The Ides of March

Countless times, in my high school days, my friends and I walked down to the nearby country club golf course to engage in the hooliganism that was expected of us as teenagers (and which came so naturally). There was never any agenda that was not completely improvised on the spot, and usually we concentrated on filling our pockets with driving range balls.

One night, we must have all had a simultaneous surge of pubescent hormones demanding pointless late night counter-productivity. I say counter-productivity because our angst (such as it was) was all about girls (of course), yet we never did anything to improve our situations, preferring to streak through dark parks, gather hundreds of free newspapers with a plan to "re-distribute" them some day, and listen to Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry" (which we interpreted as "You, the loser without a girlfriend, don't cry about it").

I digress. This night in particular, we decided to steal the flagstick from a golf hole, dig up sand traps, and perform other such minor, reversible acts of vandalism (we weren't barbarians, after all). We weren't at it long before the night watchman's spotlight chased us off, but I was able to do my part.

We were reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in school, and I was loving it, and I etched my favorite quote in one of the sand traps:

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear;
seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come." (Julius Caesar Act II, Scene II)

The older I get, the nerdier I realize I was, and the prouder I am of it.