Through the Glass
Binoculars, Weezer, and self-justification.
I am of two minds. Well, at least two. I’m not sure how many minds I’m of, exactly. But it’s certainly more than one.
You didn’t get a newsletter from me last week. When this happens, it’s for one of two reasons. The first is that I simply didn’t have anything to write about — I think this has happened once, though I forget when that was, and it actually might’ve never happened at all. The second reason is far more common. This is the opposite problem: I have too much to write about. You see, for a good newsletter, I need to have interesting things happening in my life, but I can’t have so many interesting things going on that I don’t have time to write about them. There’s a necessary balance to the whole thing, like a solar system’s Goldilocks Zone or a surviving cell in Conway’s Game of Life.
Usually, if a newsletter doesn’t come out, the reasons are more mercurial than saturnine. There’s too much sun, or too many nutrients. A sort of digital eutrophication, and the pixel blacks out until the nutrients dry up.
I’m back in West Palm Beach visiting Harry, now. I played a Minor League event on Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday, I went to a coffee roaster in the warehouse district and filled up six pages of a full-size legal pad getting a plan together for Q2 ’26. And today, among a couple other errands, I’m writing this newsletter. Tonight, I’ll go to a line dancing bar with Harry and some friends, and then tomorrow we’re checking out the Palm Beach Boat Show.
A week ago, today, I was driving back from Dothan, Alabama with mixed feelings. I was glad to be leaving — Dothan is my go-to example for a city I can’t stand, whenever someone mistakes lower-level pro golf for any sort of glamorous lifestyle. I can tell you, as I tried to cook eggs at 4:30am on a lukewarm hot plate in a run-down Residence Inn, that it is not glamourous.
And, for that reason, I was glad to be leaving. But I wasn’t glad about much else.
It’s six hours from Dothan back to St. Simons. It’s another five and a half from St. Simons to Palm Beach. I did the first on Friday and the second on Monday. Both of these days are bad podcast days for me — lots of podcasts come out on Monday, but not quite enough to accumulate the backlog needed for a long drive, and I’ll have worked through any backlog by that Friday.
Usually drives of this length are perfect for one of my all-time favorite games: Phone Roulette. Phone Roulette involves opening your contacts, starting with the As, and scrolling down until you see anyone’s name who makes you wonder, “what are they up to?” Then you call that person.
If you get lazy, you end up catching up with some old friends — but the real spirit of the game is to make real-life, context-less voice phone calls to people you haven’t seen or thought about in five-plus years. This is beyond thrilling. It breaks nearly every unwritten rule of modern Gen-Z electronic communication — none of us expect cold calls, much less from high school classmates — and you sit, white knuckling the steering wheel, wondering what the hell you’re going to say if they actually pick up the phone. It’s a perfect excuse to see who peaked in high school, or to check if old crushes are engaged yet, or to learn with shock and horror that that guy is going to be a surgeon. Any initial awkwardness dissolves almost instantly, because the game’s absurdity is its own cover, and now they’re also wrapped into the thrill of it all. I’ve never had anything less than a great phone call. Even if they don’t pick up, you can learn something: four rings before the voicemail means they weren’t near the phone, while five-and-a-half rings means they saw your call and declined to pick it up.
But, for those twelve hours in the car, ten of them were during normal business hours, so Phone Roulette was a no-go (the timing matters — you don’t want anyone thinking you’re unemployed). I listened to a few of my favorite albums, of which I can usually get through three before the high wears off, and I was stuck going 84 mph (15 mph over the speed limit is a different ticket bracket and an extra point) on the interstate with nothing going on.
So I listened to Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur. I’m a sucker for a great essay, though I find merely good ones nearly unbearable. Luckily, Klosterman hasn’t written anything sub-Top-Gun-Maverick-level entertaining in his career. Usually he’s writing about something I don’t care about at all — not that I’m not familiar with, but that I’ve actively decided not to care about — and then I’m listening to a 5,000-word essay on a reality TV show I’ve never watched, and I’m entranced.
I’m actually worried you figured this out a while ago, that I’ve been listening to Klosterman’s work in family-size portions, because the internal monologue that reads these words back to me as I type them has been nasal and red-headed for weeks.
Listening to a collection of essays as an audiobook has the same essential problem as freebasing: you just get too much way too quickly. I can tell you about the epiphanic feeling that accompanied each essay. I can give you a single-sentence summary of each, and each summary would be fairly encompassing — I can’t tell if this is a massive testament to his work or a shortcoming, though I think it’s the former. But I’m at a bit of a loss to tell you much about any essay’s actual contents. It all simply happened too fast.
