Harmony
A boat day, Japanese whiskey, and the anti-profound.
Right now[1], I’m using the box to a bottle of Hibiki Harmony as a laptop stand.
I’m at my buddy Harry’s place in West Palm Beach. It’s five-and-a-half hours from St. Simons, and there’s a ton of stuff to play down here — most frequently on the Minor League Golf Tour, Eric Cole’s old stomping grounds who pride themselves on hosting events 47 weeks of the year. In the near-18 months I’ve been down here, I haven’t made it to Palm Beach to see him once, which is a bit embarrassing, because Harry’s been one of my best friends since we were eight. And so I made it a point this year to come down and see him and play an event.
The event was on Tuesday and Wednesday, a two-day-er. I got here on Saturday, spent the afternoon on his boat and the evening at various bars, got up to watch the hockey on Sunday, got brunch, got his boat out of the water, and then went to play the par-3 course at The Park, which was lit so you could play at night. (As in, literally lit, with overhead lights. Also figuratively lit. It’s called “The Lit Nine.”)
After which, the three us of us — Harry, his friend Liam, and I — went to Flanigan’s for dinner, a restaurant that feels like an Irish Pub built in a swamp, which is effectively what it actually is. Flanigan’s is also publicly traded on the NYSE. Attached to Flanigan’s is Big Daddy’s Wine and Liquor, which we stopped by while we waited for a table to open up.
On the way down, I stopped at a Total Wine to get a bottle of Japanese whiskey for the boat. That I’m saying the following out loud kills all the magic of its contents, but: I really do take some pride and find some joy in being a bit eccentric. It’d have been easy enough to show up with a bottle of Makers, or even a decent bourbon, but I thought that something Japanese would be a little more out of left field, so that’s what I got: a bottle of Nikka From The Barrel, probably my favorite Japanese whiskey I’ve thus far had the pleasure of tasting.
The guys enjoyed it, though it’s a bit on the peatier side, and we wondered about something a little easier-going for drinking neat in Saturday-boat quantities in the future. So we went next door to Flanigan’s to Big Daddy’s Wine and Liquor to check things out. Which is where I found a bottle of Hibiki Harmony for 80 bucks. I’d had the pleasure of tasting it twice before, and it’s near-angelic — but, whenever I’d seen a bottle on St. Simons, it was north of $130. Here, in Palm Beach, during peak season, it was $80. I couldn’t believe it. So I bought a bottle for him and a bottle to take home.
Now that I’m back at his place and starting to write a newsletter. I’ve tried to get in the habit of using Bluetooth keyboards and laptop stands to save my neck a bit. So, when I pulled out a travel keyboard and looked for something to raise my laptop, I settled on the only thing on the counter that could do the job: a box to a bottle of fine Japanese whiskey.
I tell you this to give you some indication of how well my life is going, as well as how well his life is going.
I play professional golf for a living, and my days are spent walking around outside, doing an activity that most people work during the week to afford on weekends. My other jobs include an act of creative expression (writing) and dicking around in Claude Code building putting simulations and baseball prediction models, a combination of skills that, I believe, will make me a dangerous man to whichever of my college friends founds a startup that could utilize my skillset. He works at Goldman Sachs until either 9pm or 2am five days a week, which he described to me (after much whiskey) as “selling his soul.” He envies me.
I’m sitting at an island countertop in a beautiful apartment overlooking the Lake Worth Lagoon via floor to ceiling windows. I could throw a basketball from his balcony to where he docks his boat. On the weekends, he goes out on the boat for one of three reasons: 1) to hang out with friends, some of whom are single women, 2) to dive around recently sunk sailboats, or 3) to spearfish. He could also do whatever the hell else he wants. He lives in a town wherein I saw more beautiful women in a weekend than I saw on this island in the last calendar year. He largely leaves his work at his desk — furthermore, the concept of “completing” any item of that work is attainable and genuinely exists. His apartment building has a gym, a steam room, and a dry sauna. And I envy him.
After playing back-to-back weeks without doing laundry, I only had so many clean golf shirts to bring with me. Last week, I brought three normal shirts and one mock neck — I figured, if I made the cut, I’d feel good enough about myself where a mock-neck would be a fun thing to throw on. This week, down three more shirts beyond the laundry I hadn’t done, I had to pack two mock necks. It was the only way to get the colors to work without packing three pairs of pants.
That’s what I tell myself. In reality, I just think the mock necks look sick.
