THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

First, a moment of clear insight: I'm not a golfer. I golf, but I'm not a golfer. A golfer is a skilled sportsman who sizes up a situation, intuits the best outcome, and executes the best performance towards that outcome. At times, I can do one or two of those things, but rarely consistently. I'm consistently inconsistent. And with a titanium hip and no designs on getting my varsity letter in golf, I have to be okay with that. When I'm golfing by myself, it's generally about an elusive moment of competence, be it a swing with a club that I haven't quite mastered or a putt on an undulating landscape of chemical green. When I'm golfing with others, it's about the hang more than the thang, as it was when I played basketball and ran track. But no matter what situation, it's still enjoyable every time on some level, and it's about the only physical thing I can do anymore without my body sliding into critical condition. This year, I golfed at a w...

When, during the knotty course of romantic entanglements, your friends break up with their significant others, you are left to make a decision: Do I stay in contact with this person that I only know through my friend, or do I cut ties with this person and thereby reaffirm my primary friendship via the severing any connections, no matter how superficial? I have people in my life that have stayed “Facebook Friends” with some of my exes, and while it’s a bit bizarre to think about at first (“How dare you not expunge ______ as I have expunged her?”), it’s a good reminder that my failures in specific and my reality in general are not always automatically shared, regardless of the depth and duration of the aforementioned friendship. I shouldn’t expect reality to be excised so neatly, as it’s lived so messily. I was thinking about these things – more eloquently than I can capture with words, of course – as I read through Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks , a delightful ...

Lots of people talk of the best day of their lives -- it's a phrase that pops up a lot on social media, especially -- and it was one such random post on Facebook that got me thinking about the best working day of my life. I'm lucky in that I've had a lot of jobs that have felt more like fun than work, but there were a handful of days where all that blissful joy just came together in a way that sticks out of the pack. This is a obviously flawed and biased recollection of one of those days, over two decades ago, but aren't most recollections a bit gauzy and half-full? As I remember it, it was a warm mid-April morning in 1996 -- 4/24, to be exact -- just before 8am when I pulled into the Stadium Mall parking lot, and I grabbed my keys to unlock the front door of the Michigan Wherehouse Records for another first shift Wednesday. We always opened at 10am during the week, but there’s bookkeeping and bank deposits and a gentle entry into the day to manage across those two ho...