par for the curse

In the game of golf, as in life, there are penalties. Without some repercussions built into the system, your bulbous neighbors Gareth and Becky Anne are soon enough dancing buck-wild nekkid in your shared driveway under the new strawberry moon, while your “president” is illegally deporting your fellow citizens to foreign countries where they yank out fingernails with slip-joint pliers and affix brutal electrical things to testicles and nipples.

Wow, that got dark fast, didn’t it?

Anyway, in golf, when you incur a penalty, it adds to your number of strokes, right? It affects your par total, that whole over/under bit. So a few extra penalty strokes, and suddenly, your score has gone to shit.

You can get penalties for all manner of things in golf. Your caddy lifting the ball when that dumb little monster shouldn’t be touching the goddamn thing. Hitting other than your own ball, which even sounds wrong. Plus, of course, having too many freaking golf clubs, how dare you?

There are rules, people. There have to be rules.

Now, let me just say that I hate golf. I abhor the very notion of it. I do not willingly engage in such protracted pointlessness. There is plenty of other pointlessness that makes a damn sight more sense.

I have, in life, barely even nudged up to this rambling greens-and-sand-and-water nonsense, barring some pre-teen putt-putt at the long-shuttered Topsail Beach, N.C., arcade, or the Boone’s Farm stagger-drunk of yanking up flags, and peeing in at least one of the holes, on the Greenville (N.C.) Country Club course, after midnight, age 14.

And here a quick quote from human conflagration Chester “Chet” Hunnicutt Pomeroy, from Panama, 1978, Tom McGuane’s third and best Key West saga, and my go-to re-read for years, fuck the panning literary glitterati of that time:

“I’m not as stupid as I look. Are you? For instance, I’m no golfer.”

So it’s not just me.

Anyway, screw this golf shit. Any “physical” pursuit where you drive around daytime drunk in pretend cars while some poor schlub schleps all your tools and shit for you to twirl your fat fancy, I’m sorry, that ain’t a fucking sport. No one is (typically) punching some other fool in the face till one of the two falls down, or bleeding out of his or her own asshole after 26.2 miles of incessant pavement-pounding.

Golf strikes me as little more than an accepted excuse to get away from your spouse for several hours while lording over some water-headed doofus who hopes his caddying will somehow translate into a job at your firm once he barely squeaks out of his Chat GPT-enabled degree from the local university.

All of this is to say that in the Polynesian nation of Tonga, where there is but a single golf course across the 45 inhabited islands, the nine-hole Tonga Golf Club, aka the Manamo’ui Golf Course, on Ha’ateiho, the main island, where flying foxes can be heard squeaking it up in the perimeter trees, there is no penalty should a monkey steal your ball.

Let me repeat that.

In Tonga, this nearly 200-island idyll of white-sand beaches, rain forests, coconut palms and buffering coral reefs, there is no penalty, no par reduction, not a single fucking stroke, should a monkey make off with your golf ball.

Monkey see, monkey steal. It’s all good there.

So let us, friends, rejoice in such small celebrations, those tiniest of gestures that sustain us against the rising tides of violence, uncertainty and loss. In the harshening world that has become our home, this one little reprieve from life’s forfeit, is, I posit, exactly the kind of forgiveness we need.

Anyway, fuck par. Tongans are an increasingly obese bunch, so why try so hard anyway, I suppose. It’s not like the world hasn’t clearly said as much itself, and in far broader strokes, with troops invading our cities and the streetlight haloes of summer bugs growing scanter by the year.

So go on, give the monkey some. The monkey needs that ball for monkey reasons. Go, monkey, go.

And also, yes, fuck Donald Trump. Cuz I ain’t forgiving any of that shit.