Perversely thrilling. For reals.

In the 17 days since I last posted anything, I have done the following:

• spent a sordid Easter long weekend in a Chicago hotel with a woman OTHER than Goddess
• fired fully automatic assault rifles with members of a SWAT team
• ran after a cop to videotape him as he chased a suspect in a shooting who was fleeing the scene on foot, whilst realizing that perhaps only cops wearing Kevlar should tear after people who might have a loaded weapon on them
• was bitten by a police dog…voluntarily.
• spent another weekend in Memphis where I drank far too much, mostly because I found out that the one woman I’ve ever known carnally that I wanted to marry just got engaged to someone else
• did most of that drinking with a black blues musician who calls himself Dr. Feelgood Potts as we watched an attractive English girl with hot pink hair dance with some annoying Australians who had haircuts that made them look like the Doodlebops, all of which served to add a mild Wes-Anderson-like quality to my melancholy
• attempted to sneak upstairs at Graceland, was caught and escorted off premises by security.
  

  Bemused on Beale

• after several attempts finally finished Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby, which is no reflection on the excellent book or its author so much as a signal of my reluctance to commit to anything that might take longer than a few weeks
  

  The aftermath

• have put on at least 5 pounds eating Southern cooking, including (but not limited to) country fried steak, fried chicken and waffles,  chicken and dumplings, old fashioned barbecue served with either fried okra, fried pickles or cheese grits…oh, and biscuits and gravy too.
  

  Unfortunately the Lewinski doll was out of stock.

• visited the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, where amongst other things I purchased an actual Bill Clinton action figure that makes various famous comments from the man when you press its chest (strangely “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” was not one of them)
• last but not least,  I have spent 10-14 hours a day recording the efforts of police officers as they try to prevent students from making bad choices,  despite the students’ determination to make them anyway.

Beale Street Sunday Night

So you might say I’ve been too busy living my life to blog about it.  More to the point,  I’ve been too busy living life to actually assign meaning to anything that’s happened in the past two weeks plus. Which is not to say it’s not required – there are a few items on the list that will need to be unpacked in subsequent blog posts, and my experiences there may’ve helped me become a Better Man.  But I haven’t consciously sought betterment of any kind, so I can’t say for certain.  As you can tell, I’ve been…well, preoccupied.

I have been anxious, which may be no surprise if you’ve read any of my past entries.  However,  this time it’s not a general malaise. The source of my angst is very specific, and strangely it’s giving me a certain measure of satisfaction.  You see, I’m worried because I haven’t penned anything in 17 days until now.  What makes that gnawing anxiety oddly gratifying is that I’m uneasy not because I haven’t written anything for you to read so much as I haven’t written anything, period.

Devil in White City

There is a saying that goes “once you sell it, you never want to give it away again.”   When it came to creative self-expression, that was precisely my attitude.  I once enjoyed the privilege of working at jobs that allowed me to show off -  I was indulged and permitted to demonstrate how smart and funny and clever I could be.  However, in so doing I developed a rather mercenary attitude.   I couldn’t see the point of expressing anything unless there was someone there to pay me for it. Even when I started this blog,  I had plans for what might come of it;  a rapturous audience obsessed with each new post and whose slavish devotion leads a broadcaster to give me a TV show, or a publisher to give me a book deal, or a maitre’ d to give me a good table at a nice restaurant.

I did not get a good table at any of these places because of my blog.

None of that has happened, of course, but that hasn’t kept me from posting and I’m realizing why – I feel better when I’m writing, and I feel worse when I don’t.   Money’s got nothing to do with it.   This is a major breakthrough for me.   Despite a career in communications,  I could never find the internal motivation to articulate even my most basic feelings.   The result is that I was strangely disconnected from myself.   I’d pursue some ill-advised course of action or mutated strand of logic that made little sense to anybody, and I didn’t have the resources or the self-awareness to realize how far down the rabbit hole I was.

Thanks to writing,  I can summon the self-reflection needed to see and possibly avoid such things.  Moreover, writing so that one or two people can read it and possibly identify with my experience puts a little more distance between me and that nagging feeling that I’ve been behaving insanely inappropriately my whole life   Or perhaps I have been acting insanely inappropriately and only now I can understand why, thanks to people who’ve perpetrated the same anti-social behaviour and can tell me they relate.

Of course, life will continue to rob me occasionally of the time needed to write, and the Muse may not visit as frequently as I would like, but it’s going to take a lot to dislodge my newfound motivation to write, to make sense of the world and my place in it.   If there was ever a big step in becoming a Better Man, this is it.

