Eric the Blue

I’m memorializing yesterday’s golf round since it may prove to have been the last one of the year. It’s definitely the last one at our home course, Hidden Haven, in common parlance Hillbilly Haven, which is closing for the season today. From the “up tees” on number 17, I hit a driver into a stiff wind that ended on the back of the green, then two putted for a par. The golf gods allow these occasional achievements in order to maintain access to profit streams. Overall, though, meh, some good ones, some bad ones, 88 in all. I hate it when the first digit is a 9. It happens. One good thing about Hillbilly Haven: if after the round you order a drink in the bar, they serve it right up, usually a good stiff one, without asking how you played.

But I could do without the Trump flags, banners, and signs that are visible from the edges of the course. If you ignore air temperature, the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities feel like Alabama. Free speech, sure, but there’s a reason I’m not a constituent of Tommy Tuberville, whose name seems to me aptly redolent of good ol’ boy incapacities. To be fair, his colleague Katie Britt is similarly daft. That a golf note has morphed into an airing of my TDS symptoms is possibly more apt than Senator Tommy T’s Dickensian name. It is, however, beginning to appear that all my previous Trump hate has insufficiently limned the vileness of his character. I’m trying to be properly sickened, instead of amused, by the way in which some of his lap puppies are now arguing that, actually, pedophilia applies only to sex with prepubescent girls. It’s of a piece with another of their arguments–namely, that Trump is not an adjudicated “rapist,” since a court found only that he “sexually abused” E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.

Seem like some odd hills to want to fight and die on.