I Am Tiger Woods

Spring break 2005. No I am not on a Mexican beach getting liquored up and eating whip cream bikinis off inebriated college girls, I am spending a couple days at my parents house. Spring '00, went camping at ocean shores. In the spring of 2001, I went on a road trip to Los Angeles. '03 was another camping trip, this time to the Olympic pennisula. And last year we went to Salt Lake City, Vegas, Grand Canyon, Denver, and finished it with a night under the big sky of Montana. Four strait years of fun and adventure. I am saving money for life after college. Maybe I'll go abroad after I graduate.

So, here I am in Marysville. I need to leave my apartment more often. While I've been hiding out in Bellingham pretending to be a character in a Fantasy novel, the rest of the state has been paved over--turned into cheaply made, but overpriced, track housing. I almost wanted to cry driving the back roads today. In a city like Marysville, kids go into the woods for fun. Drinking, drugging, sexing, it's all done in the woods. Not that all my woodsy excursions were of the parting variety. The point is, my suburban neighborhood was surrounded by apple orchards, and farming fields (now the nieghborhood has been assimilated into the megatropolis starting south of Seattle and now ending here, in Marysville. Soon it will stretch all the way to Vancouver BC). Our Independence was found in the foothills, away from our parents in the valley. My High School, nick named "cow pie high," used to be in the middle cattle pastures. Not today. Row after Row of identical houses have turned the country side into a dizzying cubist painting. This morning, I found myself driving from memory to memory to see if the land still matched my memory of it. It is a whole new city. How do our grandparents deal with such things? The world they knew is gone. It gradually changed over 70 years. Washington has changed so much in the last 15!

I spent the day golfing though. Funny, even the course has been redesigned. I spent every day for two summers playing that course as a teenage boy. Played thirty six holes a day and sometimes at twilight I would play the course backwards with only my three wood and seven iron. The guy in the pro-shop was new. He had no idea that I grew up on that course. Just another customer on a slow day as far as he was concerned. Sure felt wonderful to get 0ut in the short grass for an afternoon. The sun even came out. I haven't had such a relaxing day in years.

I was a little concerned that I wouldn't be able to get the ball in the air with all the rust in my swing. I haven't played a round of golf in two years. How surprised I was when my first drive went right down the middle, in the air and everything. The front nine was a little shaky but I completed the back nine two over par. Not bad! I was thinking I should write MTV's Made, asking them to make me into a PGA professional. I wonder how good I could be with a year of practice and no worries about rent, food, and college debt.

Oh yeah this is what I wanted to write about: people that ride in golf carts. How lame can you get. Ninety nine percenent of my enjoyment from golf comes in walking the course. Thinking about the next shot, identifying the trees and plants, watching the clouds blow by--the narrative of the game. Every time I turned around during the first three holes, a herd of golf carts were raking up dust and challenging me with motor growls. I let them play through on four and things became serine. I am going to go golfing again tommorrow.