When you’re spending time with Retireds, you’d best be ready to spend some time on the links.

I’ve been in Palm Desert now for a week, waiting on the second weekend of Coachella to begin. Golf is something of a Number One pastime among old residents and vacationers down here. With over 140 courses to choose from in this valley of 400,000 people, you’d go broke before you tried even a reasonable amount of the selection.

As I discussed earlier this week, there isn’t a fuck of a lot to do in this beautiful little Californian valley. My week here has been full of sitting in the sun increasing my likelihood of developing skin cancer, walking around in the desert looking for the cremation location of Gram Parsons and drinking dirt cheap Budweiser. I also played a little golf.

We started with some putting practice on an 18-hole “putting course” that is popular among the olds in this gated community. Far from improving one’s putting game, it is more of an elaborate and “mature” round of mini-golf (minus the awesome obstacles) for folks to spend an hour puttering around while sipping thermoses of booze. Not a bad reintroduction to the game.

Now, I’m not a complete stranger to golf. I spent a fair amount of time on courses as a kid, though mostly for the sake of smoking hash and cruising around in a golf cart. While I understand the rules, and can connect on enough of my shots to not feel completely helpless out on the fairway or the green, I’ve never really taken to the sport.

Perhaps it’s the culture of golf that I’ve never understood. I’ve always identified more closely with Carl Spackler than Ty Webb. And the whole dress code thing just grinds my gears.

Most golf courses adhere to a strict dress code that renders most players into sunburnt, plaid- and pastel-painted clones of one another. The one I played yesterday was no exception. My cut-off jean shorts and “sun’s out, guns out” philosophy were not welcome. So old John-Boy borrowed me a set of duds, so as not to attract unwanted attention as we snuck our way onto the third hole.

We played an enjoyable nine holes, free from other golfers, as we chose the latter part of the afternoon to hit the links. By the end of our round, I could certainly understand the allure of the game. Each hole presents a challenge, which the player is to overcome through a combination of skill, strategy and dumb luck. When all three combine for a well-executed shot, there is a thrill not unlike the quick surge of adrenaline you get from snorting a well-mixed chemical cocktail straight into your brain.

What I can’t wrap my brain around is the price tag that goes along with the sport. Some of these courses charge into the hundreds for a round, while even the most affordable still takes a chunk out of your pocket money, and that’s not including the costs of a set of clubs, a cart rental, or booze. As enjoyable as smashing the old ball around a well manicured stretch of a manufactured environment can be, it will always remain an elite pastime. And as such, I’m priced out of enjoying it.

Then again, my priorities could shift as my mental and physical capacity deteriorates at an exponential rate over the coming years. Maybe it won’t make much sense to drop a bunch of dough to stand in a blazing-hot field to watch a bunch of famous fucks prance about on stage as a form of “entertainment.” I’ll have to keep you posted on how that works out for me, this time around.

Sheldon Birnie is in California investigating the habits of elderly expat Canadians and Coachella attendees. While he waits for the second weekend of Coachella to begin, he has embedded himself with his parents in a gated retirement community to explore the rituals their kind enjoys, including expensive golf and ludicrously cheap alcohol. For more in this series, see the tag “America the beautiful.”