The Muse's Corner
By the Philosopher of Arena Football, Paul Celmer
Now is the season of our discontent. Week 15 approaches -- and we are fully in the netherworld between the regular season and the playoffs. Weird things happen. Excellently serviceable quarterbacks get benched for no other reason that to protect them from injury. Teams that had been dead all season burst into a flame of hate for one week to consume the favorite and then are heard no more. The science of prognostication descends into a tale of casting bones in a dark corner, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
I gazed around my room. There was my trusty Commodore Vic-20, still glowing merrily after all the years of computational service it had given me. There was my, admittedly sometimes temperamental, 8-track tape player that contained all of the lectures of Professor Platistotle, my beloved mentor during the decade I spent studying at Wake Tech Community College. There was my wall of books, including the 30 volumes (and all supplements up to 1987) of the Oxford English Dictionary. Even surrounded as I was by all the tools that I ever could wish for to accurately make Fantasy Arenafootball picks, I was still once again thrown into the depths of despair. I of course sought out the Muse of the Raleigh Train Station.
"Fair Fortuna, how can we predict the victors in week 15?"
She looked deeply into my eyes, and then said: "Let me sing you the ancient 'Sonnet on a Fantasy's Analyst's Discovery of Blindness.'"
And to my amazement, she sang in the sweet strains of Miltonic iambic pentameter thusly:
"When I consider how my dark is spent
at noon removed by over-morbid stare
at icons cast in glass, yet charged with glare,
I morn untold the sable canvas, now rent:
Blest night! Unbound transcendent star-spun tent--
Upraised through realms of pregnant space,
I drafted breezy shadow's interface
And cast rough dice for vision's high ascent.
But now: A noxious gloss squeezing too bright
commands closed eyes to gaze at formless scenes:
I'm left to yearn for pentecostal sight.
So let blind men prate it's blacker than fright:
I know, for those who lose the gift of dreams,
Hell is a drowning flood of constant light."
So what is the Muse trying to tell us? The message seems clear: to not be blinded by the gaudy TV glare of what happens in the weeks just prior to the playoffs. And gamble if you must, but make it a noble gamble in which you seek the difficult darker truths if you wish the insight that will take you to your dream of drinking deep from your Fantasy league's champion's cup.
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