Status report from the studio: the doctors have signed the paperwork. Not the discharge paperwork, not the "please stop calling us" paperwork — the golf paperwork. As of this week I am medically cleared to swing a club again, which is the single most expensive sentence a man can read on a clipboard. The lab is running, the game is live, and the band has booked another date, so naturally the timing is perfect.
There is a witness to all of this. Mrs. Duck has been briefed on the clearance, has read it, and remains unconvinced. She has assumed the role of head of safety, a position nobody created and nobody can abolish. She follows me onto the course with the energy of a pit crew that does not trust the driver, which is fair, because the driver has a documented history.
Golf: cleared, supervised, and still dangerous
The clearance came with the usual medical hedging — start easy, build gradually, stop if anything complains — which is exactly how I would describe my putting game if I were prescribing it to someone else. First drive in weeks, and I want to report it went magnificently. It always does. The driver has never once needed a doctor's note.
The short game, however, remains a condition with no known cure. It is the part of the recovery nobody is willing to operate on. I have been waxing on and waxing off for weeks hoping the putts would quietly improve through osmosis, and they have not. They have organized instead. Somewhere on that green is a ball that took more strokes than the entire rest of the round combined, and Mrs. Duck saw every one of them, and she did not say a word, which is worse than saying a word.
So the plan is the training-montage plan: walk the fairway, hit the big one, refuse to discuss the small one, and let the synthesizer swell. Na-na-na-na, hey baby. The scorecard is between me and the county.
The fifteen-pound limit and the taco supply chain
Here is the part of the recovery nobody warns you about: for weeks I was under a hard ceiling of fifteen pounds. Nothing heavier. No lifting, no carrying, no "just this once." That sounds reasonable until you realize it is a direct, targeted strike on the taco program.
A respectable order of tacos weighs more than fifteen pounds. I am not speculating. I have weighed the bag. This is the arithmetic nobody puts on the discharge summary: taco acquisition is a logistics problem, not a culinary one. For a while I was forced into split shipments — two trips to the car, both hands free, dignity left in the trunk — and then into a strategy I am not proud of, which was eating some of the order immediately in the parking lot specifically to reduce the mass of the bag. That is not recovery eating. That is recovery engineering.
The limit is lifted now, and I want that on the record, in writing, in front of witnesses. The taco program is back online at full capacity, and the first order under the new regime was, predictably, an obscenity.
Yeet 'N' Greet: out of beta and running for real
The downtime had one permanent consequence, and it shipped. Yeet 'N' Greet is no longer in beta. It is live and working at yeetngreet.com — not "mostly live," not "live if you stand in the correct doorway at the correct hour." Live. Much destruction and taco acquisition lies ahead of us all.
The premise has not changed and will not change: you yeet, you greet, and you do not interrogate the physics. What has changed is the website, and that is where the real effort went. We hid jokes in places no user will ever click — the footer, the error states, the part of the page that only appears if you lose badly enough to be reading it. That is the highest form of comedy writing: a punch line with a bounce rate. Be sure to catch the gags all over the site, and if you find one nobody has found, tell me, because I will need to know which section of the page to keep.
If sixty seconds of explanation suits you better than a tutorial, the official ad is still up. Watch it, then go break something.
Music: another gig, and the lifting ban expired just in time
And because the universe has a sense of timing it refuses to explain, Under The Influence has another gig on the books — landing almost exactly as the fifteen-pound restriction expired. Which is fortunate, because a keytar is not a light object and I had been formally forbidden from touching one.
So the timeline came out perfect: cleared for the fairway this week, cleared for the stage this month, and cleared to carry my own backline like a normal working musician. The set list is getting its usual violent edit, and the band's channel has the evidence if you want to know what you are walking into.
What comes next
Golf, gently and under supervision. Tacos, aggressively and without supervision. A live game with a website full of jokes nobody asked for, a gig to prepare for, and a band to annoy with "can we run that one more time." The doctors have stopped objecting loudly, the lab has stopped slowing down, and Mrs. Duck is still watching the golf swing with her arms crossed. Fair enough. She has earned the veto.