Appreciations (21) … gods golfing?

Appreciations (21) … gods golfing?
Torrey Orton
March 10, 2010

Appreciation on demand…

Hope is often not enough. I need a boost or a boot to get going, and so it is with appreciating. I appreciate lots of things, but often with only a slight rise in temperature or heart rate. So they pass out of my awareness, rather than joining the crowd of input/output forces and facts jammed up around the portals of my perception.

 I mention this because I discovered one such matter – gods golfing – as a result of wondering what to write today and thinking an Appreciation would be a good thing if I could find one. My tangential insight is that creativity or inventiveness can be primed with a self-imposed demand for performance. Today's demand arose from an underlying one to keep my writing production rate up to a level which I have never specified precisely but hovers perilously (from month to month) around 4-6 pieces a month. I don't like objectives of the MBO type, but a trackable sense of concrete direction can be helpful.

 …feeds a demand for appreciation.
So, the gods golfing. Last Saturday we had our third or fourth big ploush* day in six months – an inch or more rain in a single event of 30-60 minutes. Three of these have happened on VicAvePsych days by chance and I haven't noticed whether the therapeutic events have been similarly striking in any way at those times,…but then, as I said, I miss a lot of little appreciables.


The latest event was punctuated and pocked and pierced by hailstones, appreciated danger-free from the doorstep under the front veranda of the psych shop. The real action was elsewhere, which Jane pointed out when I got home, marvelling at the height of the bounce hailstones achieved on our back lawn (nb – our back lawn is more like a cricket pitch on a country oval than whatever 'lawn' may bring to mind, so the bounce potential was good). The best pics of this effect can be found by expert websters. The link provided is indicative but not current.


Anyway, the bounce was stunning and my impression days later is that of gods golfing. I know for some the gods golfed with cricketball sized hail and damages were great, though no one seemed to stand out in the game to see what it felt like. A few cars got cratered, though not to the level of a similar event in Sydney 10 years ago, which decimated vehicle insurers, and funded lawyers for months. Some new and old buildings sprang leaks they shouldn't have – e.g. our brand new train station and a quite mature art museum.

Enjoy.

*ploush – my stab at an onomatopoetic for the sound of a deluge dropping without accompanying stormy noises, or where the other noises has been edited out by my internal sensors; the most recent was a day after the gods golfing event, in the middle of the night when a fluid afterthought dropped 10 mm on us with a ploush.