If there's one thing that is very important these days, it's having a way to get away from the reality of your life once in a while.

I don't mean escaping as in cleaning out the bank account and leaving town. I just mean that if all you're doing is going to work in the morning, coming home in the evening and watching television before going to bed, it eventually catches up with you.

I'm a lucky guy. I basically retired when I was 58, although I didn't realize it at the time. I got fired after nearly 30 years in the newspaper business, which luckily for me lowered the stress level in my life about as much as it lowered my sense of self. I wasn't a journalist anymore, but I also wasn't driving 85 miles a day and taking orders from people I didn't much respect.

I've been writing a book that should be finished by the end of the year and I've been doing a lot of reading, watching movies and pursuing the impossible dream of breaking 80 on the golf course. It's tough to improve your game when you only play once every two or three weeks, even when you play 36 holes, and my golf game is very erratic.

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Sometimes, every once in a while, things happen just like we dream them. I'll never forget the time a couple of months ago when after shooting 45 on the front nine at Empire Lakes in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, I started the back nine with five consecutive pars. I had done that once before, but this time I attacked the next hole and actually birdied the par four 15th.

That left me one under on the back nine, and I finished with three consecutive bogeys to shoot 38, giving me a best-ever 83 for the round. I've shot 85 since then, but I'm mostly in the low nineties, occasionally breaking into the high eighties.

It's an infuriating game. On the same par three in the course of a day, I can put a tee shot five feet from the pin the first time and then slice badly the second time. I can sink a 20-foot putt on one hole and miss a three-footer on the next.

It literally makes me crazy, and I'm not sure it's a great idea to have your hobbies making you crazy.

But there are few things in the world more beautiful than being on a well-kept golf course at sunrise, lining up your first shot of the day and driving it 200 yards down the middle of the fairway. I laugh when I look back at that sentence, because it tells me I'm getting old. When I was 17, I thought there were few things in the world more beautiful than the lovely Cheryl Newman; now I'm lusting after golf courses.

Oh, well.