Aimless Thoughts: The Greatest Thing Ever Written About a Shitty Mini Golf Course

I could maintain a whole blog about how dodgy my house is, like some overdramatized broke-ass House of Leaves knockoff. ‘Exploration logs’ into my carpeted crawl space or the strange plants that keep growing between boards in my deck. Or the plant that keeps weaseling its way into the threshold between the front door and screen door. I had plants coming up between the cracks in the basement stairs at the start of the summer, too. There’s also a creature scratching around the edge of my guest room, which used to be a garage. This I only discovered recently, when a guest dropped by for the first time in months.

My short friend Colin, a surrogate brother of sorts and a somewhat frequent guest, spent a week in that room and we started hearing scratching on night one. Several times they went outside to try and spot the thing. They never did. I think it’s a raccoon, after various half-assed attempts of my own. In any case, I’ve been treating it like a raccoon and hearing it less.

I’ve also seen less of Colin since they left, for obvious reasons. We still text - more frequently than I text anyone else - but it doesn’t really do much for my increasingly pronounced abandonment issues. The long and short of it is I’m one of the only people in my friend group who didn’t move out of state after high school. People only come back home for the holidays, otherwise it’s on me to make meet-ups work.

Oddly, Covid was the most socially convenient time in my adult life. Nobody had moved and only I had a job. Basically everyone was still living with their parents biding time. We seemed to be the only people aware that quarantine didn’t entail staying indoors, only staying out of other peoples’ doors, so we took a lot of good walks on desolate trails. Once, on a bleak January night, Sean and I did two or three laps around the three-mile Loop the Lake trail. We were mostly talking about Homestuck, the comic he forced me to read from April to August of 2020. 

Neither of us were dressed for that long out in the cold, but I think we both recognized a special thing in that moment - the same thing, incidentally, the kids in Homestuck never got a chance to consciously deal with. We’d turned into adults without realizing it, and we were still just talking about stupid cartoons like the day we met. This was going to be one of the last moments like it. He had to go back to college and it wouldn’t be long until I got more serious about my job. We’re both doing pretty well for ourselves in our own ways at this point, and we see each other frequently. He’s still the first person who reads most of the shit I write.

But we were right. Nothing’s ever hit like it did when we could stay up forever and talk forever about anything. Over the summer, at the tail end of a personal tragedy I’m not comfortable dragging out publicly, we sat in his parents’ living room and watched Doctor Who with our friend Jason. Started Tennant’s first season in person after finishing Eccleston’s show over Discord calls. After the episode I talked his ear off for far too long. He hardly interjected, and I apologized for that. He said he kind of missed my rants.

I’ll take his word for it, per the decree of my girlfriend. We had another hard talk between Milwaukee and now. In Delirious Coda I talked about her telling me she wanted to have more say in our vacation. I interpreted it, then, as part of some wider picture of my dangerously controlling tendencies and pulled my hair out worrying those tendencies were getting worse. I never talked to her about that in any great depth; most of our post-Milwaukee conversation was about her because that’s, frankly, how I prefer it.

She didn’t need me to tell her. The next time she cried to me she was begging me to stop beating myself up so bad. I didn’t listen, not right away. We had that conversation again a few days ago. After I self-harmed again for the first time in two years. It wasn’t bad this time. I dug my fingernails into my palms just like I used to, barely made a dent in my skin because I trim them now.

Colin came into town the moment those new cuts healed and I think I’ve been doing better since then. Abandonment issues made it hard for a few days, for both of us. They cried on the train home, I cried on the drive to work. We told each other and they called me gay for crying over a boy. I’ve spent most of my life - and most of my writing - crying over boys. It helps.

I haven’t felt any strong urge to hurt myself since then, and what I have felt is a stronger urge to start working on myself. For the boys and for Lily, who needs me to be strong but deserves to see me vulnerable. We just watched that episode of King of the Hill where Bill talks up Boomhauer after a tough break-up. Quoth Dautrieve, I’ve been trying to find my legs. We’re also watching horror movies, since it’s October. Grave Encounters last night, which was sort of exactly what you’d expect from the premise but a well-executed version of that. The lead guy is doing a great Zack Bagans impression, to the point I kinda wished it’d fully committed to being a parody of that show. John Dies at the End soon, because it’s the movie I was watching the same Halloween night I realized I loved her.

Our anniversary is Halloween. Probably the morning of November 1, actually, and we didn’t fuck at a Halloween party or anything crazy like that. I was just texting her while watching a movie and at some point I realized I liked her. Now she’s living in my weird little hut. I spend a lot of time in my Aimless Thoughts on us at our lowest because it’s the more interesting half of the story, but honestly things have been great here. We cook together almost daily, she likes doing most of the chores I don’t and vice versa, she’s enjoying a quieter home than she had in Nebraska and I’m enjoying a fuller house than I’ve had recently. She’s been learning to enjoy reading again and I’ve been learning to enjoy TV and movies - her preferred medium, which I struggle to get into without a friend to watch alongside. We’re both young, dumb and depressed and that causes problems. But this is a better situation than either of us has ever had.

We’d both like more consistent company, if only the house could feasibly contain a third occupant. Having Colin over was great for both of us. They didn’t talk much, Lily’s still shy around my friends, but the mere fact of not being alone while I was at work eased a lot of her anxiety. The three of us had some fun together, we stayed up until two or three almost every night just talking.

