

It turns out that the outcome-space for “what could happen?” on a mechanical bull is pretty limited. Maybe you’re one of those guys who can stand up on the bull and dance around, at which point, God bless. For the rest of us, one of two things happen: you fall off immediately and embarrass yourself, or you get competitive, hold on for way too long, and everyone stands around waiting for you to fall off, since that’s what they want to see anyways. At some point, the bull operator hits you with a dizzying, devastating bucking-combo, and you are removed from the bull.

You can notice this happening here:

If you look at the photo at the top of the article, you see that I’m holding a rope handle with both hands, which is my only way to attaching myself to this bull. In the photo directly above, you can see that I’m falling off the right side of the bull. That means that my entire bodyweight, plus the centrifugal force throwing me off the bull, is being held by my left arm alone. You can prove, definitively, that this force was super-maximal on that muscle by the fact that I was ejected from the bull.

So, yeah: it seems like I gave myself some acute tendinitis ten days before Q School by riding a mechanical bull.

You might be wondering how I feel about this. I won’t lie, Tuesday was pretty tough. I’ve been playing some damn good golf, and I think I have a puncher’s chance of making it through this week. I thought I’d derailed all of that in three minutes of cheap, drunk fun.

As for the elbow itself: I’m fine. It’s probably the single best tendon to hurt from a golf standpoint, the trail side of the lead arm. I’ve been doing BFR workouts and long sits in the sauna, getting anabolic as fuck. I’m sleeping as much as I can. I’m 25 years old and tissue still heals quickly. I’m playing golf uninhibited and pain-free, and I’m taking out the trash with one hand. Life isn’t so bad.

And I thought back to a few months ago, when I never would have ridden a mechanical bull ten days before a big tournament, because I might get hurt and they make you sign a waiver for a reason and that’s fucking stupid.

But, to be honest, sitting here now, I regret nothing. None of those seem like good reasons anymore. Maybe I’d have a different perspective if I’d ruptured something or whatever, but I’m realizing that I’d rather be a guy who gets banged up riding a mechanical bull than someone who doesn’t get on one. Maybe that sounds dumb, but, living in this skin, I like being this guy way better.

The guy in that top photo is about to wreck his rig and sustain a soft-tissue injury — but look how happy he is!

*************************

All of this actually happened, exactly as I’ve told it. But it’s also obviously an extended metaphor for much more significant other stuff. I actually think there’s two full layers of other stuff in here.

I played golf with my dad for the first time in a few months yesterday, and we could only talk about one thing: this looks different. I’ve been trying to convince myself (and he’s been trying to convince me) for years that I’m good enough to play with anyone. But my actual golf was a little too sloppy or looked a little too difficult. We both agreed that I had more than enough innate talent, but it became less and less clear, as the years went on, what that innate talent actually was. At times, I stopped believing in the concept of talent at all, mostly as a defense mechanism against the thought that, if I had talent and was capitalizing so little on it, I didn’t like what that said about me.

But, from the first wedge I hit on the first hole, we agreed: I hadn’t hit that shot in a long time. You could hear the bounce hit the ground instead of the leading edge. The ball looked stable in the air. On the second tee, my feet were more grounded than they’d ever been making a full swing. My first five midrange putts all scared the hole before I made a few birdies, I and eagled the last to shoot a pedestrian –4 68. For the first time in a long time — maybe since high school, maybe ever — I looked, felt, and was acting like a real athlete.

This was different. Whether it would show up this week or not, this was truly, genuinely different. It was all coming, sooner rather than later.

Which brings me to the first layer. I’ve played a lot of shitty pro golf over the last 18 months. Play enough shitty pro golf, and your mind gets uncomfortable with the dissonance that you believe good golf is coming but bad golf shows up. And your mind finally wonders if it’d be easier to reconcile things by admitting that you’re a shitty pro golfer. Keep in mind, I wasn’t a great college player either, so it’s been a near-constant battle against this idea that “I might just stink” for the last 30 straight months.

I’ve been trying my damndest to hold on the best way I know how: by coming up with and supporting objective rationales for my success. I’m going to play well this week because I worked really hard on my putting and I got these scores on these putting drills, which proves that I’m at least competent, and I have a good plan to attack this golf course while minimizing the big risks, and I’m smarter than you and better able to react to changes on the fly, and my proprietary wind chart is better than your wind chart[4], and a whole host of other things. And the implicit goal was that an independent, outside, objective, Vegas-bookmaker entity would have the objective opinion that I was good enough this week.

And this is bullshit. In part because golf is hard to predict and slightly random, and anyone could make it through any given week. But mostly, if you think this way, it admits that you don’t trust yourself, and you’re looking for some outside metric to externally justify your self-belief instead of just fucking believing in yourself.

I think it boils down to this: if you don’t trust yourself in the face of doing something extraordinarily dumb like ride a mechanical bull, then how could you expect to trust yourself doing something extraordinarily dumb like play professional golf for money and expect to win? If a little tendinitis is going to derail your week, then were you ever really prepared at all? And, if it’s not going to derail you (which it shouldn’t!), then why not have some fun and sign the waiver and hop on?

If you don’t trust yourself to do something stupid, then do you really trust yourself at all?

There’s a second layer beyond all this, for which everything above has been an extended metaphor for something greater — something to do with self-reliance and belief and faith and the courage to lay it out on the line, because courage can’t exist when you’re not in some kind of danger. That taking risks, even dumb ones, are the only way to prove to yourself that your limits are further off than your mental self-defense mechanisms would have you believe.

At some point, we’ll all be called upon to do something scarier and more significant than ride a mechanical bull at 2am, and, when that moment comes, it’s better to have already proved to yourself that you’re alive.

Of course, it’s reductive and pedantic to spell any of that out explicitly. But sometimes it’s worth reminding ourselves what this is all really about, anyways.

[1] For no reason other than they’re way more fun to leave ambiguous, because the play-by-play of any night inevitably ends the same as recounting an inside joke — with “you just had to be there man.”

[2] Though that applies to like six of you; subscriber numbers have totally flattened by the way, and are even going the wrong direction. So, if you’re someone who reads the footnotes, please pass this around!

[3] Which is, once again, evidenced by the fact that I’m writing about it now — people only ever write with conviction about the things they only sort-of believe. The real, true, core beliefs are those that are so self-evident to us that it’d be pointless to write about them at all. (I think this especially applies to political op-eds or any article with “How To” in the title, neither of which I’m all that interested in anymore once I realized this.)

[4] This isn’t a joke — I genuinely made a wind speed/direction à yardage-adjustment chart that’s better than your chart. And no, I’m not telling you why, because I’m going to use it to beat your ass.

