Bladed Balata Blog

                I first picked up a golf club the year after my mom died. And it saved my life. I grew up in a magical, if not entirely backwards, period known as the 1980s. In addition to my miraculous survival through an era when seatbelts were practically optional, organic hadn’t been invented yet, and parents only had the wisdom that their parents had passed down to them, my childhood was spent in a very small town. The year I was born, it’s population was just over six hundred people. And so, my beginning was spent as the oldest child of a barely-making-ends-meet working class family of five, in a three-bedroom house that stood next to a filbert orchard in Dundee, Oregon. In that town, whose only municipal buildings were a single post office and an elementary school, my parents, for fear my brain would rot or my soul lost to the devil, forbade me many things. Mind you, I was allowed to do some th...

                  We don’t have cable. We don’t have bunny ears either. We have smart TVs. They came preloaded with apps for Netflix and Hulu and Amazon so that our subscriptions just run fluidly onto every screen in the house. My father-in-law lends me use of his cable login information so I can watch The Golf Channel on my phone. And I really don’t see the point in having more than that. For paying more to get cable when all of our needs are so amply met. For a quarter the price. Especially when you factor in that each of those TVs also has Youtube for free.                 If I ever made it to the PGA tour I would have to stitch a huge Youtube logo on the front of my bag. Without any endorsement deal. I take that back. OF COURSE I’LL TAKE THE ENDORSEMENT. But what I mean is what haven’t I learned from the hundreds, possib...