The last essay I listened to before pulling into Harry’s building was “T is for True,” which is tangentially about Werner Herzog and Ralph Nader, but mostly it’s about the front man of the band Weezer. The central slant is that Weezer’s frontman, Rivers Cuomo, is simply so literal in his songwriting, and so incapable of anything else, that Weezer fans (who allegedly do exist) constantly feel like Weezer is fucking with them with every new album release. “Beverly Hills” is about wanting to live in Beverly Hills. “We Are All On Drugs” is about being on drugs. Maybe you can guess what “My Best Friend” is about.
I went back and listened to all three of these tracks, and I was blown away. There is not one single thing left unsaid in a Weezer song. I mean, take these lyrics from “My Best Friend”:
When everything is wrong, I’ll come talk to you
You make things alright when I’m feeling blue
You are such a blessing
And I won’t be messing
With the one thing that brings light to all of my darkness
You’re my best friend
And I love you (love you)
And I love you (love you)
Yes, I do
There is no other one who can take your place
I feel happy inside when I see your face
I hope you believe me
‘Cause I speak sincerely
And I mean it when I tell you that I need you
You’re my best friend
And I love you (love you)
And I love you (love you)
Yes, I do
Here’s my honest reaction: I’m shocked that this doesn’t piss me off. Truly. Don’t get me wrong, for better or for worse, I don’t enjoy Weezer. But it doesn’t offend me.
I’m a certain kind of person: my favorite novel is genuinely Infinite Jest, my favorite bands are hyper-maximalist contemporary progressive metal acts, I spend ten minutes brewing specialty coffee each morning and drink almost exclusively Japanese whiskey. I would show up to parties in college with a sixer of a citra-hopped IPA and I’d unironically tell you I’d “been into it lately.” Some people would call this kind of person “a douche,” and so I’ve gone to great lengths to combat what it all says about me: I’ve grown my hair out middle-infielder style, started wearing oversized t-shirts from fast food restaurants, say “fuck” a lot, and will smoke a cigarette if offered one.
But I know the truth, just as all people with pretentious interests (real or synthetic) know the truth: we just have a harder time finding satisfaction with life. For whatever reason, we insist on our lives being more profound than the standard-issue. We require complexity for its own sake, because one of two things must be true: either Ezra Pound is a genius beyond our comprehension or a bullshit artist, and we’d rather live in a world where The Cantos contains something to justify the fact that I know Pound’s name instead of it all being stolen valor. In Pound’s case, it probably all is, stolen. But once you’re drawn into the moth’s-light of complexity, you can’t help but hope it leads somewhere.
Rivers Cuomo should stand against everything I believe in. He probably wrote “Beverly Hills” in fifteen minutes, and it’s at best a caricature of our most vapid desires, and it doesn’t even bother to fucking rhyme. And they’ve sold thirty-five-million records doing exactly this and nothing more. If country music pisses people off for pickup trucks and beer and pickup trucks drinking beer, then I’m not sure how Weezer doesn’t cause riots in the goddamn streets.
But I’m OK with all of this. On its face, Weezer jeopardizes my whole worldview — I probably should be plotting some kind of holy war against Rivers Cuomo (whose name is fucking Rivers — plural!). But, despite a few hundred words of shit-slinging, I can honestly say that I’m perfectly cool with Weezer. I’m somewhere between that this is the case. I don’t even like that this is the case. But I’ve been listening to The Blue Album while writing all this, and it’s perfectly fine.
I think this indicates some profound form of spiritual growth. I don’t know when this happened — I certainly can’t take personal credit for any of it. But I think it demonstrates some nascent capacity to simply enjoy something. It doesn’t need to reward a deeper listen or justify its own complexity. To the contemplatives’ dismay, some things are just decent as they are.
You’re probably wondering how Q School went. As I mentioned, I’m of two minds.
I should mention off the bat: my elbow is completely fine. Maybe better than when I started.
I had a 7:25am tee time on Tuesday morning for round one. The overnight low on Tuesday night was 31°F, and it was going to be 34° when I teed off. I showed up to the golf course ready to play at 6:00am, but the back of my mind I was nearly certain there’d be a frost delay, on account of the ground literally being frozen when I got there. But we had a 156-man field playing one golf course, and PGA Tour Americas was clearing half-a-million dollars off entry fees at this site alone. So we went off on time.
