Fantasy That You Can Bank On

"Life is just a fantasy, can you live this fantasy life?"

-Aldo Nova

People love to fantasize. With billions of people hugging the Earth's flaky crust, there are many reasons for this dreamy passion: total boredom, hyperactive imaginations, disappointment with the meandering course of their own lives or the failures of our collective societies, lack of connectivity to the outside world, or even the natural urge to compete.

Writer Daniel Okrent is credited with inventing the genre of fantasy sports when he developed what he dubbed "Rotisserie League Baseball" nearly 30 years ago. And while Okrent was the first to actually create and market a game for the masses, pimply-faced ball fans had forever devised fantastic scenarios and statistical contests. Amongst countless other less-famous afflictees, Jack Kerouac was known to have devised his own fantasy league as a youngster in Massachusetts. There is no word on whether his early schemings were written on a scroll, or included chapters or paragraphs. 

Now, in the Instant Age, the sports fan is inundated with opportunities to publicly fantasize. What was once a darkened basement activity has become mainstream, widely accepted as a way to socialize, to belong. The fantasy genre has grown to be an unwieldy behemoth, growing like a pixilated Chia Pet on steroids. Because of the sheer fun of guessing an outcome, of mixing up rosters of players who are not otherwise on the same teams, of hazarding a wad of dough on a singular notion, fantasy sports have become nearly as popular as the real ones that they shadow.

Now all of the sporting world can play these rainy day games. Professional football, baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, golf, NASCAR, bass fishing - they all have massively popular fantasy games with millions of devoted fanatics. Fantasy football alone has a net drain on our national economy to the tune of billions of lost dollars due to workers who fantasize on their company's dime.

The integrity of the sports themselves, the real sports that is, have been challenged with new generations of "fans" who care not for the outcome of the teams that they should know and love, but for a disparate group of wealthy athletes who hold the key to temporary, smack-talking glory and enough new money, for the winners, to splurge on a new gutter system or tickets to the Cheech and Chong Reunion Tour. Come playoff time, most fantasy owners are a conflicted mess, an unruly band of traitors and disloyal capitalists.

It goes deeper, the spider hole widens. Down in that twisted web, sub-genres of fantasy have sprouted up. There are fantasy games of fantasy games - a weird mind-twisting practice in which teams are made up of players who never even lived at the same time, let alone played together. Somewhere, sitting in a pile of digital weeds on a corporate server farm, a tiny brain hums and zips, simulating results from gigaflops of statistical data, and spits out an update on the potential future of the past, which enriches some lucky synthesizer of sporty hope in greater Old Snowmass, Colorado. It's really wicked, when you think about it. 

When the popularity of fantasy sports jumped the rails of the average sports fan and lurched off into the stinted Chunnel's of broadband success, the game that was originally (organically one might even surmise) about sports and the happenstance chance of statistics has morphed into popularity contests and celebrity gossip. The "dead pool" has gone interactive. With Wal-Mart and Target's cheap stash of Chinese plastics all but burying the Tupperware party circuit, a vacuum has been created in the competitive world of neighborhood social gatherings.

There are now fantasy "leagues" for the soaps, for stock markets, red-carpet fashion and Congress, of all things. I must assume, without any way of confirming my hypothesis that won't end up with me being fired or arrested or both, that there exists somewhere on that broad plain of information a subterranean cave where Fantasy Fantasy is played. You know, that kind of Fantasy - the lurid, contortionisticly nude kind. The mind reels and revolts with the statistical possibilities. Back into the basement you go, Fantasites. But before you go, don't forget to name a starting fluffer. 

Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a converted dentist's chair in his Marina, Calif. garage, where he tinkers with game-changing inventions, including his patented Wireless Toilet.