The meme in question:

I could get into a whole tangent about how I think some of the best writing in the world today is done in a few short sentences on social media platforms. I’m not sure about you, but I find a lot of MFA-style contemporary poetry really boring and a bit empty. I think a poem, even a complex one, should suggest enough depth on the first read to compel the reader to read it again. And I think that most contemporary poetry I find simply conveys that the author is sad and stuck, or is momentarily happy with an undertone of being sad and stuck, or has found transcendence from previous sadness and stuck-ness that is nevertheless completely defined by previously being sad and stuck.

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In the way that Nirvana was Seattle’s reaction to glam metal and paninis are the answer to XL sandwiches, I think certain parts of Twitter, Reddit, and the others are humanity’s reaction to the MFA-ification of high-order literature and poetry. Enough people (I’m not sure when, probably around 2010-ish, very roughly) were reading poetry and thought, “you know, this really doesn’t describe my experience at all,” and they turned elsewhere. Country music has existed opposite pop and rock for decades. I sincerely believe social media — and Twitter specifically — is the written equivalent.

I told myself, two paragraphs ago, that I wasn’t going to get into a whole tangent about this, so I’m going to start coming up for air instead of really mining this for all it’s[1] worth. I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest more people are reading Twitter than poetry these days. So I mean to say two things more specifically.

First, that writing style is a non-trivial part of the Twitter experience. Twitter prides itself on the immediacy and breadth of crowd-sourced knowledge, which is probably their primary selling point. But the suggestion algorithms and size of the user base select for interest, and I think genuinely fascinating styles of satire, nihilism, absurdism, etc. have evolved on the platform — and that these are interesting in a literary sense as well as a “something to laugh at while I poop” sense.

“Twitter’s style” is moronic and absurd to refer to as some monolith. But, for the purposes of this argument I’m making, I need some vector by which MFA-poetry and “the Twitter-lith” are diametrically opposed. This is my second point: the interesting parts of Twitter are reactions to, specifically, the vacuousness of MFA-style.

Take this poem by Rupi Kaur — which I’m choosing because of its absolute fungibility with a zillion other poems that show up on people’s Instagram stories (so apologies for the drive by):

I don’t care for this poem. I could get into a whole diatribe against this whole school of poetry — I’d start with the fact that art’s whole function is to allow humanity to build new images of our reality (in the Alva Noë Entanglement/Strange Tools school), and that these images are the means by which we create better worlds for ourselves, either by further understanding the nature of our ignorance/pain/inadequacy or by understanding how we can move past it (two sides of the same coin), yet Kaur really only seems interested in creating a shallow, hollow world in which she decides that someone else lacks humanity when, in fact, she’s the one who has nothing in particular to say about them, or even about herself.

But I’m not giving that diatribe. I’m going to get off the train here by asking you to compare Kaur’s poem to that Reddit post I’ve included above. You read the poem for the first time, and it suggests that it has something more to say, and it takes two more reads to realize that it actually says nothing. The Reddit post seems nonsensical and dumb at first glance, and then you realize it’s pretty damn funny.[2]

The poem is suggestive but vacuous. The post is blunt, dumb, and oddly transcendent. I think people turn away from formal poetry and towards social media along these lines.

You might be thinking, “Connor, it’s a funny Reddit post, but it’s not that funny. Why are you writing about this? This is dumb.”

I’ve been in the sauna a good bit this week. I think someone futzed with the thermometer or the regulator or something, because normally the sauna shuts off around 180°, but it’s been ripping as high as 193° this week and I couldn’t be happier.

I haven’t been meditating much, recently. But I’ll go in the sauna in the evenings, and I’ll just sit for 20-25 minutes, and there’s nothing to do except feel the sting of the hot air in your nostrils and occasionally wipe sweat from your forehead. And it’s become a bit of an informal meditation practice.

Most of the time, the sauna is an exercise in tolerating discomfort. The last five minutes or so are usually pretty hairy, and you start getting anxious and itchy and you just want to get the hell out of there. But these five minutes are where all those good hormones are released, and so you just tough it out. And you learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable, which is always a good skill to have.

But sometimes it’s easy. Your mind just totally clears, and you realize you’re totally comfortable in the heat, and 25 minutes goes by like 6 minutes, and in the meantime you have a couple deeper realizations about things, and you realize Plato was probably more spiritually-apt than Aristotle because there are certain realizations that aren’t derived syllogistically from observations about the primary substances — nor even from thinking itself, which I’m more and more down on each passing day. There are certain things you just simply realize and know to be true and that’s that.

So I present the following:

Rationality evolved, cognitively, as a fear response. In situations when we feel fear, we try to construct a mental model of the situation and manipulate that model. In this way, we make predictions about different courses of action and their results. This is “thinking it through.”

The Greeks would say that these forms of rationality are man’s highest good — and go so far as to say that “rational thinking” is good for its own sake. This is false.

When we think, we build a mental representation of a situation, and then we cede responsibility to that mental representation. We’re no longer controlling the situation ourselves. We’re asking this mental representation to tell us what to do.

You might respond, “well, the mental model exists in my head, so it’s mine.” This is also false. You could write that model down on paper and have someone else read it, and then that model would be theirs as well. The model exists conceptually, as words not-yet-on paper. Concepts, written ideas, lines of logic — all of these are fungible and a posteriori. They’d exist just the same in my head as in yours, so they aren’t either of ours. They’re modes of understanding, but they are not understanding itself — true understanding is inexplicable.

Of course, rational thought has its time and place. If you’re learning something (in school, not from experience), then you have to learn from a mental model. There’s no other way. One day, you might encounter similar concepts in the real world, and what you’ve learned from your mental model might prove very helpful.

But, when we act based on our mental models, we admit that we didn’t trust ourselves to act. We were too scared to trust ourselves and act for ourselves.

Maybe it’s debatable if this is for better or for worse. All I can say is, as someone who’s tried to play pro golf based on intensive, logically-valid mental-modeling, I can tell you that it doesn’t work. As I’ve learned to give up rationality as a crutch and trust myself inherently, I’ve played much better golf.

In hindsight, there’s a pretty clean delineation between all the decisions in my life: athletic, academic, social, romantic, occupational, recreational, spiritual. The ones I made on the basis of rational choice were usually flawed (with the best models taking the longest to prove themselves wrong). But I’m not sure I’ve made a decision of my own, that I’ve truly, personally trusted, that’s ever led me astray.

(A higher self, personal communication, Sea Palms sauna, March 3^rd 2026)

[1] A strange grammatical note here: could this be either “for all it’s worth” or “for all its worth”? The former being “for all it is worth” and the latter “for all the worth that it has”? I genuinely think either is acceptable!