I hit a good drive off the first tee, then hung a 7-iron right of the green into a 5’-deep collection area. My first chip rode up the face, landed on the collar, and rolled nearly back to my feet into a wetter, grainier lie. I putt the next one up the 5’-slope to a pin at eye level, hit it past the hole, watched it run 30’ down into bowl, two-putt, and wrote down a 6. I blew a drive right on two, chipped out, hit a wedge 45’-long, lagged one to a couple inches, and tapped in with the back of my putter. My approach on the third needed to pitch about five paces past a slope to hold the top tier without going in the water long — but I landed it on top of the slope, and it rolled back to the front edge, where I three-putt from 75-feet.
Needing to stop the bleeding, I came to the fourth (excuse the Google Earth screengrab), playing 227-yds with a 34° wind blowing 15mph in off the right.
I felt the face roll shut on a 5-iron, watched one fly long-left of the green and splash. I made double. After another three-putt from 65’ — up another four-foot bowl I’d found myself in — I was +7 through five holes, and my chance at a card was all-but-squashed before 9am.
I’ve had a week to think things over since I turned in a non-competitive 72 in round four and started driving home. Nearly all of those thoughts can be sorted into two groups.
1.
Showing up to the first tee at 7:15am, I was cold, nervous, and had spent the last three months purposefully prioritizing work in the gym over hitting range balls. My swing felt good in the weeks leading up to the event, and I was unencumbered enough to mostly look at targets and make swings that felt right (I call this “throwing bean bags,” in the sense that cornhole might be humanity’s least technical activity). But, once I got cold and nervous, my tempo got quick. Once my tempo got quick, two things happened: I got out of sequence, and I lost confidence in my ability to produce specific ball speeds (and thus carry numbers). And, once your tempo gets quick, you lose your feeling of sequence, you lose your confidence to hit a carry number, and it’s blowing 34° as you’re playing for your livelihood, the wheels come off.
If you ask me if I believe, earnestly, that my quick tempo cost me 30 shots last week, I’d say that I wouldn’t put it past myself. If my quick over-the-top move and my horrible distance control are both direct results of getting quick, then unequivocally yes. I’m not sure that line is quite so easy to draw, but it’s at least close, and working on any one thing helps the other two.
You might wonder, “well shit, Connor, it seems like a hell of a lot has to go right for you to not DFL a golf tournament. What the fuck is wrong with you?” My quick answer would be an analogy to cars. A lot of mini-tour golfers are the equivalent of well-tuned Subaru WRX. It’s a great car that can put up a solid lap time. It can hit a bunch of mid-irons stone dead and make some putts and win a mini-tour event at 21-under, and it might get hot at the right time and get Americas status one year. It’s also not going to win you a Grand Prix or a PGA Tour event.
I, meanwhile, have spent the last thirty minutes trying to think of the right car analogy for myself. I’ve been trying to bolt different engine blocks into different cars for a while, but none of them felt right — the closest was a Ferrari V12 in a BMW 320i.
But then it hit me: I’m the Dodge Hellcat Minivan.
For those unfamiliar, someone took a Chrysler Town & Country minivan and installed a 1000hp Dodge Hellcat SRT engine. The thing did a quarter mile in under 10.5 seconds. It’s fucking awesome. I’m also sure that, if I tried to drive it to the grocery store, I’d do a full burnout and end up in a ditch. With that said, if you took that engine and built a real car around it — chassis, powertrain, aerodynamics, etc. — you could legitimately win some big-time races. In the current package, the talent (power) probably hurts more than it helps — but it’s there.
I can hit driver 193mph. I hit a shitload of fairways at this speed, too. But, if I’m not tuned up really well, I dump power over the top, the leading edge digs, I start fatting wedges, and everything goes up in a cloud of burnt-rubber smoke.
So what’s next? A lot of what I’m already working on. My plans in the gym are even more ambitious for the next three months than they’ve been for the last three — this is building a new chassis and drivetrain, something with better aerodynamics and the capacity to handle at high speeds. Then comes a shitload of practice hitting exact carry numbers with wedges (this is tuning the car, unlocking the latent potential to use it on the road). And then continuing to play a lot of golf — getting on the road, being familiar with the car, knowing just how far I can push it.
In this sense, everything I’ve been working on has had its desired effect. I was plenty fit enough to play four rounds on a hilly golf course. I felt largely in control of my body. Now, in Q2, I work like hell on distance control and tempo, and I’m sure I’ll come out of it a lot more competitive.
And so in this sense I’m fairly unbothered. My plan for the last three months did what it was supposed to do, and I have a good plan for the next three. What more could I ask for?
