Nirvana

During golf practice one day, a reverberating sound made its way to the driving range. It was an electric bass, bouncing around in its deep rhythms, creating a tune I might have heard before. With it was the rapid strumming of the drum kit, the growls of the electric guitar, the anxious calling of the keyboard, and the voice of what appeared a middle-aged, amateur singer.

The sound was emanating from a street below, but I could not point to it then. But in an alley a few parked cars and a small number of men and women stood with bottles in hand, listening to what this band had to offer. Suddenly, the distinct voice of Jim Morrison made its way to my ears:

“Let it roll, baby, roll! Let it roll, baby, roll!”

Then, John Fogerty:

“Born on the bayou! Born on the baaaayou!”

And then, Robert Plant:

“It’s been a long time since I rock ‘n’ rolled!”

Cheers. Someone yelled in joy.

Around me, no one seemed to be listening to it. Perhaps it is the nature of golfers to envelop themselves in profound concentration, focusing only on the ball and the club, not on any bird or band that might intrude the vicinity.

Of course, as naturally happens, the volume of this boisterous band slowly retreated, until only a faint tap of the drums could be discerned from the distance. The sound that had enveloped me so wholly suddenly evanescence. No one complained, no one rejoiced.

Later my dad and I looked for the band. By that time its crowd had dispersed, and only one gaunt, beer-drinking man stood grinning by a white van. The band was in a garage, a very crammed garage. The bassist was sitting on a chair by the entrance, with tall objects beside him on either side, leaving a narrow space for him. Standing up was the guitarist, wearing glasses and a shirt with the word “Pearl”. The singer appeared to be a recording (no one can sing like Robert Plant and Jim Morrison simultaneously), and the keyboardist must have taken a break. I could not see the drummer—but the distinct sound of the cymbals hinted at his presence, behind the other two players and the myriad miscellany stacked next to bassist.

They were not loud—someone must have complained—but they were playing. Listless children wandered in the apartments by the garage. Some painters in the distance continued their work. Doors were closed. Only the man with the beer stood.

In a world where music-making is often regarded as a money-making scheme, this group is the epitome of the true band—the band that plays and keeps playing in the desert, in a desolate island, in the midst of the deaf. For them, music is an elixir, a channel through which they can cleanse their souls, a state of being.

And thus they continued:

“It’s been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time…”

Glass Animal

(In Peru, drinking is an essential part of social life. My dad says that it is ideal for parents to take their sons out for their first drinks–to see how they behave drunk. This inspired this story. Some sensory details may be incorrect, but nevertheless, here is my story.)

The two glasses gleamed with the intermittent light above the father and the son. The waiter, careful, as though the glasses were hot, took hold of them and laid one in front of the sir. He was sitting upright, eyes carefully fixed on his son across the surface of the wooden quadruped. The waiter then turned to the boy, barely sixteen or seventeen, apathetic, unusually dormant and unenthusiastic for ten in the evening. The waiter also laid a glass in front of the boy’s hands, dancing listlessly like two ballerinas that forgot the choreography.

“Do you need anything else?” the waiter asked before leaving the table.

“For my part,” the father responded. “I don’t need anything else. What about you, Dan?”

The boy lifted his head, partly submerged in his arms, and shook his head.

“If you need anything else, let me know.” And the waiter departed.

The father immediately took a drink from the brew in the glass. A little foam slid down the edge of the glass, returning like a tide to the sea. He smacked his lips, felt the brief aftertaste, and set the glass down again. The son meanwhile remained immobile, paralyzed with embarrassment, his little eyes avoiding the sight of the liquid in front of him.

Two minutes passed, three maybe, until one of them spoke.

“I didn’t ask for this.”

It was Dan. His voice was not yet profound and reverberant like his father’s; it was like a red coffee bean, like a blossoming peach tree. He looked at the brew in the glass, and buried his head once more in the depths of his forearms.

“Neither did I, when I was your age,” the father replied. He took another sip from the glass. It had lost some of its sweetness, but still had taste. “My father did it for my own good, and I’m doing it for yours.”

“My own good,” Dan scoffed. “That just means you don’t trust me.”

“I do trust you, Dan.” The father leaned slightly toward his son. “You have to realize, it doesn’t matter whether you’re having fun hiking or playing video games. Without the appropriate precautions—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Dan lifted his head from the table and sat upright, meeting his father’s light green eyes. “It’s all fun and games ‘til someone loses an eye. Like it ever happens.”

