The Cleaning Aisle
An on-course mental hurdle, and the advice of a kind stranger at the grocery store.
As a perfectionist-in-recovery, I’ve spent the last couple months learning to be less structured, to require less, to let things come the way they do. But two weeks ago, as I sat in a coffee shop after a tournament, taking stock, my gut told me I needed systems again. Good ones, this time. I’d love to tell you the difference between “good structure” and “bad structure” — both because it’s my job as a writer and to save myself from future rake-stepping — but I haven’t been able to pin it down. It just sort of exists, the differentiator being a gut feel.
What I do know is that my new systems are working. I’ve put together morning and evening routines, daily chores to keep my place clean and organized, and meal plans that hit my macro goals, are quick to throw together, and have turned out pretty tasty. It’s efficient — like tuning an engine to get all the energy out of the fuel and into the drivetrain.
When I got to the supermarket on Sunday night, I had a grocery list for three days’ worth of planned meals and a Swiffer WetJet, a spray mop I remembered using as a kid, combining childhood nostalgia with the adult pleasure of clean floors. I’d found an old favorite album during a putting drill, Bad Omens’s Finding God Before God Finds Me, and threw in one earbud as I walked into the store. It’s a heavy-as-hell metalcore record — the lyrics are pretty edgy for my taste, but it’s riff- and melody-writing at its best, and I bobbed my head to the last couple songs as I turned into the cleaning supplies aisle.
A woman had left her cart in the middle of the aisle, and I bumped it as I tried to pass. The woman, looking for something, apologized for leaving it there, and I apologized for bumping it. I turned down the aisle, listening to my music, when she asked, “what’s the best thing here to clean a toilet?”
My commitment to systems has extended to golf as well. I’ve showed up to practice with specific drills, and on play-days I have a warmup routine: a list of gym activations, three quick putting exercises, and a twenty-seven-ball range warmup. I understand what I’m doing better, and it’s translated into greater confidence. I’ve made some money on the course this week. I feel like I’m starting to play to my level.
As part of this structure, I don’t wait to start the round to see how I feel — I’ve decided in advance that I’m going to be the most confident person on the course. Our mind likes being right, and doubt is a defense mechanism against unwanted outcomes, an emotional hedge against bad shots. It serves no other purpose. I’m realizing that I’d rather be good than correct, and so I’m choosing confidence.
It would feel dishonest to write a personal newsletter without copping to some stuff I’m not proud of, and there’s a side effect to choosing confidence. Self-doubt and rationalizing were my primary modes of accepting bad outcomes; without them, I’ve run a bit hot. On Friday, having wasted a couple good opportunities and lipped out about $60 worth of putts, I was pissed. With 227 to a back pin on a par-five, I pulled 6-iron and made a 205 swing. I felt it jump off the face, watched it land on the back edge and skip long, settling short-sided on a severe downslope twenty yards over the green. I did well to hold the green with my chip. Before going to my 70-foot birdie-look, I tomahawk-planted the wedge next to my divot, the grip still stuck in the air as I walked away.
The Scrubbing Bubbles toilet wand I’d recommended wasn’t going to work; Randi had been away for three years, and the water-line stain in the toilet was too well-set. She needed something rougher, maybe a Brillo pad. I handed her some steel wool, to which she said, “oh no, I don’t like that,” and we put it back. Eventually, we settled on some coarse plastic scrubbing sheets, a Magic Eraser, and a pair of vinyl gloves to protect her hands from scuffs.
She stands about 5’3”, roughly early sixties (though I’m an awful guesser), gray hair, bare eyebrows above bottle green eyes. She projects an indefinable kindness that some people carry with them. It came as no surprise to learn she was a teacher (“I don’t have kids, I taught them”). More surprising was where: she’d taught at a youth prison. She told me that they’re good kids, they’ve just made mistakes like the rest of us, and that the beauty of being young is that you can learn.
She told me, in aisle ten, the two of us holding various cleaning supplies, that she’d taught a boy whose grandfather had passed while the boy was in the youth prison. He was distraught. She sat him down and told him: his grandfather was walking with Jesus now, and the two of them were looking down on him, and they knew the boy would live a good life. He’d made mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes, and we learn — this is the beauty of being human. He’d learn, and he’d live a good life, and one day he’d walk with Jesus and his grandfather again. The boy was crying, and she comforted him, told him he was a good kid, and Jesus loved him, and his grandfather loved him, and he’d live a good life through Jesus, and everything would be alright through Him.
Having saved par with a six-footer on fourteen, I went behind to retrieve the wedge and fix the divot. I hit an approach to 2½’ on fifteen and birdied. On sixteen, with the grain going dead right, my putt didn’t move from the left edge until it kissed it. (Of course, after last week’s newsletter, I’ll never miss a short putt again without hearing, “I tHoUgHt YoU wErEn’T sUpPoSeD tO mIsS tHoSe??”) My attempt to drive the seventeenth green hit the path and went 40 yards long into the pine straw. On eighteen, stuck between 2-iron and 4-iron, I watched my 2-iron bite through the wind, roll past pin-high, and disappear. I squat down in the fairway, taking deep breaths and waiting for the taste of metal to leave my mouth.
As I drove up to the green, I saw that my approach had run over a small crest and stayed on the green, leaving me twenty feet for eagle. I missed the putt on the high side and kicked in for birdie, enough to win me the hole. As I walked off the green, a playing partner told me well done with the late birdies, that they’d saved me a decent bit of money. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I’d birdied two of the last four until she said so.
About ten minutes after I bumped into her cart, our conversation drew to a close. She reminded me that Jesus is all we have, that we shouldn’t stray his path. That I was a nice young man and that she’d keep me in her prayers, as I would her. She could tell I loved Jesus, she said, and she told me to stay close to Him. As we went our separate ways, I replaced my earbud, and hit play on the album I’d paused: a heavy guitar riff and scream from Finding God Before God Finds Me by Bad Omens. It took everything in me not to break out laughing.
I’m of the group that hears song lyrics like a foreign language — without reading them, the poetry is lost on me. I pulled up the album’s lyrics while making dinner, and I’d misinterpreted the message. Most of the album’s anger is directed towards relationships and mental health, and the edgiest lyrics are sung by another character, a caricature of the devil. The protagonist finds various forms of resolution in the record’s back half. I think he finds God, in the end.
After dinner, unboxing my new Swiffer WetJet, I thought back to the match on Friday. I was still pissed walking to the eighteenth green, almost more upset to lose the justification for my anger than I was happy to have an eagle look. In my mind, this is the real mental work: identifying these strange emotional vestiges that hold us back and cleaning them out.
After I’d inserted the batteries and the cleaning solution, I tried the button on the Swiffer, and it sprayed solvent with that same satisfying sound I remembered as a kid. At some point, the idea of cleaning lost its appeal: it was work, and it was annoying, and I could be doing something else. But, really, there’s nothing unpleasant about it. It smells good, and the motor makes a little whirring noise, and you can listen to good music. And, by the end, you have a clean floor.
You can’t make too much sense of the truth — it’s far too simple.