​There are many markers in life, milestones that tell you something about yourself, where you stand. Most of us get revelations – big and small – along the way. It may be a lesson learned, an accommodation that maybe we don’t want to make, or a recognition that we either should or shouldn’t be doing something in particular.
 
These markers come in many forms. It’s possible there’s a book you finished recently that has a particular passage that resonates, and you choose to incorporate that into your daily meanderings. On your morning jog you may find the hills are starting to kill your knees, so you choose to walk the inclines instead or purchase knee supports to continue plowing ahead while alleviating the jarring. Perhaps you grow tired of a friend constantly complaining and you decide to point out to him the folly of his behavior and you wait to see if he changes his attitude.
 
Regardless of the time, place, or type of marker you encounter, what follows is some form of change. Typically, it’s subtle. We don’t change dramatically. It’s all about increments.
 
Over the past year or so, this type of accommodation has occurred to me regarding my golf game. The essential lesson for me has been, “You can’t hit the ball the way you used to.”
 
Sounds simple. Sounds like something a human can figure out and then move to a new level. It’s not that simple.
 
So much is involved. Your ego, for one. Your sense of yourself, for another. You see yourself as being able to do something you could when you were 31 or even 48, and when you get into your 60s, that just ain’t the case anymore. The body joints don’t function the same. The muscles don’t torque the way they used to. Your flexibility decreases.

All of those changes decrease your ability to crush a golf ball. Watch the pros, and you’ll see the difference from the regular tour to the senior tour. Take a look at the old codgers, and we’re swinging like a joint that has no oil.
 
The blues are the championship tees in golf, the white tees are considered the men’s regular tees, then courses now have tees to shorten the holes for the elders, often gold tee boxes, then there are the front tees – the red. Long ago, my age bracket moved away from the blues and to the whites. The current adaption to not being able to hit the ball the way you used to means moving to the golds.
 
This has happened in increments and not without psychological and emotional difficulty for me. You want to think you can still crush the ball with the 40-year-old golfers. And, that is not the case. You can’t kid yourself.
 
I play with a good friend who I’ll term J. He is 15 years younger than me. When I want to move up to the gold tees on an egregiously long hole that is totally unfair to me at my age, he gives me the poke. He mocks me. Blows smoke my way. I laugh, defend myself. But, I also feel like I should compete and go back to play the white tees on holes way too long for my age.
 
These tee box decisions may sound trivial, but actually are difficult. You confront what you are no longer capable of doing. Face your personal limits, regardless of your competitive drive. I haven’t fully figured it out yet, but am in process of adapting, letting go, still challenging myself and not letting J get away with harassing me too much.
 
I don’t think any of us fully figure these types of things out. We adapt, sometimes under duress and sometimes due to our intelligence, which helps us make good decisions. Regardless of the impetus, you shift to a new plateau, enjoy a different vista and if you’re lucky, get to savor it for a number of years before the next adjustment.

​Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already here. We’re applying it every day. We just don’t think about it for the most part.
 
As AI takes up more space in the news, we wring our hands. It bothers us, taking control from humans, likely eliminating more menial jobs and thrusting us into the ever-unknown future. What happens next? The predictatologists are predicting, and perhaps they have slightly informed opinions, but who really knows?
 
At this point AI inroads into our careers and lives has already occurred and it will dig deeper. Take the case of a writer, someone who tries to make a living by applying the written word in creative and unique ways. Writers entertain, inform, report, tie facts together, make sense of the world.
 
Currently, AI takes some of those functions away, albeit the basic ones like standardized phrases and responses that can be determined by prior use. An example is your email or text messaging and how you reply to someone.
 
I noticed this several years back. As I typed a note to a friend, one, two or even three words would pop up as a way to finish the sentence I’d started. The software program in Microsoft Outlook decided on the most likely following words and laid them out there for me. Since I didn’t know what was going on at the time, I never hit the “tab” key to use their selections. But, I certainly could have, and I imagine many people do.
 
There’s a degree of righteousness I feel for still never having applied the tab key. “Those bastards aren’t going to put words in my mouth” is my sentiment. Yet, I know AI’s claws are edging closer to digging into each of us.
 
As birthdays crop up or work anniversaries on Facebook or LinkedIn, we are exhorted by their programs to send a specifically tailored message developed by their software engineers. “Have a good one” or “congrats” or “enjoy your day” all might be choices just waiting one click away for your finger to tap and send and connect to your friend or colleague, letting them know you’re thinking of them when you really aren’t.

Because if you were, you’d send a personal note. You’d capture something in the relationship the two of you had and add that to your message. It would be funny or incisive or tell a story only the two of you remember. That’s worthwhile, meaningful communication.
 
To me, on the AI/software front relative to communications, that’s where the problem lays. Sure, you can tap a basic all-in-one message and you can apply a framework to a news story about a fire because certain standard issues tend to arise and would be included in the first couple of paragraphs. To dig into the meat is a whole different story. You must research, connect quotes, go to different sources for information and figure out how to tie it together.
 
Maybe AI will get there some. I don’t know. I’m not the person to ask.
 