“You don’t know what drinking this can do to you, do you?” The father took another sip.

“Of course I do!” Dan said, gesticulating. “I see it in movies, in the paper, in the news. It happens everywhere, Dad!”

“Except in front of your own eyes,” the father added, with a little smile.

“I still know what to expect.” One of Dan’s hands gingerly danced toward the glass. It felt cold.

“But you have never felt it.” Another sip.

“It can’t be that bad,” Dan said, looking down to the foam on the glass’s rim. Like a pack of marshmallows, or a bubble bath he used to take as a baby.

“You sure?” Dan’s fingers tapped the glass rhythmically, trying to make some sense of the object.

“I mean…” His hands made an effort to lift it. Heavy.

“You mean…”

“Yeah, I mean it is perfectly fine. If you can do all that stuff after drinking this, you must not be that unconscious…”

The father made no reply. It reminded him of the conversation he had with his father when he was his son’s age. That face, that lethargy painted on Dan’s countenance—if he had a picture of himself that many years ago… was it that many years ago?

Dan shook the glass tentatively. It seemed to be slipping from his hands. He took the glass with his other hand, and before he knew it he was kissing the glass’s rim, encouraged by an impetuous leap of faith and curiosity. A stream of melted ecstasy made its way to the stomach, inflating his insides with a dose freedom, and a hint of lunacy. He only felt it slightly, but it felt good. It felt good. Something was knocking on the outer boundaries of his mind. Dan did not know what it was, but he knew how to open the door.

“Waiter!”

The premature, naïve voice surprised the other customers. Silent, the father took another sip, watching the hands of his son shudder.

“One more, please.”

As though reminding him who was paying the tab, the waiter turned to Dan’s father. He put up two fingers, and asked the waiter to leave.

“It’s perfectly fine?”

“Yeah, it’s perfectly fine. Just you watch.”

“I’m watching,” the father said, and finished his first glass.

Again the glasses came, and almost immediately after the waiter left the glasses on the back of the wooden quadruped, Dan took hold of his, not trembling as much, but with an acute sense of expectation. Again he felt it. It was a flying eagle; no, it was a penguin; no it was a tiger; no, it was—what was it? The liquid once more went down, but he felt it up here, or there, he could not point to it if he wanted. It was all in his head. He looked down to his glass, and a small orange pool rested on the bottom.

He looked to his father.

“And?” The father was halfway done with his.

“It was interesting,” said Dan. “Interesting.”

“There’s some on your shirt too.” With a blaming finger the father pointed to a place on his shirt, where a formless blotch, a residue of his behavior—

“So what?” Dan took one of his hands and made an effort to clean it. “I mean, I spill some when I drink milk too.”

“What did it taste like?” His own father had asked him that question a number of times.

After pondering for a moment, Dan finally decided, “Bubble gum.”

Two more came, and two more. Dan counted five glasses, his father only three. Dan’s apathy was gone, replaced by a carefree demeanor, an oblique smile, a sporadic laugh—it was beautiful. His father was smiling, patting him on his back, recalling old times, cracking dirty jokes they both understood. For some reason the people behind his father’s back looked far off, blurry, obscured by some spontaneous fog. But there they were, father and son, laughing, singing, laughing, patting their backs, pounding their fists, laughing, joyful, joyful, like ignorant animals, eagles, penguins, wooden quadr—

Wats hee blabering about? Was it tu muchhh?

—upeds, his pet cat, his pet do—

Hou ould is hee? Sixteeeen? Hee shoud be ould enufff.

—g his dancing hands his revolving head—

Hes juust laik mee… hees not redieeee, hees tu fragile…

The Unpretentious Guide to Learning to Play Golf–Prologue

It looks simple enough: take the club back, hit the ball, take the club forward, and hope it doesn’t hit a person or a car. In case of an emergency, yell out, “Fore!” Never play during a lightning storm. Have fun.

From the remoteness that exists in the spectator’s perspective, sure it looks simple. And then you foolishly try to emulate that guy from Happy Gilmore, or maybe Donald Duck or the Three Stooges, and thump! the club hits the grass, the fence, your foot—everything except the white lump below you.

It does not move, and yet having the club somehow, perhaps miraculously, reach the ball at that point and make it fly in a beautiful frown up to the sky and down to the hole is, in all honesty, a pain.

