In my efforts to get a little more ‘loosey goosey’ with the way this blog works I’ve stayed away from formalized days for certain ideas. No Waiver Wednesday, in other words. No fantasy football at all, in fact. I started to feel like the fantasy aspect of the game was changing my relationship with the game. I recognized that I was routing for statistics and individual achievements, often to the detriment of the team I enjoyed watching. Imagine watching your favorite team and hoping beyond hope that someone scores on them. No, that sucks. However, that is the conundrum of fantasy, because you are pretending to be a GM and managing players outside of the actual context of their responsibility.
This is not a knock on fantasy football. I enjoyed it for many years. Now I am taking time off. Instead I am going to enjoy the game in the classic sense. For me that means watching two games at once while I play Madden on a 3rd monitor. Yeah, that’s happening. Happening August 18th, actually.
In the meanwhile I do love the hype and buildup of the preseason and the training camps. I treat these things as important to the sport as the game itself. Pre-season camp is where bonds are made and rookies show out and under performing vets have a chance to show that they still have what it takes to be in the show. That kind of drama doesn’t often translate outside of football. There is no training camp for office work or even teaching. The ability to touch that tension gives me access to more story and a wider breadth of what I understand. Given my brief relationship with collegiate athletics I completely understand a great number of the tensions and storylines and needs and wants, etc. In the end, that understanding adds to my enjoyment and builds up more firewood for story.
Turns out everything in my life boils down to story. Even the characters in the Madden fantasy are more than just code. They too have imaginary lives and tensions and familial relationships and needs…
Basically what I’m revealing here is that I am a big weird nerd. Or maybe a geek. I took a quiz recently, and it said I am fairy normal which indicates being geek or nerd (or dork) is somehow abnormal. Fuck that quiz.