Laboring with a fantasy

     I know that New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day is supposed to be the time or making resolutions, promises of what we would like to do for the coming year, but I am wondering if Labor Day isn’t the day where I start to wonder if it isn’t time to start letting things go.
See, tonight in the umpteenth annual Uncle Jimmy’s Fantasy Football League draft.  I can’t begin to tell you when the league first kicked off, though I did find paperwork from when I was the league’s commissioner back in 2006 the other day, and the league was around well before that, I was the second commissioner of the league (we are now on our third) and I don’t know, I just can’t get geared up for it this year.

     In the past I would have spent a week, if not more, preparing just for this draft.  Sure, I might get involved with another league or two, but the one league I really wanted to win each year was this one. Sure, some years there were cash prizes, some years we just played for bragging rights, but the focus was always the same.  Whether the early years of the draft, when we used to sit around Uncle Jimmy’s, drinking beer, eating pizza and wings and talking smack on each other’s picks, or later on when everyone started moving away and the draft day event was gone, everyone instead would meet up on Yahoo to make their selections, stretching the league from just the confines of Pittsburgh, to as far south as Atlanta, Georgia and as far north as Anchorage, Alaska, the league always meant a little something to me.  So I would run out and buy a couple of fantasy guides, spend hours just checking out player rankings and preseason injuries on ESPN or CBS Sports, the motivation was always there.

     Now, not so much.  Maybe it is just the distance, I am just feeling like I am growing apart from that circle of friends, maybe it is just time, another step in saying it is time to put away the toys of youth and finally start growing up, I really don’t know.  I just know that the excitement that would normally be there for me isn’t this year, truth be told it started fading last year.  The desire to follow each and every NFL game, in hopes that I might find the one player to give me a competitive advantage; I just don’t have the energy anymore.  Sure, I might watch highlights of some of the games, I am still a sports fan after all, but the dissecting of individual performances on all of the teams, the nonstop scanning of rosters to see who I might be able to swing a trade with, I am starting to think I can do without it.

    I know I used to post my draft on here (well on my other blog pages, but you get the idea), and I would spend hours putting together the blog entry, trying to justify to everyone else why I chose so and so at a given time, what my thinking was going in, and at the end of the season, a recap of the draft itself and how I think I did, not just from a win-loss perspective (though that is how success is measured in fantasy football), but how each person performed in relation to where I selected them.   I may still do that, I haven’t decided yet, but I would be lying if I said I was going into this year’s draft with the same energy and enthusiasm that I brought to the table previous years.

     In other news, as you know, it was Labor Day, which means I labored.  Not that I labored hard mind you, but I labored nonetheless.  Labor Day is possibly the worst actual holiday on the calendar at Smithfield News, because it pretty much kills business.  Sure, we have the Labor Day parade that goes right in front of the store, but as far as parades go, if parades were motion pictures then something like the St Patrick’s Day parade would be along the lines of “Titanic” (sidewalks crammed with people, 5 and 6 deep along the entire parade route) whereas Labor Day would be akin to “Earnest Goes to Camp”.  I would not be lying to you by saying there were maybe 50 or so people watching along the parade route, at least the part of the route I can see (3 blocks or so).  At one point I was outside talking to my partner in crime at work, Sammy, and I said, “These people could use some help from the people who organize the Pridefest Parade.  Imagine Gay Teamsters Local 427, marching down the street, chanting “we’re here, we’re queer, we get paid for it!!!””  Instead we were subjected to the likes of the “Letter Carriers Union”, marching down the street in not so straight lines (so much for organized labor).  On the plus side though, it is probably the fastest I have ever seen postal workers actually move.

     The only thing that the Labor Day Parade does, at least for us at work, is kill business.  Street closures kill our normal traffic flow into and out of the store, meaning I have to find things to do.  Luckily Ed came in today, he is always good for making things up for me to do, today I got to play office secretary, writing two different letters for people, confirming that they are in fact employed by our company, then working on fixing the dairy prices and reorganizing the 5 extra coolers Ed had brought in on Friday.  No matter how busy or slow we are it seems there are always plenty of things for the likes of me to be doing.

     Well, I guess I better get to doing some research for tonight’s draft.  I have to make it look like I know what I am talking about after all.