[2] In ways that I refuse to expound upon because I refuse to ruin the joke for myself or others.

I’m at my buddy Harry’s place in West Palm Beach. It’s five-and-a-half hours from St. Simons, and there’s a ton of stuff to play down here — most frequently on the Minor League Golf Tour, Eric Cole’s old stomping grounds who pride themselves on hosting events 47 weeks of the year. In the near-18 months I’ve been down here, I haven’t made it to Palm Beach to see him once, which is a bit embarrassing, because Harry’s been one of my best friends since we were eight. And so I made it a point this year to come down and see him and play an event.

The event was on Tuesday and Wednesday, a two-day-er. I got here on Saturday, spent the afternoon on his boat and the evening at various bars, got up to watch the hockey on Sunday, got brunch, got his boat out of the water, and then went to play the par-3 course at The Park, which was lit so you could play at night. (As in, literally lit, with overhead lights. Also figuratively lit. It’s called “The Lit Nine.”)

After which, the three us of us — Harry, his friend Liam, and I — went to Flanigan’s for dinner, a restaurant that feels like an Irish Pub built in a swamp, which is effectively what it actually is. Flanigan’s is also publicly traded on the NYSE. Attached to Flanigan’s is Big Daddy’s Wine and Liquor, which we stopped by while we waited for a table to open up.

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On the way down, I stopped at a Total Wine to get a bottle of Japanese whiskey for the boat. That I’m saying the following out loud kills all the magic of its contents, but: I really do take some pride and find some joy in being a bit eccentric. It’d have been easy enough to show up with a bottle of Makers, or even a decent bourbon, but I thought that something Japanese would be a little more out of left field, so that’s what I got: a bottle of Nikka From The Barrel, probably my favorite Japanese whiskey I’ve thus far had the pleasure of tasting.

The guys enjoyed it, though it’s a bit on the peatier side, and we wondered about something a little easier-going for drinking neat in Saturday-boat quantities in the future. So we went next door to Flanigan’s to Big Daddy’s Wine and Liquor to check things out. Which is where I found a bottle of Hibiki Harmony for 80 bucks. I’d had the pleasure of tasting it twice before, and it’s near-angelic — but, whenever I’d seen a bottle on St. Simons, it was north of $130. Here, in Palm Beach, during peak season, it was $80. I couldn’t believe it. So I bought a bottle for him and a bottle to take home.

Now that I’m back at his place and starting to write a newsletter. I’ve tried to get in the habit of using Bluetooth keyboards and laptop stands to save my neck a bit. So, when I pulled out a travel keyboard and looked for something to raise my laptop, I settled on the only thing on the counter that could do the job: a box to a bottle of fine Japanese whiskey.

I tell you this to give you some indication of how well my life is going, as well as how well his life is going.

I play professional golf for a living, and my days are spent walking around outside, doing an activity that most people work during the week to afford on weekends. My other jobs include an act of creative expression (writing) and dicking around in Claude Code building putting simulations and baseball prediction models, a combination of skills that, I believe, will make me a dangerous man to whichever of my college friends founds a startup that could utilize my skillset. He works at Goldman Sachs until either 9pm or 2am five days a week, which he described to me (after much whiskey) as “selling his soul.” He envies me.

I’m sitting at an island countertop in a beautiful apartment overlooking the Lake Worth Lagoon via floor to ceiling windows. I could throw a basketball from his balcony to where he docks his boat. On the weekends, he goes out on the boat for one of three reasons: 1) to hang out with friends, some of whom are single women, 2) to dive around recently sunk sailboats, or 3) to spearfish. He could also do whatever the hell else he wants. He lives in a town wherein I saw more beautiful women in a weekend than I saw on this island in the last calendar year. He largely leaves his work at his desk — furthermore, the concept of “completing” any item of that work is attainable and genuinely exists. His apartment building has a gym, a steam room, and a dry sauna. And I envy him.

After playing back-to-back weeks without doing laundry, I only had so many clean golf shirts to bring with me. Last week, I brought three normal shirts and one mock neck — I figured, if I made the cut, I’d feel good enough about myself where a mock-neck would be a fun thing to throw on. This week, down three more shirts beyond the laundry I hadn’t done, I had to pack two mock necks. It was the only way to get the colors to work without packing three pairs of pants.

That’s what I tell myself. In reality, I just think the mock necks look sick.

A similar line of reasoning held when I realized, as I was playing my practice round on Monday (in a regularly collared shirt) that I was potentially joining a friend at a nice golf course on Thursday, after the event. I probably couldn’t wear a mock neck there without drawing unwelcome attention. So, for the first round of the tournament, I had to wear a navy blue mock neck. Again, I’m only complaining performatively.

What I didn’t anticipate was, because it was my first time playing a MLGT event, I’d be asked to pose for a profile picture for the website. If you go look at my results now, you’ll see my face sitting above a tight mock-turtleneck collar, wearing a script “Sleepy” hat with sunglasses perched on top.

I had every intention of showing up to the first tee wearing a mock neck. I did not, whatsoever, intend to be the guy wearing a mock neck in his profile photo, but that’s the way the ball bounces sometimes.

I thought about that photo for most of my way down the first and second holes. More accurately, I thought about how I felt about the photo — because, for whatever reason, I felt kind of badass about it. Which is odd, because I’m a pretty self-conscious person, often enough. I don’t necessarily want to be That Guy In A Mock Neck — that feels like something you earn, the same way you don’t wear three Cuban Link chains as a guy hitting .180. But, for whatever reason, the following thought occurred to me:

“Yeah. Fuck these guys. I’m good enough at golf to wear a mock neck, and they aren’t. I’m cool enough to wear a mock neck and they’re not.”

I’ve tried to put my finger on where exactly this idea came from, and I think it’s a strict combination of two things, without either of which it couldn’t have happened:

1) I’ve been working my ass off on my golf game, specifically in ways that I actually, genuinely, finally, truly believe are getting me closer to the results I want.

2) I have opinions on Japanese whiskeys, which I sometimes drink on boats. Sometimes, while drinking on boats, I throw a Modelo 30 yards to a guy on a booze cruise catamaran, and he catches it. I do both of these in a red-paint-stained t-shirt featuring Larry’s face from The Three Stooges (and the slogan “Beer: it’s not just for breakfast anymore”), a shirt which I found at my favorite thrift store in downtown Savannah. I also have a favorite thrift store.

Both of these feel important, vis a vis a “why.” Because, the truth is, I have zero basis for “I’m good enough to wear a mock neck and they’re not.” I finished in 46^th. Who the hell am I?