The Friday before Colin left was one of the best days I’ve had in recent memory. It was one of my days off that week, and we just kinda drove around forever. Like old times - we all have a history of long, aimless drives and we all missed it. I used to take my brother on night drives during Covid; we’d meander our way up to the Taco Bell in Menasha or Appleton whenever he had the munchies. I’d buy him a five dollar box and he’d play whatever rapper he was into at the time, just loud enough not to drown out conversation. We drifted apart not long after that and it remains a strange, isolated moment of closeness between us.

In 2022 I drove our mutual friend Owen home from one of my brother’s parties and he asked me, halfway through the drive, to keep going. Take the wrong turn, get lost for a moment. He didn’t move out until 2023; our night drives turned into one of my major outlets for socialization. Conversations got deep, turned us from acquaintances to friends. I helped him find faith while I slowly lost sight of God. I came out to him. He got emotional over the death of a pair of earbuds he’d had since high school. We figured out our political beliefs together, butting heads only because we were going in the same direction through different means. He taught me to play poker in the back of my truck, sitting in a parking lot by some obscure trailhead. We still drive whenever he’s in town. It hasn’t gotten old yet.

But it can be even better with new people; Lily and I haven’t lived together long and Colin lives out of state, so driving with the two of them was a whole new experience. I met both of them around the same time, through the same mutual friend, and conversation veered gleefully from past to present. See, that friend was my high school ex, a woman I’m long since over. She’s the reason we all know each other, but we weren’t much more than acquaintances until she’d burned her bridges with all of us. In the car we all talked shit together, the first time I’d opened my mouth about her since my teens. Like I said, I don’t care anymore, but it’s fun to reminisce with the people who all know as well as I do why I was better off moving on.

Then we drove by Saint Vincent de Paul’s in Neenah. I’ve held a number of important phone calls and text conversations in the parking lot of that building by virtue of the fact that it’s cheap as hell. When I crave retail therapy but can’t afford it, SVdP is always there for me. I let them know that with the additional context that it’s where Colin and I first met, in a sense. At a dark period in their life, Colin stopped talking to everyone. A friend of theirs asked me to reach out and it turned out they’d randomly sent me their phone number at some point. I texted them and, after confirming they were okay and promising to stop being such a hermit, we started talking about Spider-Man or some inconsequential fun shit and we’ve hardly stopped talking since then.

Some time passed and we drove through the less gray bit of Menasha’s ugly gray commercial sprawl. This took us past good ol’ Mexican Restaurant Ice Cream Shop, an eatery with absolutely no pretenses. Then it took us past the plain field of grass that once housed Wittman’s Funland. I grew up going to Wittman’s. It certainly wasn’t the strongest mini golf course in Wisconsin, nor even the strongest I’d been to as a child. But it was the one closest to my grandparents. They’d treat me, my brother, our parents and our cousins to 18 holes whenever we were all around. It was good enough for what it was.

It still exists, in a roundabout way. The shapes of the courses are all still laid out on the ground, the hut you got your balls and clubs from is still there. Nobody’s bought it. All the props and balls and brightly colored carpeting have long since retired, but the shapes in the field remain. You know exactly what they are and why they’re just silhouettes now. These places, these goofy-ass golf silhouettes, will be our Nazca Lines.

Also still in existence is the website theputtingpenguin.com, a community-driven host for reviews of mini golf courses. It doesn’t seem like it was ever particularly active; even on the pre-consolidation internet mini golf was a niche hobby. But despite that, somebody out there wrote a review for Wittman’s! Delano Lopez’s review from 2008, one of the last years the place was open, is an utter masterclass. My friend Jason sent it my way one night, telling me it had the same energy as the way I describe shitty run-down places in Aimless Thoughts posts. I couldn’t be more flattered. To close off this roundup of things I’ve been loving and hating about my life lately, here’s Delano’s review in full. It’s one of the best things to happen to me this fall:

Wittmann's Funland boasts on its sign that it was established in 1960. Unfortunately, it appears as if it has not been maintained since then. The course was more difficult than it should have been, as peeling-up greens and poor designs made it quite easy to launch balls off of the course. The anticipated campy fun of visiting what was clearly a road-trip tourist trap from the hey-day of such attractions was spoiled by the run-down appearance and the seemingly random scattering of modern plastic lawn toys around the "Funland," giving it a junky, sad feel. The creativity score could have been even lower, save for the one interesting hole in which one putts through the tines of some sort of antique threshing machine. A few such machines and wagons surround the course, reminders that the area, now surrounded by suburban sprawl, was once farmland. Unless serious renovations are made to Wittman's, if one is in the area, I advise skipping this one and heading north to either Funset Boulevard or Badger Sports Park.

I also basically only remember the thresher hole, along with a hole involving a boot in some capacity and one with occasionally quite grubby water. Those serious renovations were never made, and now Wittman’s is a part of the area’s distant past as much as the farmland is. Menasha as a whole has that energy lately. Serious renovations are needed. The city needs to change. I need to change.

But I wouldn’t change a thing about this review.

Oh, and the mouse statue from Wittman's Funland still exists (courtesy of: https://x.com/JoshLipnik/status/1839461663289864248. Also sent to me by Jason - who, incidentally, has never actually been to Wittman's Funland)