The Boss’s autobiography lets us in to his most private experiences.

One Saturday afternoon in the early 1980s, I was home visiting my mother who lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in the wealthy community of Rumson, New Jersey. I was in my early 30s. I was walking down Bellevue Avenue, admiring the gorgeous and stately homes partially hidden behind walls and high hedges, and as I reached Ridge Road, I stopped in front of one of these mansions. I knew it belonged to my high school musical hero, Bruce Springsteen. No, unlike what Springsteen admits doing at Graceland, I did not climb the wall and try to meet my hero. I just remember looking with a longing, a nostalgic ache, desiring something I couldn’t articulate. I guess I wished I could go inside, see Bruce in his “natural state,” hang out, get close to him, or be a fly on the wall, observing what mattered to him.

It’s a bit embarrassing now to admit to being such an adoring fan; somehow, it doesn’t sit so well with my more cynical and dignified adult identity. Still, even when I first heard him and his band, Steel Mill, playing on the Jersey Shore in the late 1960s, I wanted to get to know him. Even then, Springsteen had that effect on his fans. As a performer, he gives until he drops, exhausted—and so do his fans, feeling that we have just been transported to a better place. We want to get closer to the source of that experience and visit that place again.

What a delight then, it was, to read Bruce Springsteen’s new autobiography, Born to Run. He lets readers in and shows them so much more than his home. He shares his most private experiences with an astounding candor and psychological-mindedness, beginning with accounts of his earliest childhood in Freehold, New Jersey, all the while meticulously tracking his long (and meteoric) public journey to the very top of the rock ‘n’ roll world and popular culture.

Read the full article on alternet.org

Golf seems like such a good idea, doesn’t it? It shouldn’t be the nightmare it is for so many people. Spending the morning with your friends, beautiful surroundings, playing and competing, occasionally making contact with the ball so sweet you can hardly feel it, but can only marvel at the sight of the ball doing exactly what you want it to do. No wonder so many people play it.

Therefore, it’s puzzling that more people have been leaving the sport than picking it up. It’s estimated that, in 2013, 4.1 million more people quit golf than began to play it. Moreover, within each golfer this approach/avoidance tension exists as well. Too many of us have God on one shoulder and the Devil on the other. And most golfers don’t know why.

I’m one of them. I’ve been playing for 13 years. Although my game has waxed and waned, the reality is that my scores are pretty much the same now that they were 10 years ago. And I’ve taken dozens of lessons. I shot in the low 90, sometimes the upper 80s, too often the mid to high nineties, occasionally breaking the century mark, just as occasionally getting into the low or mid 80s. Am I unusual? I don’t think so. The average male golfer in the United States shoots in the mid – 90s. Further, most people don’t get much better at golf over time—a few strokes here or there but nothing significant. At a conference of golf teachers and professionals, golf guru Fred Shoemaker asked if the teachers in the audience had seen their students get significantly better over the last 10 years. No one raised his or her hand.

Read the full article on TheMindofGolf.com

Debates over gun control vs. mental illness after a mass shooting are ridiculous kabuki dances that defy reason but have become so ingrained in our culture that their essential irrationality is invisible.

The dance begins with a tragic shooting rampage by a young man dressed in camo with a semi-automatic rifle or pistol. Gun-control advocates take to the airwaves calling, again, for greater regulation. Initially, the NRA and its shills, aware of their shameful political vulnerability at this moment, are quiet “out of respect for the grieving families. Soon, however, when pressed, they begin talking about mental illness and call for a “national conversation” about how to detect, treat, and handle these disturbed individuals and others who might become like them. Eventually, when the threat of regulation gains traction, they begin to play political hardball and fight any reforms at any cost. The Newtown killings were different only in that we got to watch the Executive Director of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, prematurely and inelegantly open his organization’s kimono a bit and reveal the true extent of an underlying delusional and paranoid view of the world when he advocated armed guards in every school in America.

I’m not going to argue the mainstream progressive position on gun control, only because it is well known and, in my opinion, occupies the only rational and humane space in this debate.

Read the full article at Huffington Post