The semi-tragic realization I’ve come to, recently, is that confidence (competitive confidence, at least, though I do believe it’s true of all confidence) is almost completely anti-profound. Semi-tragic, instead of tragic, because it’s not a-profound — that would be a real tragedy. At least there’s still some polarity between confidence and profundity. But confidence is, in no way, shape, or form — I’m totally convinced of this — profound.

Which is at least semi-tragic because this whole newsletter was predicated on the idea that the details of my journey to pro-golf success would be profound. That’s why I’ve bothered to write anything down. I certainly hope that something other than the golf has been profound, as told in this newsletter, because the journey to golfing confidence turns out not to be profound at all.

It’s worth clarifying the difference between wisdom and profundity — this, in the hopes that maybe I can salvage something of worth out of this realization. Something can be wise without being profound. I actually think this is more often the case than not, though I’m not sure I realized so until now.

Wisdom, in the same sense as confidence, is anti-profound in that it liberates a person from desiring the profound, or desiring things that are believed to be profound if attained. Take waking up early for example. “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” This is wisdom. It’s not profound. It’s simply an instruction. You can do it, or you can not. If you wake up early, nothing all that profound happens. The secrets of the universe aren’t revealed to you. You see a sunrise. I guess sunrises are profound, but the wisdom itself isn’t — the wisdom only told you to be awake for it. In that sense, the wisdom isn’t much more than a menial, on-the-nose instruction. Maybe it does, indeed, open yourself up to some rapturous second-order effects of bird chirping and early-AM UV stimulation, but those are just that, second order. It’s merely a point of access. If there’s any complex spiritual breakthrough on the other side, that’s only understood once you’re awake at that hour, and can’t be described precisely to someone who was asleep.

I feel pretty similarly about the whole mock neck bit. If there’s a secret vector to this entire newsletter enterprise, it’s to find ways to communicate these breakthroughs that would’ve resonated with a younger version of myself. But I have no way to communicate the essence of “I’m wearing a mock neck because fuck ‘them’” to my younger self. He wasn’t awake yet. Nor do I know what would’ve woken him up sooner.

On Sunday evening, on the way to the par-3 course, Harry asked me how I was doing. We haven’t talked as much as we should have in the last couple years. He said he’d been reading the newsletter, but he wanted to hear from me: how was it going?

It’s one of those questions that has two answers, one that’s directly indirect, the other indirectly direct. Harry and I are beyond “it’s going well, yeah, it’s going well.” As for the latter option, there are few things that people are more willing to ramble about than the boundaries of their own psyche. It’s some of the closest we get to self-actualization on any given day, verbalizing the things that happen at the outskirts of our heads, our latest attempts to put ourselves together.

I didn’t need to tell him how lucky I was to be playing professional golf. We’re past that. I started with the fact that there’s an odd push-and-pull between competing forces, both of which are fluid and usually entirely ambiguous, but that center around the question: how much of myself am I able to put into something? If I were to spend every waking moment redlining my mental engines to produce better golf, practicing with white knuckles in search of perfection, then I’d both fail and go insane — I know this from experience. The opposite is, obviously, just as ineffective: you sit around eating Oreos and watching old seasons of Family Guy until you go play a tournament you’re woefully unprepared for.

Somewhere in between these, supposedly, lies the happy medium. Other people have found it. This is proven by their success in the field. But, often enough, I wonder if that medium actually exists for me. I need to do other things. I need to write, and I need to build needlessly sophisticated computer models for reading putts, and I need to predict the outcomes of baseball games I’m not playing and understand what’s going to happen to the price of Brent crude I’m not buying and wonder how AI-doomed various white-collar jobs are that I don’t have. I don’t know why, but I do.

I tell myself that these things are important to my well-roundedness and that following these urges will come in handy in the future. That, one day, I’ll be happy I learned how to maintain basic python repositories and eliminate dangling participles, in addition to hitting a wedge exactly 95 yards. But I see plenty of guys who show up to the golf course, engross themselves completely in the game of golf, and then go fishing, totally content. Golf is enough for them. And I wondered, on that spectrum from all-in work to all-in ease, why — as someone working the greatest job in the history of the world — why sometimes it wasn’t enough for me.

I told him that, above all else, there was one unifying thread holding it all together: I wanted to win. I wanted to get the absolute most that I could out of my general human potential, but I also wanted to beat other people at what they did. I know what I’m capable of, and I think my best is better than their best, and goddammit I just want to turn over our cards and show that I have a better hand.

Golf is infuriating to me, because I know it might be the thing I have the highest potential in, but it’s also the hardest to achieve that potential in myself. I just have such a tough time getting out of my own goddamn way. And I tell myself, this is the right thing for me to be doing. This is the best way to push myself towards the best version of myself. And I love it. So keep going.

But, I told Harry, I look at the other side of things, at a good corporate job where you can spend your weekends fishing with friends instead of sneaking in a putting session before driving to spend a week in Dothan, Alabama[2], thinking over how well you prepared yourself to take another man’s job from him. The nights spent alone in my apartment watching meaningless college basketball games while I try to roll out my quads without screaming, thinking about the fact that I’m not going to be 25-years-old forever, wondering if any of this is actually all that healthy. Wondering if maybe the guys with real jobs on the other side actually figured something out.

Harry let me get all that out, then reminded me that I have it pretty good in the way only a good friend can without you hating them. He told me that he doesn’t keep friendships with losers, and that we’re friends because I’m a winner, so all that’s left to do is to be myself and win. And he said that, of all his friends, I’m one of his favorite stories to tell — that he has plenty of buddies in various sects of finance, but he “knows this one guy who’s playing professional golf and writing a newsletter about it, among a bunch of other random side projects, and let me tell you about him….”

Harry: I’ve been thinking about all this. It’s always complicated when we’re rambling, trying to piece ourselves together. But the reality is beyond simple. It’s the fishing. It has nothing to do with the golf — the golf is great. It’s everything else. The golf is enough when you can go fish with your buddies afterwards. That’s the balance. That’s when it all can click.

Some might call it Harmony. I’ll be down again soon brother — keep that bottle handy.

[1] See, the concept of “right now” gets tricky with these newsletters. “Right now” was, at one point, Monday night. As for when this newsletter was meant to come out, “right now” should have been last night, Friday — but I got a call from a friend I hadn’t talked to in a couple months, and I made the executive decision to stay on the phone and catch up and release this tomorrow. Which is now today, which is Saturday. You might be reading this on a different day entirely. I’m continually drawn back to this whole idea, because I want to write this newsletter in the style of “right now” while never actually inhibiting that moment of time, almost by definition. It’s odd. It’s not a problem that has a solution. It’s merely something that crosses my mind.