There is much dexterity and coordination involved when playing the game of golf. Unlike the embellished duplicate mini-golf provides, the real game of golf involves focus, technique, and a lot—a lot—of patience. Individuals with hot tempers or minimal patience are highly recommended to seek a source of diversion other than golf (or else you can experience what I experienced… which is another story) for the benefit of other players.

This seems rather audacious for a player with not even two years of experience (and who holds no special talent for the sport) to write down, and it could be, but golf is like a fire—once you know how it feels, you know how it feels. It may take two days or even two hours to realize how difficult golf is, but once you have been exposed, it is hard to forget.

This short unpretentious guide will let you know what to expect when playing the sport, and will provide easy-to-remember tips to enhance your learning experience. Indeed, if you are willing to allocate time and money to learning to play golf, this guide may be the cheapest investment you’ll have made. I do not guarantee you will become the next PGA Tour big-shot just by reading this guide, but at the very least it will give you an idea of what golf is really all about. So without further ado, here is your guide to learning to play golf.

Intellectual

(Here is a little story I wrote.)

“I’m…I’m sorry?”

“I want to check out every book in this library. Every single one.” Dallas took his library card and left it, barcode showing, next to the lady. His voice was confident, steadfast, and his gaze was unrelenting. The lady took the card with perspiring hands.

“I…I…”

“The terms of use say there is no limit. I want to take every single book this library has. Is there a problem?”

“Steven, can you attend this young man, please?” The lady turned to a rather tall and bulky man, about a foot taller than Dallas, whose eyes were two heavy blue stones attached to two empty sockets on his face. From the start Dallas was disgusted, that indifference painted on his face, as though the world could end and he would not notice.

“How may I help you?” The words came out like boulders, but Dallas said, with the same impudent tone he used with the lady, “I want to check out every book in the possession of this library. I have my card right there.” He pointed a dirty finger to the plastic on the table. Steven was unmoved.

“I do not believe we can do that right now, sir,” the man said mechanically, almost ironically. “It would require hours of scanning books, and we close in an hour.”

Dallas squinted his eyes, trying to find some weak spot on the man’s two blue stones. “Are you kidding me?” Dallas uttered, just loud enough for the two to hear it. “Here is my library card, and I want my books.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Steven said again, his mouth opening and closing like that of an android. “The library will close in an hour. What you are asking is too time consuming to be performed in an hour.”

“You know something, Steve?” Dallas almost spat at the word. “When you are talking to an intellectual like I am, not just a random librarian that cannot iron his own shirt, you better listen closely, because someday the newspaper and the media and all those girls over at Beverly Hills will only be focusing on me and how badass I am. Do you understand this much? Can I go on?”

The two stones shifted and surveyed Dallas’s diluted pupils.

“I want to learn everything. Everything. Why the world is round is not enough. Why the government is spending its tax dollars on you worthless people is not enough. The answers lie in books—you guys say it all the time—and I want every answer there is to be found in the surface of this planet.”

For a moment Dallas thought he saw a small inflection on the man’s lips—a smirk, a smug sign that he knows something he does not. It frustrates Dallas to know this. The man, stone eyes and all, turns to a statue, a stony facsimile of a great philosopher, a great thinker, better than Dallas. His justification did nothing to convince the man. The grin turned to a smile, and soon the statue was laughing, laughing, laughing!!! Hahahaha!!! Hahahahahahahaha!! The heads of curious bystanders turned to the furious boy, card in hand, eyes on the man with the blue stone eyes, laughing at the stupidity of an intellectual.

When it was over, the statue cleaned his teary eyes, coughed once or twice, and said, “May I help you?”

Dallas, nostrils dilated, eyes shut, breathing heavily, head down, thinking, thinking, thinking… he opened his mouth to say something, but he just turned around. The man had single-handedly defeated him in Round One, gloves off, legs tied. He thought it senseless to move his king—the man had him on checkmate from the start.

Dallas returned ten minutes later, a couple on books and one CD in hand. When it was his turn, he approached the statue once again. Steve acted indifferently once again. They had not met, another boy had just come in from basketball practice to check out books for homework. Dallas laid his material on the table, and placed the library card next to it.

“Is this all?” Steve asked as the red scan shone on the black and white bars. He did not turn around to see Dallas’s frown.

“No, not all. Just two books and a CD.”

“‘I only know I know nothing’,” Steve remarked, quoting rather pompously.

“I can tell you know nothing,” Dallas said. He took his two books, the CD, his library card, and headed out the door.