Dear Tiger:

Soooo…I suppose I should say “welcome back” but to be honest I’m not that happy to see you.

What happened man?  When you said you were going to take some time off, I thought you were going to spend a year on a kibbutz, or work with the poor, or simply roam the world getting in adventures like Jules Winfield in Pulp Fiction.  Now THAT would be atonement.

tiger, please tell me marcellus wallace does not look like a bitch to you.

Instead, you hid out for a measly four months at a Mississippi clinic and now you’re supposedly “cured” of your “addiction”.  Ari Fleischer (former White House pitchman for a certain ill-advised war in the Middle East) is coaching you on how to “Ac-cen-tu-ate the Positive” and “E-lim-in-ate the Negative.”  You’re playing the Masters and giving interviews with a certain look in your eye that makes me think you’ve returned to kill John Connor, the future leader of the human resistance. The Division II hoochies you nailed who missed out on their big payday last time are getting another chance to tell their stories to someone other than their roommate (who’s probably sick of hearing them go on about it).   Suffice to say, I’m disappointed.

However, I think I’m more upset with myself than with you.  It hurts to realize that you never read my last letter, but perhaps that’s a good thing.  You see, I got a few things wrong, such as this:

Unlike a lot of celebrities these days, your fame depends primarily on your ability to play golf, and less on people’s willingness to pay attention to you.     You owe them nothing.  You owe me nothing.  The only people to whom you owe anything are your wife and kids.

I mean, how naïve am I? When you said you were sorry for letting down the ones who depend on you, I thought you were talking principally about Elin.   I realize now you were talking more about the entire world of golf – the PGA, the broadcasters, the sponsors, the fans, and lets not forget all those other “pros” – that pantheon of shit golfers who can barely qualify for the tour.  Before your prodigious talent revolutionized the game and got everybody paid those assholes would have to take the bus to tourneys, and I’m sure a few of them thought about giving up golf to work for their brother-in-law’s septic business.  Thanks to your return they can continue to roll up to courses in a Lexus and put their kids through private school.   THOSE guys are your real family, and they are thrilled that you’re back.

Then there’s this gaffe:

Not that you need any more cashish, but foregoing millions in sponsorships and walking away from glory and adoration just to step back and refocus your priorities on being a better man, a better husband and father? that’s brave. That’s way braver than some dubious apology formulated by a crack squad of PR people and then soft-balled on some Tiger-friendly non-judgapalooza like Larry King. It’s brave because your wife has far less reason to forgive you than we do, and the chances you’ll succeed in earning her forgiveness and regaining her trust are pretty low.  Yet her forgiveness is what you need the most.

What was I thinking? I still believe you need Elin’s forgiveness but it’s obviously not as important as I thought.  What IS important is to play again, because while Americans kinda sorta dislike men who betray their spouses (but not really) they FUCKING! HATE! quitters.   There’s only so much self-reflection we’ll tolerate. Ultimately the only proof of your contrition is 13 strokes up on the leader board, or maybe 13 strokes behind – 13 strokes of anything that doesn’t involve a plump-ish cocktail waitress in the Pharoah’s Suite at the Luxor.   Playing is the only thing that matters, for them and for you.  I guess I’m the only one who didn’t get that memo.

I am trying to look at the upside.  As Jonathan Mahler pointed out in his excellent article for the New York Times Magazine “the same scandal that has battered professional golf…will now drive new levels of interest in it.”  CBS, the network that will air the Masters, is expecting as many people to watch it as the Super Bowl.   Moreover you have a brand new bad-boy image for sponsors to exploit (adios, Gillette Razors…hello, Axe Body Spray!).   But four months does not give you a whole lot of time to change your stripes, Tiger. I had hoped you would take that same focus and discipline that you apply to winning and apply it to actually changing for the better, but I guess those are mutually exclusive goals.

In the future, if you do end up keeping your 1 Wood in your bag  I suspect it will have more to with the damage of indiscriminate sex on your ability to win than on your relationships or your soul.  I suppose learning to only fuck 9’s (or hotter) with a gift for discretion is a pretty valuable lesson but at the risk of sounding like a prudish moralist (because Lord knows I’ve stepped out on a special lady friend once or twice in my life)  I was hoping for more.  I was hoping for a fellow traveler, a man whose desire to improve was similar to mine. To quote Dylan,  it ain’t you, babe.

That’s why I have no choice but to revoke your title as 2010 Better Man of the Year and pass it to the first runner-up.    If you see Jesse James at the Masters next week, have him call me.

Chris