[2] Dothan has, and will continue to, catch a lot of strays in this newsletter. If someone has some great restaurant recommendations or things to do there, please let me know — otherwise, it will continue to be the paradigm example of a place that pro golf takes me where I am not excited to be.

Two friends of mine, Chris and James — roommates, one of whom I knew from junior golf, the other I’ve gotten to know better on the pro circuit — joined me for dinner most nights, and I had a hell of a good time being The Guy Who Knows A Restaurant. We initially went to The Flying Monk looking for Asian food, but we were told it would be a 30 minute wait for a table. No problem, I had plenty of other options. Though, we did get to Flying Monk later in the week, as the second part of a two-act dinner between there and Zanzibar — and “two-act dinners” might totally be a thing in 2026, going to two different restaurants in one evening. That shit slapped. I digress.

We head over to Flock to the Wok, another Asian place that’s a hard 4i from Flying Monk. It was just me and James that night. I’ve picked up enough about Asian food to know that soup dumplings should be consumed by biting the side of the wrapper and draining the broth into that big spoon so you don’t burn your mouth, and also that, if they’re on the menu, you order the soup dumplings. Aside from that, however, I’ve learned that, if you’re at an Asian restaurant with an Asian person (James’s last name is Imai), then you can never go wrong by tailing their order. I’ve gotten a lot of shit for it in the past, but I’ve eaten a lot of damn good food, and so I think I’ve come out well on top. In any event, James got target-lock on an order of sesame chicken as it was going to another table, we both ordered it, and it was fabulous.

At the end of our meal, we were presented fortune cookies. I’m largely a pretty anti-astrology, anti-wuwu sort of guy — there’s just too much good information out there for me to waste brain-energy on fake stuff — but fortune cookies are a cheap thrill. Some sequence of events led this cookie to my table and into my hands, with this exact message. They’re usually lighthearted and fun and don’t need to be taken too seriously. James held up two cookies and asked which one I wanted, and I chose the one in his right hand, and it was mine.

I realized that we were close enough to Chinese New Year that these were probably particularly auspicious cookies with particularly meaningful fortunes. I turned over the cookie to open the wrapping, and I saw that my fortune was swimming around in the plastic wrapping, outside the cookie. Not a great sign. I put the fortune down without reading it and cracked open the cookie anyways, thinking it’d be bad luck to read the fortune without opening the cookie.

To my surprise, my cookie did, indeed, have a fortune — the other fortune must be a bonus, one that snuck into the wrapping somehow. I decided to save it further, first reading the cookie-d fortune:

Take a pause from consuming information.

That hit pretty damn close to home. I feel better about my golf than I have in a long, long time, and I feel better about what I know about my golf than I ever have, by a mile. (To the same extent that Rory might never play better golf than he did at the end of 2014, but he has a better understanding of his game and success a decade and change later.)

But I’ve been waterboarding myself a bit with it all. I’ve been so excited by all this information that I’ve been trying to do every damn thing all at once. And I keep seeing results, which is why I keep doing it — I’m genuinely getting better at a pace I haven’t seen before. I can’t get enough.

I’ve fallen off journaling and meditating. I wake up in the morning, read the news, scroll around looking for more news before I even get out of bed — just total “mentality of more” type stuff. I have a whole list of things I want to accomplish that’s longer than I could ever actually tackle, and I just keep knocking things off at full effort. I’m running full tilt nearly all the time. I’m not taking time to breathe or cool off. My cortisol is spiked.[2]

But I hadn’t really realized this, embarrassingly enough, until I opened that cookie. I read it and immediately relaxed my shoulders and unclenched my jaw. I did have to stop consuming so much information, take a beat, and get stock of everything. I was running the engine too hot. This was a wise cookie indeed.

I turned over that bonus fortune — that almost impossibly auspicious gift from the cookie gods, that, if I was ever going to trust a piece of paper randomly sent to me through the fortune-cookie distribution network, this one had my whole heart — and read:

You will achieve success this year.

*************************

By now, you’re probably wondering how I fared at the GPro. (Sometimes I forget that that’s why like 80% of you are here.)

I played fine. I’m much more encouraged by the quality of play than I am by the score – I finished -1 for the week, well outside the cutline. But some real positives — actual ones this time.

I shot 73 in round one, and I was sloppy in the ways that, in hindsight, I should have expected to be sloppy after not competing for a full five-month rebuild. I hit a bunch of bad wedges, which is always where I get exposed when I’m not all the way on[3]. I smothered a chip-driver left on a hole where you absolutely could not go left. I putt like shit. I made four birdies, but five bogeys is always going to sting, and I finished round one well off the cutline pace.

I went to bed on Tuesday thinking of a formula an MGA official gave me once: the cutline is, more often than not, double the first round cut + 1. The top 33% of players make the cut in GPro events, meaning a tie for 28^th or something, and that fell at –3. So the cutline, by my estimate, would be –5. I needed to get it in the house in six-under 66 tomorrow.

Standing on the 12^th tee, I was five red and had missed two birdie putts inside 11’. I tugged a 9i into the 12^th green, the toughest hole on the course, and two-putt from 35’ for par. 13, a 580 par-5 back into the wind, was the last demanding tee shot left, and I hit that punch driver dead center and hot. I actually said “fuck yeah” under my breath as I picked up the tee, then cringed so hard at myself my inner ears hurt.

Standing in the middle of the fairway, I had 273 to a middle-back pin. The green has two tiers and runs front to back — it’s not receptive. And there’s water long and left. But pushing one up near the green would give me at worst an up-and-down for that last birdie I needed, and I was going into a short-4 next where I could pick up an insurance run — and, absolute worst case, I’m in the water left and need an up-and-down for par, and I pick up the last bird on the next hole. I had wind off the right that would help my draw. Ordinarily this is 2i territory, but I absolutely cannot risk being long, the front edge is fine, and I’m sitting there in the fairway, waiting for the green to clear and getting more juiced up by the second.

I pull 4i. I’m going to hit it to the front edge. More likely than not, it’s going to come up 30 yards short, I’m going to look like the dumbass who thought he could get home in two, and I have a pitch and a putt for my 4.

My dad has often noticed that I’m really good at hitting the hard shots, and if I could only get the easy shots figured out I’d be on Tour. He’s damn right. As I stepped into that 4i, I got that sensation I often get when I feel like I’m about to so something that very few other humans can do with a golf ball. I wished I had more people watching me. I took a big swing.

