THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

"I bet you'd drop ten strokes if you golfed more," my father said on a windy early evening last week just outside of Gaylord. We were playing the back nine of the Gaylord Golf Club, driving up to the tee boxes on the 17th hole. I was having my usual experience of up-and-down play -- mostly down, to be honest -- but I thought about what he said and decided to engage in a little experiment: That next week, I would golf nine holes at least once every day during the week to see if I could get the average to drop. And so I did. If there's one positive to having seven online classes, it's that you can schedule your time for golf pretty easily. And after grading for hours each day in the early morning -- Monday was the worst, with just over an hour's worth of grading for each class, eyestrain and neck cramps be damned -- you really want to hit a little ball as far as you can over and over, so it was 9-hole therapy at its finest. With a few texts and Facebook messages...

  A couple days ago, I decided to swing by the Roscommon campus of Kirtland Community College, one of the 28 public community colleges in Michigan, to check out my old stomping grounds. Like many people who grew up in or near Roscommon, I have some significant personal history with KCC, an outpost of higher learning nestled in the thick jack pine woods, triangulated between Roscommon and Grayling and St. Helen as a rural oasis of academic possibilities. Thanks largely to my step-father Tom Dale, a KCC professor for three decades, I attended classes at KCC for three semesters when it was clear that I wasn't emotionally or financially developed enough to attend Michigan State University, giving me a jump into my time at Central Michigan University. And starting as a 25-year-old Master's student, I taught Intro Psych at KCC from the summer of '96 to the spring of '98, so I wouldn't have my job at North Central Michigan College were it not for my time at KCC. My memorie...

  If I'm asked what I'm thinking about at the moment, it's some variation on the fact that the cult leader never leaves the cult on his own volition. Let me give you some context. It's hard to bitch about experiencing sub-clinical agitated depression when you firmly understand how blessed you truly are when compared to the people around you. After all, when I start talking about why I'm feeling down or out of sorts, I start boring myself almost instantly, so I can only imagine how people on the receiving end of the communication must feel. How fortunate am I? My job has changed, but I still have a job. My housing situation has changed, but I have a stable home. I'm less than two months away from turning 50, but I can say that each birthday is halfway to death and it's a statement more positive with each year. I can do frivolous things like golfing and buying CD's and drinking funky flavors of Mountain Dew straight from the lab and not have to instantly w...

  In the summer of 2013, when I packed away the last stuff I was ever going to take from my first-ever house on Resort Pike Rd. outside of Petoskey -- a small place twelve minutes from the College, purchased at a slightly inflated price from two work colleagues and ultimately sold for far less -- I had a moment’s sorrow where I cried in the guest room / music room, shedding tears by myself for a moment that seemed longer than it was, thinking about promises made and promises broken while an uncertain but exciting future lay ahead.  I'd left plenty of apartments in the past without a second glance, but this was my first goodbye to a house, and it was tougher than I expected. But the transition away from the Perch Lake house that I called home for almost exactly seven years, pictured above in the bottom center? My first house as a married dude with a wife and two little doggos, my first house on a body of sparkling clear water, my most expensive purchase to date? Leaving that ho...

In January of 1984, a thirteen-year-old boy took the SAT’s in a large and uncomfortable room surrounded by hundreds of other kids and scored a 920 combined. That score was good enough for me to qualify to attend a three-week summer academic program (a.k.a. "nerd camp") at Alma College from 8 July to 27 July called the Midwest Talent Search. Given the choice between a mathematics or English program, I chose English.  I chose English largely because of a middle school teacher named Mrs. Brown, who taught a 7th + 8th grade English Enrichment class of which I was a student. In the two years that I was in English Enrichment, my writing simply wasn’t consistently good enough for Mrs. Brown, and I got the worst grades of my middle school career. At the time, my grandfather was the assistant principal and athletic director, so perhaps I suffered for the sins of the (grand)father, as not everyone warmed to the unyielding countenance of Earl Haight. Or perhaps it was the simple fact th...

A lot of my "...when I was a kid..." memories are of deprivation. They shouldn't be, of course -- for example, I had two parents who, while they weren't together, loved and supported me -- but for a time in preadolescence, I lived in a rural area outside of a small town, with a couple of radio stations and a couple of VHF TV stations to periodically give me transmissions of mainstream culture. And I wanted more, and I told myself to go out and get more, within my parameters of general laziness and sloth. As I got older, with the disposable income that comes with working jobs and being "parsimonious" (a.k.a. "cheap as fuck"), I was able to uphold that promise to myself after a fashion. I wanted more comic books to read and more movies to watch and more music to listen to, and I was able to do all three. Were the adult me able to time travel to that shitty dirt road outside of Roscommon and pop out of my underinsulated bedroom closet to show my 10-ye...

It's been just under fifteen years since I did my first three-pack of Netflix DVD rentals -- The Brown Bunny (2004), La Petite Lili (2003), and The Corporation (2003) -- and with a total of 481 titles watched, paired with the resigned understanding that I will never have the time to watch the 388 titles currently in my queue, I've come to the decision that my DVD plan at Netflix will end tomorrow. As a film lover from a rural area, Netflix in the early 00's was a godsend, and I'm sure in many ways I was their ideal customer, even if I did dial back from the 3-at-a-time plan pretty quickly. But I will say that while some of the titles I rented were watched as soon as I got home from the post office, others sat at my house for months, earning Netflix a tidy profit on my recalcitrance and sloth. But now that I've moved to a new house, and after unpacking box after box of physical media -- some watched or played or read, some not -- it's clear that some thin...