2.
I was in the second group for the last two rounds, meaning I was in the bottom six players of the field after 36 holes. I woke up knowing I’d be playing with guys I could beat. And I showed up to the first tee feeling a bit cocky — I was going to blow these guys out of the water.
On the thirteenth tee of the third round, I learned that the two of them could bond over being in near-fatal car accidents in the last 24 months. To my understanding (I didn’t press them much), each had lost north of 15mph of ball speed, and they were simply glad to be back on the golf course and not bedridden. At the time, I was losing to both of them.
The second category of thoughts is a deep sense of embarrassment.
I’ve yet to make a dime playing professional golf. This sentence hurt to write after six months of playing professionally, and it’s been a year since then. I can tell you that I’m a lot closer, and I can say that I truly do think I have the talent to get to the top of the mountain once I harness that talent, but 82-89-76-72 and a bottom-10 finish in a 156-man field doesn’t really justify those words, does it?
I like to think of myself as being fairly grounded in reality. So, when I tell myself that I have all the talent in the world and that I’m going to be a PGA Tour player in the next couple years, I mean it. I’m not pulling that out of my ass — I have legitimate reasons for believing that. I have a team of people who believe it, too, and I don’t think they’d blow smoke. I’m fine. I have what I need, and the rest is just noise.
But isn’t this all getting kind of sad? Because one of two things is true: I have all the talent in the world and I’m managing to blow it, or I don’t have it and I’m chasing a delusional fantasy. Aren’t both of those kind of sad? Have you, reader — without having seen me play golf, or only having seen me play bad golf — have you started to wonder, “what the hell is this kid doing?”
None of the above is exactly accurate, because I don’t really care what you think of me as a golfer. Your opinion doesn’t matter, in the same way that mine doesn’t matter — at the end of the day, there’s a score, and that’s it.
But, regardless of any outside party’s opinion, there’s something deeply embarrassing about dedicating more than half your waking hours for months to a pursuit that ultimately ends in a horrible public failure.
I’m fine. I have plenty of belief that I’ll get where I’m trying to go, and I have plenty of belief that I’ll be fine if I don’t get there, and I have plenty of belief in the process as a valuable end unto itself. I have six legal pad pages worth of a plan, and they give me a lot of hope for what’s to come.
But still. I’m a professional golfer — playing golf is my job — and I was +7 through 5 holes during one of the 3-4 weeks a year that matter. That’s pretty damn embarrassing. Isn’t it? It sure feels it.
My buddy has a pair of Leupold binoculars sitting on his coffee table in his living room. This fact makes more sense once I tell you that the coffee table is two paces from three floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a marina in the unfortunately-named Lake Worth Lagoon.
There’s a series of super-yachts docked in that marina, the closest of which are a chippy 9-iron from his balcony. They’re the sorts of yachts that only exist to be rented and used for social-media photo-clout — there’s simply no other reason for a charter yacht to exist that’s that large and that beautiful. I can see Anawa, Luna, Podium, and — I shit you not — Infinite Jest. There’s usually a couple more, though the Boat Show is this weekend so a bunch of them are elsewhere.
When we have nothing else going on — which is about half the time either of us is in the apartment — we pull out the binoculars and see what we can see. Often times this is nothing. The super-yachts all have privacy glass windows, and the docks are usually mostly empty. But often enough, especially in the mornings, there’s a ton of activity. It takes battalions of people to staff these boats. (Bonus: many of them are pretty blonde women.) It appears that significant portions of their jobs involve carrying singular planters off the yachts, through a maze of docks, and to shore, only to quickly return those same planters, seemingly unchanged, back to the yachts.
It’s utterly fascinating in ways that I don’t know how to describe — except that I do, because I listened to a Chuck Klosterman essay on the way down here. From his Eating the Dinosaur collection, “Through the Glass, Blindly” talks about a couple Hitchcock movies, his neighbor in Fargo, ND, and the fact that he “spent a lot of his free time [in Fargo] sitting in parked cars and being weird.”
But mostly it’s about watching people. Specifically, the fact that watching real people who don’t know they’re being watched — people who are doing absolutely nothing of note — is far more entertaining than reality TV, an entertainment product which is meant to replicate this voyeurism. As Klosterman comments about Hitchcock’s Rear Window, “it does not feel like [Jimmy Stewart] is watching strangers; it feels like he is watching a collection of one-act plays.”