The ball came a little out of the heel — probably subconsciously to hold it against the right-to-left wind — but solid, and I thought I’d gotten it there off the face, that I’d hit one real hot that would fly that extra 10 yards to get to the front edge. I saw it land between the two front bunkers. I wasn’t sure about depth, but it occurred to me I might have a real look at 3 to get it to seven under.

I walked up the left side as the other two guys in my group hit wedges in from the right. Getting to the green, I didn’t see much of anything, and I had a sinking feeling as to what happened. I asked them if they’d seen the ball land. Apparently it hit way too close to pin high, bounced about eight feet into the air, and went three-rows-back into the hazard long. It didn’t have a prayer. I hit it too damn good.

It’s a lateral hazard back there, but it runs parallel to the green, so there’s only a tiny sliver where I can actually drop. That whole sliver was straight mud. I tried to get the bat on the ball, failed, chunked one to 20’ short, and missed the putt.

Now I needed two birdies, and there was only one real birdie hole left, the short par-4 14^th in front of me. Maybe I could pick one up at 15, but 16-18 were playing long and into the wind and were going to be bears. I hit my tee shot on 14 right where I wanted, threw a 60yd wedge 15’ past the hole, missed the putt, and that was about that. I hit a 9i through the wind on 15 and two putt. Now down both my decent chances, I got too aggressive with a 30’er on 16, ran it past, missed the comebacker, and that was about it. A decent look on 17, but a par. Knowing I was well outside the cut, I straddle-stanced a 2’ par putt on 18 to get out of someone’s way, missed it, and tapped in backhanded.

So I finished at -2 for the day and -1 for the event. But, damn, I do swear it was closer than that. It’s getting legitimately close.

If you’re looking for specifics reg. my takeaways and plan and such…honestly, it’s getting late, I’ve had a full day, I’m driving to Palm Beach early tomorrow morning and want to get a putting session in before that. So I’m going to keep it super brief. But, tee to green, if I hit it like I did in round 2 every round, I’m a PGA Tour professional. If I putt it like I did during both rounds this week, I’m a 4 handicap.

The putting was atrocious. I know the number geeks will tell you that you don’t need to make any putts outside of 10’, but it does turn out that, if you have a lot of them, then you need to make some of them, and I certainly did not. I’m missing everything on the low side, which sounds easy enough to fix — just aim higher, dumbass — but putting requires some visualization, and for the life of me I cannot see a way for the ball to go in when I’m taking these high lines. So I just have to rep it out until I start to see something.

As for the ball striking, everything I’m doing is working so far. I’m sure there’ll be peaks and valleys, but I feel like I understand it all so much better that I can dig my way out of something more easily now. I’m excited. I think good things are around the corner.

That’s all for now. I’m getting to bed. Cheers.

[1] This isn’t at all what he said, but the sentiment was there.

[2] If this phrase didn’t activate a primitive part of your brain Soviet Sleeper Style, then God bless you, you’re doing something right with yourself. If you know exactly what I’m talking about: I’ve been grindmaxxing to brutally tourneymogg golfoids, but I train-goon stress-pilled myself and now I’m cooked!

[3] Yes, I know this is the easiest part of the game — let’s get a beer and I’ll tell you all about the specifics if you give me 75 minutes to do so.

That’s a bit of a stretch — that I’ve been thinking about it lately, that is. Truth is, I haven’t been thinking of much at all recently. Which is due to the simple fact that I’ve worked harder on my golf this week than maybe any week I can remember. By some metric, at least. I’ve definitely hit more range balls or played more hours of golf than this week, and there’s been weeks when I’ve burned more calories on grip-wringing or jaw-tightening or brain-racking reg. my golf. But, this week, as some measure of the effort that I have to direct intentionally towards anything, I think I’ve directed more of that energy more efficiently at my golf than any other week in my young life.

In fairness, though, I’ve thought about that Tracy Austin essay a lot over the years (and have been thinking about it for the last half hour, when I got off the golf course and realized I needed to write something). It’s been one of those subsurface essay concepts that’s been meant for a newsletter for some time. But it hasn’t ended up happening, whether it’s because something else happened that week, or because I didn’t have the time or energy or motivation to write it any given day (God forbid I write something unworthy of the concept and burn the idea forever). I don’t think today is the day either — I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere near the bottom of what I hope to say about it all, though I guess we’ll see.

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To a non-zero extent, Into the Weeds is a direct response to “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” I remember reading it for the first time and immediately thinking, “There’s no way in hell he’s actually getting at something, here. That’s bullshit. There are people who can play a sport at a high level, and there are people who can write about sports at a high level, but there’s nothing that says that one person can’t do both.” This was the real bugaboo for me, that Wallace insinuated that there was something metaphysically dull about the act of playing a sport at a high level, and that anyone who thought the act of sport was any particular sort of beautiful was then immediately disqualified from achieving the highest level of that sport. He insinuates, in that essay (I should caveat, as I understood it four years ago and how it’s haunted me since), that a mind capable of elite sporting performance and beautiful sporting commentary are mutually exclusive. I think that’s bullshit.

On its face, this seems fairly obvious. You’d expect most athletes to put in the training time and energy because they find the experience profound and meaningful, which almost automatically disproves the whole thing. If anything, there’s then a survivorship bias towards the people who put in their 10,000 hours playing their sport vs. 10,000 hours writing, and the population self-sorts. Not to mention, most of the best TV commentators once played the sports they cover — not that most of them are poets, but surely they’re good enough.

I’ll admit, because if you’re still around by now I think you’re in the trust tree w/r/t my dreaming big, that Into the Weeds was meant to document how a person can go from middling levels of pro golf to a PGA Tour winner, and to do so in a way (hopefully) more profound than a laundry list or podcast interview. I figured, if I wrote well enough about how I got to the top, that was a proof by contradiction to Wallace’s whole slant, and I’d finally be able to sleep without waking up in a sweat.

Flash forward to today, and I’m reading the following (the last two grafs of Wallace’s essay):

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, “I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,” the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there’s nothing she can do about something bad and so she’d better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? Or is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened?

This is, for me, the real mystery — whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. … As is so often SOP with the truth, there’s a cruel paradox involved. It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

My initial discomfort (that there’s no way that these can be mutually exclusive) quickly — like, in a few microseconds — transitioned to the horrible realization that I was a decent writer, and that my experiences on the golf course were, to me, quite profound, and so maybe I was disqualified from being a truly elite athlete by that very virtue. In the time it took for the signal to go to my gut and back, I remembered that I had a horrible pattern of overthinking, that multiple coaches had told me that I’d play better golf if I showed up to the course drunk, and that I’d had a good bit of trouble getting out of my own way. A quick mental recount of every rake I’d stepped on while playing golf proved that most of them were interesting, in some way, and for a moment I felt some sort of doomed.

