The Driving Range: Is It Worth the High?

Welcome to “Is It Worth the High?”, where our writers see newly released movies, listen to the latest album drops, and try other experiences while high to determine whether they’re worth your time, money, and most importantly, your cannabis buzz.

This week, Dante Jordan goes to a golf driving range.

A few months ago, my father bought me a set of golf clubs for my 28th birthday. However, I hadn’t used them until a few weeks ago when he took me to the driving range to practice the craft.

Was I high? Of course I was. Was it worth it? Let’s talk about it.

Products Enjoyed: 3 bowls of OG Kush.
High Experienced (Scale of 1-10): 7. I was high, but not blitzed.

I’ve been wanting to learn how to play golf for a while. A lot of business deals are made on the golf course daily, so I figure it’s a great skill to have for the future. So my dad bought me clubs and took me out to teach me how to use them.

By the end of our bucket of balls, I was ready to toss my clubs into the lake and never set foot on a golf course ever again.

It seemed like a fun and exciting idea at first, until I got to the driving range and realized that swinging a golf club properly is damn near impossible. I was looking extremely unnatural like a young Charles Barkley, and I couldn’t drive the ball for shit. The experience changed from fun and exciting to incredibly frustrating.

By the end of our bucket of balls, I was ready to toss my clubs into the lake and never set foot on a golf course ever again. Turns out, if you’re bad at golf, you actually never get better and should give up immediately.

Golf Does Not Want to Be Learned

What’s so difficult about golf that makes the driving range a frustrating experience? Everything, but mostly the simple motion of swinging a club. If you’ve never done it, you think it’s like swinging a baseball bat, only with the bat toward the ground instead of over your shoulder.

Turns out that’s wrong and to get a good hit on the ball, you have to know when and how to “break your elbow” when you swing. However, if you’ve never done this before, it’ll take you FOREVER TO LEARN.

So that’s one thing the driving range has against it, concerning rookies: It takes a tremendous amount of time to feel like you’re not out there wasting your life trying to learn something that simply does not want to be learned.

In addition to being trash with my swing, I also had my father tossing out tips and pointers that simply did not register. So now, on top of being trash, I’ve got someone talking to me about how easy it is to not be trash, all while I’m watching other golfers at the range be extremely opposite of trash, and it all just resulted in me feeling extremely discouraged and embarrassed.

Is It Worth the High?

On top of all the difficulty of swinging a club and the discouragement from trying to do so, being high turned out to worsen the experience. Usually being stoned during a random activity enhances it because you’re loosey goosey and don’t have a care in the world.

But when it comes to an activity like practicing at the driving range, when you’re extremely bad at swinging a club, being high becomes another aspect of frustration.

I was getting angry at myself for being high because I’d convinced myself that maybe it was impairing my skills. All in all, going to the driving range high was not a good experience.

So again, we ask: Is going to the driving range worth the high?

If you’re already a perfect golfing pro with a perfect swing, then yeah, it probably is. But if you’re like me—a novice with zero hope of ever driving a ball more than 28 ft.— then no, the driving range will only frustrate you, and you should find a different activity to do when high.