You don’t need a golf course to play golf. Or: everything is a golf course. For Outside, the Portland Urban Golf Club is awesome and nothing—and everything—like real golf.
Ryan O'Hanlon
Santa Barbara, California
Associate Editor at Pacific Standard
Email me, tweet me, and friend me.
• My Work
Rwohan
“And that is that tennis is a profound form of sanity. That its beautiful geometries, its exchanges that draw observers in, offer a way of experiencing the physical world at a lucid distance from the anarchy of culture or identity (or whatever). That most of us never escape that anarchy, or escape it just for brief moments with the aid of music or sports or art or drugs (or whatever), which is why we crowd the edges of tennis tournaments, pile onto the hill, watch giant video monitors.”
— Brian Phillips, basically discovering the meaning of life after a few weeks in London.
I Got My Hair Cut Today
I got my hair cut today. There is an old, 70ish, woman who works at the barbershop I go to. She cuts hair, but she doesn’t really ever cut hair because no one goes to her because she is terrible/has a blonde afro/may or may not be a Cabbage Patch doll.
So, this walking-talking-mostly-talking piece of produce was standing, staring at a TV when I walked into the shop and sat down. For a couple minutes, she stood silent, eyes locked on the screen, which was tuned to Fox News. A few minutes into my haircut (being done by another woman because I prefer not to be given ice-pick sideburns because she felt like it), cabbage-lady started yelling.
“What happened? WHAT HAPPENED? I don’t understand what happened.”
The barber continued to cut my hair, and I continued to, um, let her cut my hair.
“Did it pass? WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
Maybe she couldn’t read. Maybe Fox News’ “OBAMA DESTROYS FREEDOM” (I’m guessing; I couldn’t see the screen) headline was confusing. Whatever.
“It passed, five to four,” I said.
“What do you mean, five to four?”
Then, the woman cutting my hair jumped in: “It just passed. It’s over. IT IS DONE, OK?”
“Ugh. He is a socialist. He. Is. A. Socialist.”
“He told stories merrily, clearly relishing the chance to confirm various extreme rumors. “What I do,” he said matter-of-factly, “is stab people, and eat snakes and chickens onstage.” Finally, he directed me to a briefcase across the room and told me to bring him one of the forks inside. The utensil’s handle was wrapped in dirty athletic tape, and when I got close enough to hand it to him I immediately regretted the decision.”
— Graeme Wood for The Atlantic
“Mat? This is fun, laying on this mat. I am having fun doing this. I am really having fun.”
Roger Angell Is 91 Years Old
And he wrote this. I know a couple people over 80, and I don’t trust them to do … well, anything. Comparing Roger Angell to my grandmas probably doesn’t make much sense, but that’s basically all I have to go off of—and it’s something. The dude’s 91. And his mind is still coming up with stuff like this:
This is where Dickey is right now, and for him the horrendous din of the game and its perpetual, distracting flow of replay and statistics and expertise and P.R. and money and expectation and fatigue have perhaps dimmed, leaving him still in touch with the elegant and, for now, perfectly recallable and repeatable movements of his body and shoulders and the feel of the thing on his fingertips.
Also: R.A. Dickey is apparently a wizard? He basically controls a pitch — the main advantage of which is it’s utter uncontrollableness — as well as I can move the mouse across this screen to click “create post.”
A human being made that with a bike. For The Awl, I spoke with said human being/magician.