My response has been, by and large, to say “fuck it” and simply try to do both at once. I documented my first full year of professional golf in this newsletter, and I’m personally satisfied with the result. (The writing, that is — if you think I’ve been satisfied by the golf, I’m insulted, and please unsubscribe now.) I’ve come up with two pretty comprehensive plans for the last two quarters, and I learned a lot from the first, and the second is still in progress. Neither has been all that interesting, from a literary standpoint, and any bit of it takes 5000-7000 words to relay in any parse-able form (I’ve tried, and I’ll do it at some point soon), and so I’ve mostly been writing about music or movies or whatever.

Here’s the real trouble I’m dancing around: I’m finding it harder to write about golf as I’m (I really, truly believe this in my heart) actually starting to get better at golf.

There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes, and I’m sure a lot of that is interesting. My upper body, for instance, turns out to be much weaker than my lower body, and it’s inability to handle the forces I produce has created most of both my bad swing patterns and ball striking inconsistencies. I’ve gotten my upper body stronger, and now I can keep the club in front of me better. The club slots up nicely on the way back (whcn I pay enough attention to actually get it there — still a work in progress). On the way down, I’ve been pulling my left elbow into my chest to stabilize it, which snaps the face shut and creates a hard left miss. So I’ve been letting my left elbow float away from myself (abduct, physiologically speaking) through impact — a move that, before recently, I didn’t have nearly the upper body strength to do with any sort of control. But now that I can control it, it extends the impact zone nicely while keeping the face square for longer, and my ball striking has gotten a hell of a lot better. There are some further idiosyncrasies from the banal (stop sliding my head backwards on the way back) to the inexplicable (the tiny sensory perceptions as I understand how my new body can handle, distribute, and produce force).

Actually, I have one more tidbit: I like to trigger the start of my swing by feeling force in my feet, but this causes me to drift backwards, so I’m trying to train myself to trigger by pressing the club into the ground and letting it bounce up at me. If you watch Tour pros, they almost all have some trigger that starts their swing. Rory rotates his hips towards the target slightly. Plenty of guys bounce the club (Spieth used to). Watch, next time you’re watching golf, for no other reason than it being fun inside-baseball stuff.

But besides that, man, I don’t have much to say. Simply saying that I’ve been getting my upper body stronger and that I’m learning all sorts of new ways to use it — that really is a pretty exhaustively descriptive account of the situation. I’d love to make it all into some extended commentary on Kant or whatever, but it’s really far too simple for any of that.

I compete next week — my first time in about six months, not counting pre-qualifiers. I’ve spend a lot of time working on a lot of stuff. I’ve gone down some rabbit holes before finding some stuff that I think is genuinely working. To be honest, I don’t feel like any sort of finished product. I can’t tell you with much confidence how this week is going to go. I believe I’m a better golfer than I was this fall, and the path to some really elite shit looks very, very clear from where I’m standing. Who knows when I’ll get there. Maybe this week, maybe not. That’s why we play the golf, I guess, to find out and all.

I have a hell of a lot of belief in what I’m doing right now. The tragedy is that it all seems way to damn simple, mundane, or specific to talk about in any way that’s at all profound. And so I’m wondering if Wallace really was right, that there’s something about the mental state of great golf that’s just too damn banal to describe in the way we watch others.

That, or maybe I’m just tired as hell after this week and drawing a blank. Who knows. Time will tell. All there is to do is keep playing golf and keep writing, and I intend to do both for a while. Cheers.

I’ve played the drums for most of my life, and I was always involved in a high school band in some form or another. My freshman year, anyone with an instrument was herded into the freshman jazz band, and we worked on a bunch of jazz and swing standards to perform twice a year at school concerts. Once we were sophomores, however, things bifurcated: you could stay on the jazz band track and join the Blue Notes, or you could move down the hall to the High School Band. I don’t think it had any other name. But that was where you went if you wanted to do something else.

In practice, this meant rocking the hell out. In hindsight, I recognize how well our teacher — Mr. Kirsch — integrated a healthy diet of fusion, funk, and other rad shit into our curriculum, really broadening our musical exposure. But there was always a Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple song to really highlight the semester and get us all juiced up.

I was on drums. My friend Tommy was on guitar. He and Scott had come in as freshmen together — most of us had been there since middle school or earlier — and immediately established themselves as the music guys. Tommy played guitar; Scott played drums. As I was first discovering classic rock in earnest, they’d already arranged a Led Zeppelin medley at their previous school. They were the true Ball Knowers.[1]

A common topic of conversation between them: Tommy would try to convince Scott that this “progressive metal” thing was the shit, and Scott would halfway brush it off. Scott enjoyed it, from what I can remember, but was nowhere near Tommy’s rabid fandom. This was the absolute zenith of contemporary music. This was the bleeding edge. Holy shit, man, it just rips.

I was the next target. I think there was (I’m not exaggerating) a fifteen-month stretch where I didn’t listen to a single damn thing other than Led Zeppelin. I was obsessed. They were the greatest band in the history of the world, nobody would ever touch them, I had no interest in anything else, thank you kindly.

Tommy kept telling me: “hey man, you like this super heavy groovy shit — what if I told you there was something even heavier and groovier?”

This sounds great, on its face. What Tommy wasn’t saying — and the reason I was resisting — was that most of these songs had some “harsh vocals.” You might know this as “screaming.” I was very attached to my self-image as a normal dude, and normal dudes don’t like listening to screamo shit. They wear jeans and quarter-zips and listen to Led Zeppelin and do their homework on time. They don’t wear eyeliner and black long-sleeved t-shirts under graphic short sleeved t-shirts yell expletives at their parents. And for that reason I resisted listening to any progressive metal for a good two years or so, no matter how pumped-up Tommy was.

He’d tell me to listen; I wouldn’t. This went back and forth for a long while, up until sometime early February of 2019, when I had a 90 minute drive up and over towards West Point, and I wasn’t feeling any itch to listen to anything in particular, and I figured, what the hell, I’d try it out again. And so I threw on “Mile Zero” by Tommy’s favorite band, Periphery.

I listened through it. Then through the next track, “Masamune.” That was the end of the album, so I went back to “Mile Zero,” then through to “Masamune,” then back again….

Something clicked. Hard. What had been a hell of a lot of noise — for years — suddenly had this deep groove to it, and I fell all the way in. I listened to those two tracks for an hour of the drive up, and then those same two tracks the entire 90 minutes home. Six years later, I’ve never looked back.