A similar line of reasoning held when I realized, as I was playing my practice round on Monday (in a regularly collared shirt) that I was potentially joining a friend at a nice golf course on Thursday, after the event. I probably couldn’t wear a mock neck there without drawing unwelcome attention. So, for the first round of the tournament, I had to wear a navy blue mock neck. Again, I’m only complaining performatively.
What I didn’t anticipate was, because it was my first time playing a MLGT event, I’d be asked to pose for a profile picture for the website. If you go look at my results now, you’ll see my face sitting above a tight mock-turtleneck collar, wearing a script “Sleepy” hat with sunglasses perched on top.
I had every intention of showing up to the first tee wearing a mock neck. I did not, whatsoever, intend to be the guy wearing a mock neck in his profile photo, but that’s the way the ball bounces sometimes.
I thought about that photo for most of my way down the first and second holes. More accurately, I thought about how I felt about the photo — because, for whatever reason, I felt kind of badass about it. Which is odd, because I’m a pretty self-conscious person, often enough. I don’t necessarily want to be That Guy In A Mock Neck — that feels like something you earn, the same way you don’t wear three Cuban Link chains as a guy hitting .180. But, for whatever reason, the following thought occurred to me:
“Yeah. Fuck these guys. I’m good enough at golf to wear a mock neck, and they aren’t. I’m cool enough to wear a mock neck and they’re not.”
I’ve tried to put my finger on where exactly this idea came from, and I think it’s a strict combination of two things, without either of which it couldn’t have happened:
1) I’ve been working my ass off on my golf game, specifically in ways that I actually, genuinely, finally, truly believe are getting me closer to the results I want.
2) I have opinions on Japanese whiskeys, which I sometimes drink on boats. Sometimes, while drinking on boats, I throw a Modelo 30 yards to a guy on a booze cruise catamaran, and he catches it. I do both of these in a red-paint-stained t-shirt featuring Larry’s face from The Three Stooges (and the slogan “Beer: it’s not just for breakfast anymore”), a shirt which I found at my favorite thrift store in downtown Savannah. I also have a favorite thrift store.
Both of these feel important, vis a vis a “why.” Because, the truth is, I have zero basis for “I’m good enough to wear a mock neck and they’re not.” I finished in 46th. Who the hell am I?
The semi-tragic realization I’ve come to, recently, is that confidence (competitive confidence, at least, though I do believe it’s true of all confidence) is almost completely anti-profound. Semi-tragic, instead of tragic, because it’s not a-profound — that would be a real tragedy. At least there’s still some polarity between confidence and profundity. But confidence is, in no way, shape, or form — I’m totally convinced of this — profound.
Which is at least semi-tragic because this whole newsletter was predicated on the idea that the details of my journey to pro-golf success would be profound. That’s why I’ve bothered to write anything down. I certainly hope that something other than the golf has been profound, as told in this newsletter, because the journey to golfing confidence turns out not to be profound at all.
It’s worth clarifying the difference between wisdom and profundity — this, in the hopes that maybe I can salvage something of worth out of this realization. Something can be wise without being profound. I actually think this is more often the case than not, though I’m not sure I realized so until now.
Wisdom, in the same sense as confidence, is anti-profound in that it liberates a person from desiring the profound, or desiring things that are believed to be profound if attained. Take waking up early for example. “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” This is wisdom. It’s not profound. It’s simply an instruction. You can do it, or you can not. If you wake up early, nothing all that profound happens. The secrets of the universe aren’t revealed to you. You see a sunrise. I guess sunrises are profound, but the wisdom itself isn’t — the wisdom only told you to be awake for it. In that sense, the wisdom isn’t much more than a menial, on-the-nose instruction. Maybe it does, indeed, open yourself up to some rapturous second-order effects of bird chirping and early-AM UV stimulation, but those are just that, second order. It’s merely a point of access. If there’s any complex spiritual breakthrough on the other side, that’s only understood once you’re awake at that hour, and can’t be described precisely to someone who was asleep.
I feel pretty similarly about the whole mock neck bit. If there’s a secret vector to this entire newsletter enterprise, it’s to find ways to communicate these breakthroughs that would’ve resonated with a younger version of myself. But I have no way to communicate the essence of “I’m wearing a mock neck because fuck ‘them’” to my younger self. He wasn’t awake yet. Nor do I know what would’ve woken him up sooner.
On Sunday evening, on the way to the par-3 course, Harry asked me how I was doing. We haven’t talked as much as we should have in the last couple years. He said he’d been reading the newsletter, but he wanted to hear from me: how was it going?
