It’s Week 8 of the prison holiday season. It’s also Week 8 in the NFL. The two are really the same.
On all the big holidays like Christmas or 4th of July, we get a special meal and a gift bag. For the Super Bowl, we receive a small bag with soap, chips, cookies, and other sundries. Before the game, they pass out special sandwiches, with real turkey (!), cheese (!!), and fresh lettuce, tomatoes, & onions (!!!). It’s the second best meal of the year.
A whole underground economy arises during football season. There’s skins, squares, and fantasy leagues. This is my second year running my own league, but I’ve been playing over twice that long. I also play in another league. It’s enough to keep me occupied.
There’s no IBM Watson-AI projections, or automated lists of available players–you have to do your own research for everything. As commissioner, my responsibilities include typing up the weekly rosters; calculating the points from the newspaper box scores; and paying out the weekly points winners. By far the worst part is collecting the weekly buy-in. Every year there’s always one guy whose team hasn’t won yet, and is always behind on paying.
As you can imagine, it’s pretty competitive. We don’t have many things to do or anticipate. The money’s nice (if you win), but just looking forward to the weekend again makes the whole pursuit worthwhile. I went two years of day after day passing by undifferentiated. You need some reminders time is passing to keep a grip on sanity.
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I’m a benevolent commish. I’ll grant some leeway, but it’s a fine line. This is prison after all. Give an inch, they take a mile. Mistaking my kindness for weakness, etc. etc. all those cliches.
Things came to a head this past week. Dawg was always behind. I’d let home go two weeks before collecting. Earlier in the year, he didn’t pay for the week and then swore on his kids that he did. Knowing full well he didn’t, I let it pass. Maybe he’d been tunech’d out of his mind and actually thought he did. Fast forward a month later, he tries the same thing. At this point, there’s no confusion. He’s trying to get down. Plus, I know he’s got it.
Without any argument, I gave him back the coffee that was the buy in at the beginning of the year, and informed him of his expulsion from the league. He wasn’t too happy about it, just as his team started doing well. I’m blessed enough that a $10 loss isn’t devastating. (It didn’t even turn out to be that much, because he happened to win that week, which recouped most of the loss.)
I don’t make any money for running it, so that kind of shit is too much of a headache. I do this for fun, to bring people together in a place where every minor difference is a source of division. I won’t go so far as saying I’m a civil rights leader, but my fantasy league brings about some degree of racial harmony. If nothing else, fantasy is one of the best small talk topics for people that otherwise have nothing in common.
Easy Trouble 