To be honest, I’ve never even really listened to much Periphery since that six-week stretch of discovery. Wanting to branch out, the next band I found was Tesseract, a band that I’ve loved dearly ever since. Next was Caligula’s Horse, a band that’s way less metal than it sounds (and my recommendation for anyone who likes good rock music — try “The Hands are the Hardest” or “The World Breathes Through Me”). Those two bands carried me through a good 18 months or so, until I branched out further into VOLA, Haken, Leprous, and Ebonivory.

I don’t remember the first time I listened to Karnivool. For those not familiar,[2] Karnivool is a progressive metal band from Perth, Australia, a city that’s closer to Indonesia’s capital than its own and 1,300 miles from Adelaide, the nearest major Australian city — between which there’s not much besides desert and spiders.

Coming from such an isolated place, Karnivool doesn’t sound like a single other band I know. I’m not even really sure how to describe them. Their frontman (who does not scream, for anyone wondering) is the only man who’s simultaneously held the number one song on Australia’s metal and pop charts (the latter with his other band, Birds of Tokyo, whose eponymous album is an all-time great).[3] Their bassist — Jon Stockman, whom I believe is the best one doing right now and it’s not close — designed the Darkglass Alpha/Omega distortion pedal based on his tone on the song “Goliath,” and I’m not sure I’ve seen any bassist use anything else. Their drummer, Steve Judd, is a name I don’t hear nearly enough noise about (putting people on notice here). And their guitarists, Mark Hosking and Drew Goddard, do things on guitars that I never would have considered possible — not in a Van Halen sense, but in a “how the fuck do you get a guitar to sound like that” sense.

I think I found Karnivool sometime in 2020, and I found them in earnest in ‘21. But, in 2022 and 2023, they were my most listened-to artist on Spotify. The past two years they’ve been second. Under the gun, I normally say that I have four favorite bands, and there’s no way of differentiating between them. But the numbers don’t lie. If I had to pick one, most days it’d be Karnivool.

You might be wondering where all this music talk is going. It’s pretty simple, really.

Karnivool released their last album on July 19^th, 2013.

Their long awaited fourth album released today.

I can’t say that I’ve been waiting for even close to twelve years for this release, like some people have. I can say, however, that I’d resigned myself to Karnivool being a three-record band. The fourth record had been rumored for a long time, and they released a single in 2021 with the intention of putting out the album soon-ish after. Years later, we had two posthumous Mac Miller releases and no new Karnivool. Which I’ll reiterate, considering just how absurd that is: one of my favorite non-metal acts, a solo artist, passed away in 2018, and two finished products (good ones!) released between his passing and the Karnivool release.

On June 27^th, 2025, another Karnivool single released, “Drone,” along with a fresh set of insinuations that the album was coming soon. I was just thrilled to have another track, and I think it’s one of their best ever. I listened on repeat for days, then on and off for weeks. Then, right before Q School last year, “Aozora,” along with album art, a release date, and a tour announcement. There’s no sexier way to say it than that I simply could not believe it.

A quick gripe here that, in the current streaming economy driven by monthly listeners, it’s economically irresponsible to release an album with fewer than four singles. The band said publicly that they wanted to just get the damn thing out to their fans, but it took seven fucking months from the first single to the album release.

But here we are. At midnight last night, Karnivool’s fourth album, In Verses, whose name contains two different puns and a Roman numeral because they’re the fucking best — it’s finally here.

To be honest, in thinking about how to land this all home, I thought I’d draw some parallel between that first car ride when metal clicked for me and this album release today. I thought something about the record would hit me like a ton of bricks and the comparison would just fall right out and hit me.

Here’s something embarrassing: I’m enjoying the first song on the album so much that I’ve only listened past it once.

My experience with my favorite albums has been that I’m pretty lukewarm on them on first listen. After a couple listens, I start to pick up on more, get a feel for the pulse and syncopation, and really start feeling the lines in my bones. For a lot of music, you can imagine, “if only I could listen to ___ for the first time again’ — with most prog stuff, I almost go in knowing that my first listen will be the worst it’ll ever sound.

Karnivool has never been great to me on the first listen. I truly thing every song they’ve released has gotten a bit of a “eh, not sure this is as good as the rest” feeling from me. I know what’s coming when I fire it up, and I still keep falling for it. Because the second listen opens up a hair. On the third and fourth listens, you start realizing how many damn guitar tracks there are, and how damn sick every one of them will be once you wrap your head around it. By listens six through eight, I start imagining just how loud I’ll be singing this in the car by listen 20.

Songs 2-4 on In Verses were previously released as singles, but the first song, “Ghost,” was a new one for me. I knew I wanted to be fresh for my first listen, but, after getting off my flight and making it to my childhood bedroom, I really wanted to hear one song. I got the headphone amp and studio cans out of my suitcase (that I brought north for this release) and fired it up.

I listened. I tried to hide my disappointment from myself. I listened to the singles. I went back and listened to “Ghost” again. A little better. I checked ESPN. I listened a third time, and I realized, holy shit, this is what they’ve spent twelve years putting together.

I’ve listened to the rest of the album through one time. I’m not quite there, right now, but I can tell it’s going to be an all timer. The last song, “Salva,” seems like a particular standout. On their second album, “Sound Awake,” the closing track features a digeridoo, a cool Aussie touch in a spot that absolutely rips. I wondered if they’d bring it back as an homage. They didn’t, but they brought in a fucking bagpipe instead.

But that first song, man. I’m probably 10-12 listens into “Ghost” by now, and holy shit does it bang. I’ve waited for this album for four years, and some people have waited for twelve, and the first song is so goddamn good that I can’t even listen to the rest of the record long enough to write a newsletter about it.

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about weird esoteric music that you love deeply and want others to enjoy is to dance about your favorite cathedral and submit it as a blueprint to a zoning committee. Truth be told, I don’t have much to say about the music, aside from the fact that it’s everything I ever wanted. I’m so goddamn happy that Karnivool IV actually made it to my ears.

If you want to join us ‘Vooligans and check them out for yourselves:

- If you’re looking for a song, listen to “Drone.”

- If you want to start with an album, good! Sound Awake is maybe the greatest album of the whole genre.

Maybe you’re a better listener than I am and you dig it on the first spin. Maybe you have to stick with it for a while. Either way, I hope that, at some point, you have the moment I had in the car in 2019 when it all came together. I’d love to share it with you.

[1] Looking back, I never gave myself nearly enough credit for being a damn good drummer — confidence wasn’t exactly my strong suit in my teens, as I’m sure is common among people who run substacks.

[2] Lmao I know you’re not familiar (and if you are, reach out brother! We need to talk!)

[3] And not at all metal — if all of this talk about distorted guitars makes you queasy, go listen to “Plans,” “Circles,” and “Wild At Heart.”