It’s one of those questions that has two answers, one that’s directly indirect, the other indirectly direct. Harry and I are beyond “it’s going well, yeah, it’s going well.” As for the latter option, there are few things that people are more willing to ramble about than the boundaries of their own psyche. It’s some of the closest we get to self-actualization on any given day, verbalizing the things that happen at the outskirts of our heads, our latest attempts to put ourselves together.
I didn’t need to tell him how lucky I was to be playing professional golf. We’re past that. I started with the fact that there’s an odd push-and-pull between competing forces, both of which are fluid and usually entirely ambiguous, but that center around the question: how much of myself am I able to put into something? If I were to spend every waking moment redlining my mental engines to produce better golf, practicing with white knuckles in search of perfection, then I’d both fail and go insane — I know this from experience. The opposite is, obviously, just as ineffective: you sit around eating Oreos and watching old seasons of Family Guy until you go play a tournament you’re woefully unprepared for.
Somewhere in between these, supposedly, lies the happy medium. Other people have found it. This is proven by their success in the field. But, often enough, I wonder if that medium actually exists for me. I need to do other things. I need to write, and I need to build needlessly sophisticated computer models for reading putts, and I need to predict the outcomes of baseball games I’m not playing and understand what’s going to happen to the price of Brent crude I’m not buying and wonder how AI-doomed various white-collar jobs are that I don’t have. I don’t know why, but I do.
I tell myself that these things are important to my well-roundedness and that following these urges will come in handy in the future. That, one day, I’ll be happy I learned how to maintain basic python repositories and eliminate dangling participles, in addition to hitting a wedge exactly 95 yards. But I see plenty of guys who show up to the golf course, engross themselves completely in the game of golf, and then go fishing, totally content. Golf is enough for them. And I wondered, on that spectrum from all-in work to all-in ease, why — as someone working the greatest job in the history of the world — why sometimes it wasn’t enough for me.
I told him that, above all else, there was one unifying thread holding it all together: I wanted to win. I wanted to get the absolute most that I could out of my general human potential, but I also wanted to beat other people at what they did. I know what I’m capable of, and I think my best is better than their best, and goddammit I just want to turn over our cards and show that I have a better hand.
Golf is infuriating to me, because I know it might be the thing I have the highest potential in, but it’s also the hardest to achieve that potential in myself. I just have such a tough time getting out of my own goddamn way. And I tell myself, this is the right thing for me to be doing. This is the best way to push myself towards the best version of myself. And I love it. So keep going.
But, I told Harry, I look at the other side of things, at a good corporate job where you can spend your weekends fishing with friends instead of sneaking in a putting session before driving to spend a week in Dothan, Alabama[2], thinking over how well you prepared yourself to take another man’s job from him. The nights spent alone in my apartment watching meaningless college basketball games while I try to roll out my quads without screaming, thinking about the fact that I’m not going to be 25-years-old forever, wondering if any of this is actually all that healthy. Wondering if maybe the guys with real jobs on the other side actually figured something out.
Harry let me get all that out, then reminded me that I have it pretty good in the way only a good friend can without you hating them. He told me that he doesn’t keep friendships with losers, and that we’re friends because I’m a winner, so all that’s left to do is to be myself and win. And he said that, of all his friends, I’m one of his favorite stories to tell — that he has plenty of buddies in various sects of finance, but he “knows this one guy who’s playing professional golf and writing a newsletter about it, among a bunch of other random side projects, and let me tell you about him….”
Harry: I’ve been thinking about all this. It’s always complicated when we’re rambling, trying to piece ourselves together. But the reality is beyond simple. It’s the fishing. It has nothing to do with the golf — the golf is great. It’s everything else. The golf is enough when you can go fish with your buddies afterwards. That’s the balance. That’s when it all can click.
Some might call it Harmony. I’ll be down again soon brother — keep that bottle handy.
[1] See, the concept of “right now” gets tricky with these newsletters. “Right now” was, at one point, Monday night. As for when this newsletter was meant to come out, “right now” should have been last night, Friday — but I got a call from a friend I hadn’t talked to in a couple months, and I made the executive decision to stay on the phone and catch up and release this tomorrow. Which is now today, which is Saturday. You might be reading this on a different day entirely. I’m continually drawn back to this whole idea, because I want to write this newsletter in the style of “right now” while never actually inhibiting that moment of time, almost by definition. It’s odd. It’s not a problem that has a solution. It’s merely something that crosses my mind.
[2] Dothan has, and will continue to, catch a lot of strays in this newsletter. If someone has some great restaurant recommendations or things to do there, please let me know — otherwise, it will continue to be the paradigm example of a place that pro golf takes me where I am not excited to be.