An enthusiastic phone call to a friend later, I’m in Play it Again, buying “factory second” discs at $10 apiece. Then, I’m driving through parts of Sarasota I didn’ t know existed, winding through a residential neighborhood until coming upon Lakeview Park, with its 18 hole disc golf course.

I am intimately familiar with the Gainesville course on 34th Street but few others (I’d played Lake Wauburg in Gainesville, and of course Spirit of Suwanee’s Grateful Dead course last weekend). The excitement of a new course, this close to home, was almost unbearable.

Unfortunately there wasn’t a map of the holes, and we ended up meandering like tourists through 18 holes of challenging, at-times-heavily wooded, swampy dream for any disc golfer. We never found holes 11 or 12.

The course is fun, with creative pin placement and lots of water. The park had restrooms, water fountains, a fenced-in dog park, and picnic tables. Nice.

This whole thing’s got momentum. I’ll be playing the North Watertower Park course tomorrow morning, which is apparently either on-par with (no pun intended) or even better than the Lakeview course. I’m learning all of this from the Sarasota Sky Pilots web page. Yep, a full fledged disc golf community, which I’ll duly be looking into. Tuesday and Thursday night handicaps? Count me in!

They had a DISC GOLF course at the park (among other things) that John and I and his fiance Tracy took the opportunity to play. We both scored well, considering we’d never played this very narrow, challenging course before. I also got bit on the ankle by something with fangs, but I survived and am doing okay. Thanks for asking.

If you’re unfamiliar with disc golf, don’t be surprised… it’s a hippie sport that most people haven’t heard of. It entails throwing specialized frisbees into chains. It scores just like golf, you play it where it lies, and copious amounts of inebriants are often involved, in our case, historically.

Background music – Sugar Magnolia, Grateful Dead, Europe ‘72

We watched the game with some friends at Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Grill. That’s how it’s listed in Google.

Since Troy and I have the typical testosterone-driven tendency to try and out-whatever each other, it was no surprise that we simultaneously looked at one another while perusing the menu, and quietly understood that we were going to sample their hottest wings.

I had the hottest wings on the face of the planet. Troy ate them like candy, barely stopping for a swig of beer or the occasional onion ring. He skipped napkins altogether, actually, and deferred until the end of his Blazin’ Wings run to hit the head and warsh his hands.

I, on the other hand, was inches away from needing to have someone call me an ambulance. Usually, spicy foods give you a few moments before “hitting you.” These wings, though, of which we ordered 12, were not so generous. Instantly, upon touching my lips, I realized that I was willfully ingesting poison. Nothing this spicy is actually meant to go into (or come out of) a human body. One friend took one, single bite and immediately flushed, threw down the nibbled wing, yelped and downed his entire beer and half his wife’s icewater. That was it for him.

Since I’m either an idiot or a glutton for punishment, I ploughed through five of these things. My eyes were watering uncontrollably. My skull was sweating. After 5 minutes I felt dizzy, disoriented, and started to have trouble hearing and seeing. For a moment, I hallucinated. These wings are not for the faint hearted. The reason they serve celery and ranch dressing with hot wings became very obvious to me at this point. The sour cream counteracted the battery acid on my tongue nicely, and I once again regained my composure and enjoyed the game.

This morning, I experienced these wings again — in the bathroom. They’re spicy on the way out, but I resisted the urge to shove a stalk of celery covered in ranch dressing up my ass (though the thought did cross my mind as I sat there, holding my head as my eyes watered and my vision blurred).

In related news, Joe Paterno, pushing 80 years old, jogged off the field during Penn State’s unfortunate loss to Ohio State. It was reported in the media that he’s “suffering from the flu,” but we all know what that means… ol’ Joe had the wicked shits. Props to Joe for doing what he had to do, and that was to find a toilet – and fast.