John Hanson's Weekend

On Friday at noon John Hanson was fired from the Hollows Golf and Country Club after his night escapades of playing “flame golf” were discovered. Flame golf involves breaking into a golf course at night and driving burning golf balls soaked in lighter fluid at the main lodge with a two iron. John knew it was for the best, since he would now have more time to dedicate to his new novel, Golfing With Apollo. Golfing With Apollo was the story about a man very much like him who meets Apollo, the god of the sun, who by day looks just like a wealthy middle-aged Englishman with bad teeth. It recounted the quasi-homoerotic relationship between the two, their incendiary adventures playing flame golf and exploding gas stations in Springfield, Missouri. John returned to his bungalow at 1 p.m. on Friday. Three pages into his “edit,” John realized that it would be a lot easier to write after watching The Matrix trilogy and drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels mixed with lemonade. At 6 p.m., John called his friend Karl and the two of them went to the driving range, then got drunk and played pool, while John ranted about his book. The next morning, John awoke at 11 a.m., sobered up as best he could, and decided that Golfing With Apollo should be a graphic novel. He began calling his old classmates at Middlebury College to find out whether they knew of anyone who could draw or anyone in the graphic novel business. At 4 p.m., he opened up a bottle of Jagermeister than Luna had left in the cupboard after moving all her stuff out three months before. He began sending comments and emails to his friends on Tumblr blog pages. He fell in love with a woman named "catekill" and proposed to her online, offering her half of his inheritance. He sent her a photograph of his face and then opened up a new Tumblr page called JOHN HANDSOME in which he wrote a long erotic poem to catekill. She finally reponded and said no thanks. At 7 p.m., Karl came over and the two of them went to see a zombie film with two mickeys of Jim Bean and then tried to pick up two Goth chicks at the cinema. Karl got lucky but John's "target" decided to take a cab home. At 10 p.m., John took a cab to the casino alone and told a prostitute that he would write a book about her if she gave him a blowjob. She asked for two hundred dollars instead and she sucked him off in the handicapped bathroom at 11:15 p.m. John couldn’t come. He called Luna in tears at just after midnight telling her what had happened to him and she told him to fuck off and never call her again. John woke up at 4 p.m. on Sunday, sobered up as best he could, and picked up the manuscript for Golfing With Apollo for the third time. He stared at the cover page, and imagined his brains leaking out of his mouth and eyes like liquid Jell-o. Suddenly, John realized what his problem was. I am not John Hanson, he thought. I am Apollo. I am the god of the sun. The revelation seemed like a joke at first, but when he repeated the words again, “I am Apollo, I am the god of the sun,” shivers went through him, and his empty life seemed to have more meaning than ever before. If he really wanted to write Golfing With Apollo, he would have to take flame golfing a a lot more seriously, and start really blowing shit up.