What I do know is that us humans have a deep need to connect interpersonally and we do a much better job of that than a program written in code does. That’s not going away.

​There are so many fun things about refereeing high school basketball (and the levels below that), that I hardly know where to begin the list. I’m not being sarcastic or ironic when I say that. I’m serious. The positives of officiating a sport FAR outweigh the negatives.
 
This past season, I had a high school varsity basketball officiating assignment in Nowheresville, WI. Suffice to say that the high school population barely topped 100 students and the population of the town in the 2010 census was 1,123. Small town stuff.
 
When you enter a smaller community, you drive back in time. You slow down, look around, pay attention to the downtown of a law office, two bars, three abandoned buildings, maybe a bank and a feed store. You often have to go to the gas station for minimal groceries. You drink it all in as you drive the one square block commercial strip. It reminds you of yesteryear in a good way and a sad way.
 
People wave. They stroll. They don’t hurry. You can find the high school without a map, because somewhere on one of the streets, there’s a big sign telling you where it is, or you see the lights of the football field.
 
The Athletic Director (AD) greets you with an oversized smile, a powerful handshake and a big clap on the back. “Good to see ya again. Let me show you to the locker room. What would you like to drink at half time? Would you like some popcorn or something else from the concession stand after the game?,” he asks. A cooler with three bottles of water are iced down and ready when we enter the locker room.
 
Those are niceties. What follows next is a cool thing, something you wouldn’t consider, something that makes me think referees bring something good to those types of communities, and unexpected.
 
Two middle school boys greet me with HUGE smiles as I head back to the court to watch the JV game. They nudge each other, clearly enthralled to see the BIG town referee coming to their gym.
 
“Where ya from?,” one asks excitedly.
 
“Outside Milwaukee,” I respond.
 
One nudges the other, “I told ya.”
 
“What’s it like there?,” he asks.
 
I ponder this one. What do you tell a kid this age about your own community, which though bigger and having more services and up-to-date businesses, doesn’t differ in basic structure from his small town?
 
I defer the question and talk about some of the games I’ve reffed that year, what the players were like – size, speed, intensity of the games. They listen, rapt, eyes large.
 
They poke each other repeatedly, giggling and posing other questions one wants the other to ask me. It’s amusing watching and listening to them as I realize they don’t get this type of opportunity often. It really is a big deal for them to chat with me.

And, during this interaction, I much more fully recognize the nature of being an ambassador. Everywhere you go, you have the opportunity to touch people. You can make that experience positive or negative. As a basketball official (and human), I choose the positive path, and I extol to these two young boys the joys of officiating, how you get to travel and see new places. I encourage them to referee basketball. They nod their heads as I get up and walk to the locker to change into my uniform. I hope to see them one day on the court with a whistle.

​Wouldn’t it be great if there was no garbage on the side of the road? Man. Nirvana. See grass, trees and bushes the way they are supposed to be seen: not encased in plastic or surrounded by Styrofoam cups and beer cans.
 
And, you know what? The crap overloading the sides of our roads across the United States shouldn’t be the norm. It should be the exception.
 
When I travel by car long distances, I catalogue in my head the level of the garbage coating our raw environment. It helps me draw distinctions and make sense of the type of people who live in certain areas of the country. An imperfect measurement of life quality, no question, nonetheless….
 
Recently returning from a trip that started in Wisconsin and ended in Texas, I zoned in with my observaton gauge to determine how each state fared on a scale that rated which one has drivers that throws more trash out the window – a scale that determines to me how much people care about where they live. It didn’t turn out the way I thought it would.
 
On the trip, I covered Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. For you, what state do you think had the most garbage? And which had the least?
 
Using my intense visual observation skills, the state with the least garbage (ranked #1) to the one with the MOST garbage (ranked #5): 1) Missouri, 2) Wisconsin, 3) Illinois, 4) Oklahoma, 5) Texas.
 
You can argue about any of those choices. Part of the ranking is the roads I drove and maybe certain ones are cleaned more regularly by highway crews than others, but it was pretty much all interstate, so  that kinda goes out the window.
 
No question that wind plays a factor. Flatter areas allow the wind to whip more waste products longer distances, particularly if there are no trees or shrub growth to block the projectiles. That theory implies Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas would be the worst, which turned out to be the case.
 
The inherent cultures of each state come into play in the rankings, IMO. Which state has a better conservation ethic? Which one could care less about keeping their land pristine? Again, IMO, I feel like Wisconsin has the best land ethic, protecting its resources. Not sure how I would rank the other states. But, Wisconsin was below Missouri in my rankings.
 
How well funded state cleanup crews are is certainly another variable. As is volunteer groups that get out and regularly do pickups, which seem to be increasingly necessary with each passing year, as flaying plastic materials launch across our national landscape.
 
I sang “America the Beautiful” to myself on the drive, changing the lyrics to more accurately reflect our country, which is definitely NOT “America the Beautiful” these days when you look around and open your eyes. We can easily do much better. It’s on the shoulders of all of us to make a difference.

Next time you take a long drive, look out the window and make your own assessment. Take photos of the egregious spots. Think about what your part is in keeping our country beautiful. How does your state rank?