In which The Gay Recluse ponders the dinosaurs.

In today’s New York Times, in a shocking piece that has vaulted all the way to number one on the “Most Popular” chart, we learn that golf is on the way out; declining in a popularity, with too many courses built in the 90s, it’s no longer feasible for men to spend their weekends on the green when they have to be home for lunch on Saturdays. Equipment is expensive, Tiger Woods hasn’t sparked such a big revolution after all; according to Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The truth is, we have always been bored to tears by the game, which makes us think mostly of 1) our asshole Republican relatives who do insane things like get up in the dark so they can squeeze in two rounds in a single day, and 2) that bitch in the clubhouse who yelled at us in junior high, when our confidence was not exactly overflowing, because we had (unintentionally) chopped up a little bit of the fairway (and this at a public course) on the fifteen-or-so strokes it took us to complete the final hole. (Wherever you are now, feel our vindictive wrath!)

But our memories of golf are not all bad; it occurs to us the some of the greatest snow sledding in history has taken place on golf courses, and isn’t that a testament to some higher calling? Or what about the inevitable “woods” next to or behind the golf course? Here is where the derelicts and the outsiders gather to drink beer and get wasted (and have sex) beyond the sightlines of their suburban parents. Awesomely, in the debris of such a party, we once found fifty dollars — or in today’s dollars, $100,000 — mixed in with the empty bottles of tequila and cigarette butts, and it was easy to believe for the next ____ years that our life really was charmed. Or we always like to think about wandering through the woods looking for all of the lost golf balls; buried in the underbrush or wedged between rocks, each one is small and hard and usually a bit too damaged to be used for anything except for driving practice. But still, how exciting to collect a bag of these and bring them back to the clubhouse, where someone might give you a dollar or two! These are the little truths in the world, which collectively add up to just something more than nothing.