Interoffice Confidential
We have three editors here at The Horse You Rode In On, and our “office” is the lower 48 contiguous states – Boston (actually Hingham) at one corner, the Bay Area at another, and Pittsburgh in between.
Thus to produce a coherent weblog requires some interoffice memoranda, and given the quixotic nature of the posts we write, one could hardly expect the memos to meet the standards of the Harvard Business School.
Nevertheless, since we’ve never featured ourselves in one of our posts, we thought that full disclosure and transparency called for sharing at least one such exchange.
Barb to Al:
Subject: Must have been one of yours
I went on a hike today to a place called Land’s End. When I got there, I sat down under a tree to rest. Moments later I was struck in the head by a golf ball.
Al:
And then did you feel like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Is that how you felt?
Having just discovered the world’s greatest water hazard?
Barb:
No, it was more like this. I was having a crisis of faith, and I looked up into the vastness of the vast… vast… what is that thing called? Oh yeah, the sky. And I said, “If you’re so fucking smart, what’s 37319405747280 divided by 9329851436820?†And He (for who else could it have been?) yellethed 4, and I was struck by a golf ball.
PS:Â And watch who you call a fat Cortez.
Al:
Ah.
The ball represents inner peace. It has an inner piece of silicon wound and trammeled in utter captivity by 7.000 miles of a sticky rubber band that doesn’t form a, you know, oblong ellipsoid kind of circular hickey because each end is just sort of glued in place by the forces that wind up golf balls. Your skull represents the subjective/objective membrane of alienation. In this scene, Rick represents the Open-Mouthed One Whose Time is Not Yet Come. The stars you saw are a thousand points of false enlightenment and one true one, in case you happened to notice the star with four points instead of the hackneyed, fallacious five or six. This may be the second coming — unless, of course, the first one was a bad experience.
Have you noticed any extra bliss?
Mark chimes in:Â
Philistines.
From Henry IV, Part I, Act
III, Scene 1
Glendower: “I can call golf balls from the vasty deep.”
Hotspur : “Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?”
Clearly you simply wandered into a regional production of some sort. If you’d only studied you could have faked your way off stage: “Prithee, sirrah, Lords Woods and Duval approach anon. I will away to the Blue Tees.”
Barb:
Hamlet: This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of golf balls.
Mark:Â
King Richard II:
… for within the hollow brown
That rounds the distant aprons of the green
Keeps Bad Luck his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing your shots and grinning while you curse,
Allowing you a breath, a little stream,
To chip across, quite near except it hooks,
Into a limb which sends and then conceals,
As if this shot which went unto the green,
Were made impossible, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last toward the little pin
Bounces on a hidden twig, and farewell Ping!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away your club,
spiked shoes, bag and ridiculous clothing,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I drive quite far like you, make par,
drink beer, putt well: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I moved the ball?
11 Comments »
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I expect to be repeating this
Somewhere ages and ages hence.
Two paths diverged in the wood and, hey,
I took the one past the tenth fairway,
Got crocked on the dome by a wicked slice,
And that has left me a little dense
Comment by Frosty the Snowman — January 11, 2009 @ 8:59 am
I may be a little hoarse,
but I think this strange
Comment by Carl Sandtrap — January 11, 2009 @ 9:58 am
Cretins.
For, had the passions of thy heart burst out,
I fear we should have seen decipher’d there
More rancorous spite, more furious flying balls,
Than yet can be imagined or supposed.
But howsoe’er, no simple sister that sees
This jarring discord of family,
This shoving of each other on the course,
This facetious bandying of droll quotations,
But that it doth presage some ill event.
‘Tis much when golf balls are in siblings’ hands;
But more when satire breeds smart-assed derision;
There comes the rain of balls, then contusions.
Henry VI, Act IV, Scene 1
Comment by Lynn — January 11, 2009 @ 10:14 am
You’re hired.
Comment by Mark — January 11, 2009 @ 10:44 am
Whither, midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue
Thine errant Callaway?
(Made in America!)
Comment by William Cullen Briarpatch — January 11, 2009 @ 4:17 pm
How very, very nice. Now have a warm cup of tea, all of you, and go back to the home. There’s a bingo tonight.
Comment by Steve Alber — January 12, 2009 @ 5:47 pm
What a cop-out! You’ve committed the entire corpus of English literature to memory, and you couldn’t think of a single apropos passage to butcher?
Comment by Al — January 12, 2009 @ 11:30 pm
The old pond,
My ball jumps in:
Plop!
Comment by Matsuo Basho — January 13, 2009 @ 12:17 pm
Girl of the Limberlost
her Way Down Upon the Swanee
Big Two-Hearted River aches
and a drowsy numbness pains
her head, Knock Three Times
After the Ball is Over the Green
Green Hills of Home, lying on the couch
of Dr. Freud, she say, Ouch.
Comment by Al — January 13, 2009 @ 4:03 pm
Oh all right; you shamed me into it.
Should God create another green,
And I another chip afford,
Yet loss of strokes would never from my heart.
No,no, I feel the links of Pinehurst draw me!
Slice of my drive and hook of my bunker shot thou art,
And from my swing no Mulligan shall be counted,
No matter what Torisky says.
…w/apologies to John Milton and Milton Bradley
Comment by Steve Alber — January 13, 2009 @ 7:45 pm
Sport, that wrinkled care derides,
Hitting golf balls far and wide,
One flies o’er battlements and sees
Bosom’d high in tufted trees,
Where some beauty lies abed
And conks her on her comely head,
The cynosure of neighboring eyes.
Oh sure, but play it as it lies
Steve’s friend Milton,
L’Allegro
Comment by Al — January 14, 2009 @ 4:16 pm