Compare this to Brian De Palma’s Body Double, a film that Klosterman describes as “not half as good as Rear Window,” but that gets the thrill of people-watching far more right, in that “[Craig Wasson] doesn’t question [his neighbor’s actions] at all. It makes no sense, and—somehow—that seems more real…there’s no elucidation whatsoever.”
This is exactly what makes these planter-carriers so fascinating: I have no idea what they’re doing. I don’t know if they’ve changed out the planter for a new one, or if they’ve modified it somehow, or if they made a mistake and are simply bringing it back to the yacht where it should have never left. And I never will know. I just get to see a glimpse of someone else’s life, totally devoid of context — something that should be entirely boring but is, in reality, utterly fascinating.
Klosterman wonders, towards the end of “Through the Glass, Blindly,” if the core of voyeurism’s appeal isn’t antipodal to the two most common abstract causes of modern depression: “the possibility that one’s life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence.” Voyeurism’s appeal seems to be in that the watched person would not want to be watched — indeed, if asked if I’d want to be watched by strangers without my knowledge, I’d say “no.”
But, with the roles reversed, the concept of voyeurism defeats both aforementioned causes of depression. Our lives cannot be wholly unimportant, because watching someone else carry a planter to and from a yacht is fascinating, and I spend my days doing things no less interesting than this. Similarly, as mundane as our lives may feel at times — for instance, when I’m on my third hour failing to complete a putting drill, or when I’m gearing up for the third round of a golf tournament when I’m two-dozen shots out of contention — there’s comfort in knowing that someone else might view this as spontaneous and captivating. And so voyeurism and its appeal are reductio ad absurdum proofs against contemporary depression. We are unpredictable, and so we matter, QED.
I met Harry and his work friend for dinner last night, after which they had to go back to work. I didn’t, so I went to a bar. As the Arizona–Arkansas game came on, I started talking to a VP of a boat loan firm, during which — as tends to happen in bar conversation — I learned more about his life than I know about many of my friends’: his father’s life story, including two Olympics in swimming and a 61-year professorship at Harvard Business School; his short-lived golf career, in which he hit one drive over 280-yards but threw out his back; the evolution of the American bar from the center of the village to a brick-and-mortar Yelp review. After about 40 minutes, he pulled over an associate, a mid-20s blonde woman whom I promptly bought a drink.
She asked if I’d gotten Phil’s whole life story, sarcastically. I told her, earnestly, that he’d told me where he was conceived. This seemed to make the point. She asked what I did, and I said I was a professional golfer, and she didn’t believe me, so she asked what she’d find if she looked me up. I told her she’d find some bad tournament results if she scrolled enough, but mostly she’d find a bunch of my writing.
And here’s where the debate started. It came up that I believe two things are true of every writer: that we got good at writing because we were insecure, and our insecurity required us to make good written sense of our experience to find comfort; and that nobody writes about anything they’re absolutely certain of, because all writing exists to convince the writer themselves that what they’re saying is true.
She disagreed. She considers herself an introspective person, and she can’t think of many things more terrifying than writing those feelings down for the world to see. I clarified that not all introspectively people are writers, but all writers are introspective, and at one point they were insecure about what they found. If they’re self-confident in the present day, then that’s a more recent development than their skill at writing. Saying this out loud made me realize two things: that I was grateful to have writing as a means of self-actualization to recover from playing soul-crushingly bad golf, and that her non-writer-ness — someone introspective, but whose thoughts she can handle without an audience — was more than a little attractive. I hoped that the inverse was the same.
I learned she lived close enough to me to offer to buy her dinner, at which point she told me she had a boyfriend and that she was very happy. I ordered another round of drinks, pulled a business card out of my wallet, told her to bury it in a desk drawer somewhere just in case, and toasted to things with him and her working out and “to her never calling me.” We touched glasses and drank. At which point Harry got out of work, so I finished my drink and left.
I’ve spent most of the day writing — in fact, I’m delaying our night out as I type this final paragraph. At first, I lamented the fact that I didn’t have more to say about the golf. The two statements “I feel embarrassed” and “I have a plan I believe in” really do sum it up, as much as I wish I had something more profound. But, the more I write this newsletter, the more I think that that’s not a golf newsletter at all. To whatever degree it’s readable, it’s a contract that, as long as I’m doing something interesting enough to read about (whatever that is), that’s enough to justify another week of not applying for a stable office job. The golf will come when it comes, and I don’t need to feel any guilt in the meantime — as long as it’s all at least as interesting than carrying planters around, hopefully that’s enough, in itself.