A Study in Fantasy

I’ve been studying lately. I didn’t feel like studying, and I was going to blow it off, like I did in college, or at the very least, wait until after Late Night with David Letterman was over and then start studying, and after an hour or so, decide it would be better if I went to bed, since any knowledge I might gain by studying that late would be worthless if I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. I did that in college, too. As you can see, I was a multi-faceted studier back then. Nowadays, when I do get myself to study, my strategy is to skim through material hoping something sticks, similar to the way a blue whale scoops up euphausiids for a scrumptious dinner of raw euphausiids. If you looked at my brain, you would recognize that it looks very similar to the baleen plates that equip a humpback whale’s mouth. Or maybe it’s similar to the plate heat exchangers in a hydraulic oil cooling system. I always confuse whales’ mouths and hydraulic oil cooling systems. Then they ask me to back up and say it slower.

Speaking of euphausiids, I like words that have two i’s in a row. Like skiing, obiism, piing and The Godfather II. You don’t see that much in words. Not in English, anyway. It is ironic that most of us have two eyes in a row on our faces that we use to read words, including words with two i’s. You would think there would be more instances of that occurring in our language. Maybe the language writers didn’t want to be redundant. The lower case i is probably my favorite letter to write. Sometimes, when I’m writing a letter to an ex-lover or taking down a recipe or preparing an injunction, I will leave all the i’s undotted until I have finished. Then I will go on a crazy dotting spree and dot them all in one fell swoop. Sometimes it gets out of hand and I dot other things like the dogs, sandwiches or other dots. There is nothing more demonstrative than a dotted dot. I’ll even dot myself sometimes, which helps explain the enormous amount of freckles I have. And the gonorrhea.



I’ve been studying this week for fantasy football. I’m in four leagues. The first draft is this Saturday. If you don’t know about fantasy football and what a draft is, don’t bother looking it up or asking anybody about it. Save yourself from the geekitude. I wasn’t going to study this year, as I haven’t studied much in the past few years. My interest in fantasy football is waning. I mean, I still enjoy it – especially the drafts. The drafts are like bachelor parties, without strippers. Unless, of course, we decide to get strippers. And I still enjoy playing each week and watching the games on Sunday, but not enough to exert too much energy to the process. Which is why I wasn’t going to study.

So I planned to wing it this year, relying on a free cheat sheet downloaded from the Internet to help me decide which players to take for my teams. Then, earlier this week, I happened to have Sports Center on in the background while I was pruning my sasanquas, and I heard them say the name Marshawn Lynch. I realized I had no idea who he was. So I looked him up on the Internet and discovered he was the third string punter for the Saskatchewan Roughriders*, which is a vital piece of information for us fantasy football enthusiasts. Then I thought, “I wonder how many other players there are that I don’t know about.” Forty-seven, as it turned out. Well, forty-seven players who might have fantasy football impact this year, anyway. There are countless lineman nobody cares about. I then realized there would be no way to remember forty-seven players, so I decided to sleep during most of my study sessions. But that still counts for studying.

I used to be much more into fantasy football, especially with the draft preparation process. I would buy magazines as soon as they were published at the end of May, read them, highlight them, and update them with crayons when I learned new information. I would listen to sports radio 24 hours a day, waiting for snippets of information that would help me destroy my competition. I would trade my urine to NFL players for drug testing in exchange for inside information. In fact, Edgerrin James was declared Physically Unable to Perform after submitting my urine in a drug test in 1999 (not that Edgerrin was trying to hide any illegal drug usage – he just doesn’t like other people touching his pee). They made him do fifty push ups, which the NFL thought was impossible for him to do based on the physical health of my urine, to get out of it.

Something has caused my interest in fantasy football to dwindle over the years. Am I more mature now? Do I have more sophisticated interests in life? Do I now realize the insipidity of such ventures? Have I grown tired of winning all of the time? The answers to these questions are “not even close”, “does Muppet porn count?”, “what does insipidity mean?”, and “you have to win in order for that to happen”. The real cause is divorce.

I have correlated my diminishing will to make an effort in fantasy football to my state of being divorced. When I was married, preparing for fantasy football was a diversion to the marriage (not necessarily a diversion to the wife, since she was my fantasy football partner for a couple of seasons). Speaking of the ex-wife, I went to her birthday party over the weekend. She has hit an age milestone – I think she’s 30. I wasn’t sure what to get for her as a gift. The first thing that came to mind was shoes. Nobody ever buys people shoes for their birthday. So, I bought her shoes – a pair of casual, fashionable Sketchers. I’m not sure if she wears those types of shoes, but she better start. Actually, I’m guessing she’ll return them (gift receipt included), but it did produce a collective laugh throughout the party, which was my primary objective, and even a “You’re the best ex-husband ever” comment from one of her friends (yes, I got her number). Add to that the “The Lord is our greatest physician…” sympathy card I gave her serving as a birthday card (I wrote Happy Birthday on the inside with an eyebrow pencil) , which included a dollar and a free beer token from one of my local bars that she never goes to, and I’d have to say that I was the hit of the gift giving portion of the party. During the rest of the party I sat by the bar and looked cool, which wasn’t easy to do because I was a little gassy.

Without the pressure to divert from the shackles of married life, I have no impetus driving me to immerse myself into flawed speculation of gridiron future events. In other words, I don’t feel like reading about the possibility of Devin Hester becoming the next Reggie Bush. Now that I think of it, most of the other guys in my leagues are married, so they’ve been studying all summer. There is no way I can compete with that. Maybe I should remarry. Naaaaaah! Time to take another study session and get some rest. It’s going to be a long season.













* I know he’s not actually a third string punter in the Canadian football league, but just in case any of my fantasy football adversaries read this, I don’t want them knowing I plan on drafting Lynch in the sixth round**










** I don’t know what I’m worried about - like any of those assholes actually read anything except football magazines and sports web sites.***











*** Most of them are still waiting to feel their first boob, whereas I’m waiting on feeling my sixth.****











**** What do feeling boobs have to do with fantasy football?*****











***** That’s why we have to hire strippers for the fantasy football drafts.