My Mount Lemmon Disc Report

We need a sign. Here is one.

Only one way up the mountain...

Well, here are my excuses:

1.) It was fucking hot.
2.) My toe was infected. So I was on drugs.
3.) Snakes, dust, tequila, holy saguaro.
4.) Ander made me drink beer.

Also, if you add total strokes, for 6 rounds, 3 days, Ander finished 4 strokes ahead.

Ok, that sound whiny. I'm now done whining. Dude beat me, OK? Protected his hot house. And to be honest, he often pulled shots on 18, or other clutch, and that's how he beat me. So kudos. Etc.

Did I mention cacti?















Another beaten metal day, sultry, like inferior heroin, or Werner Herzog the day he was shot while giving an interview.



Heat piled on heat, the blue eye of the sky glaring, feverish with ill will; headaches hammer; sand becoming animate, grasping, swirling--alive. The desert is a dessicated whore. Every aspect is with harmful intent, not even recognized in its total oblivion of life; it just is. Like a stone. A flood-washed board of nails. A cactus, thorny, waiting. Ander (on right, below) appears from the cauldron, the devil's abyss, after finding his Beast impaled on the teats of Satan.















The discs refuse to fly; they melt in the air. Plastic tears. On one hole a spiny lizard--it's skin the color of prostitution and dried caramel--swallows my Star Wraith and trudges away fulfilled with hate and venom. The cacti laugh at me. The tee pads fling dry spittle and Mexican curse words. (rough translation: "Fairways are for the gringo-ass!")

Huh? Drive it where? Seriously. This is a tee box. If you think that is opening on left, you are wrong. It is a sliver, and the hole is right.

Fuck this course. We serpentine up the mountain.













Ander hands me a dank ale and notes every other disc golfer has hiking poles as essential gear. He has the best quote of the day: "Well," he says. "We might not be the best disc golfers here, but we will be the drunkest."















We ride the lift. We start the wretched descent. Disc golfers with spears drift into the whispery ghosts of occasional shade, the jumbles of sharp rock, the scree and scream. Ander and I round a curve and come upon a group of disc golfers roasting a DX Valkyrie over an open fire. The polymer drips from their fangs. Another has a strange brown substance in the bowl of an Aviar putter. It resembles Spackle rimmed in seagull shit. Smells similar. Ander takes a pic but his camera would later tumble into a crevasse, so no go. We trudge on. A night-blooming Cerues pricks Ander as he reaches for a Star Sidewinder. His thumb swells into the shape of Richard Nixon's head. He bleeds the bleeding of the blooden.















A scorpion in my bag again. Brown and black and curling--it looks like a cigar a dead man has choked on. I hear a rustling next to my tricked-out Roc and then a sting that makes my index finger go red, purple, black, then red. The type of red you find inside carcasses, or volcanoes. Something falls onto my shoulder. Vulture shit? No, all vultures here have been eaten by dust and the sun. Another scorpion. I try hitting it with a Wraith and the disc goes rolling, over a cliff, an incline Ander is hiking up.

I catch my foot on a whiptail lizard, fall over a fuck-ton of scree, and hit my head on a boulder. Ander plays out the hole.

Hours later I wake, shivering. The temperature has dropped like housing value. The sun is still out, though. Mirrors of heat trapped upon the mountainside. What would happen if my disc bag--seeping heat against my right hip--exploded? Around me snakes are chewing the skulls of rabbits. An odd soggy sound. I notice a quail swallowing a quail. One blue throat squawking from another. I stand. I take yet another lorcet and miss my putt.
















Uphill? Cliffhanger? A limping burro approaches our group and two starved D golfers leap upon its flesh and rip it limb from limb. In a deep valley I yell to try out an echo. There is no echo. My voice and will are swallowed. After the burro slaughter, I am shaken up and settle my next drive into the top of a raggedy aspen. It stays there, cackling. I pick up a femur and throw the disc free. The sun is a terrifying father.

Upshot this photo below, by-atch.
















Downhill to here? See that basket in front of the tree? Hit that tree or kiss your ass goodbye. One disc golfer starts rolling--head over teakettle over ass--past this basket and just never stops. We never see him again. Ander asks his group, "Aren't you even going to look for him?"

They cackle and reply, "Why? What would we find?"
















I must have ten thousand prickly thorns in my ankles, my socks, the epidermal lining of my shins. The skin resembles paper in a fire, curled black and stinging. My body is on fire. The earth hums below me, a turbine, a tumor, an undertow of sand and rock. 17 looooong holes later. Everything is silent, dead. Poisonous. One wrong step, you die. A right step, you are painfully injured. A perfectly placed step, you're just uncomfortable...

Fun though:

S