Captain's Chronicles: Wasting Time in Fantasy Land

My wife came up to me a couple nights ago with a precarious grin on her face and the television remote firmly in her hand. She bashfully informed me that she has a crush on Adam Levine and proceeded to sort of giggle like a maturing school girl thumbing through a Tiger Beat.

For those people part of the unhip brethren which I proudly hold a membership card, Adam Levine is the lead singer of Maroon 5 and a current "coach" on NBC's The Voice.  I'm secure enough in my masculinity to admit that he is a decent looking fellow. 

While it is always a little unnerving when you hear your significant other say they find someone else attractive, it would be ludicrous to think that I don’t partake in fantasy worlds of my own.  In fact, as Wendy's drool short-circuited the remote during every one of Levine's scenes, I was fixated to my laptop screen googling my upcoming match-ups in fantasy baseball.

Don't get me wrong. My fantasies don't only consist of sports players scoring points for me in certain categories.  Actually, as I was writing this, I was caught watching women's tennis and Wendy had to tell me to control the river flowing out of MY mouth as I stared at those short, scandalous tennis skirts.

Fantasies are the spices that make the mundane meal served by everyday life flavorful. Everyone has a dream of something or someone that they would love to do, whether it is being the owner of a professional team or absolutely owning Megan Fox.

As ESPN writer Bill Simmons once said, (and I'm paraphrasing) the Internet was created for two things...porn and fantasy sports.  Men's fantasies are readily available everywhere online these days. If guys aren't careful, the Internet will cast an unbreakable daze upon them like someone consuming the flowers of the Lotus Eaters (or the peaches in this week's True Blood that was obviously stolen from Homer).

Sexual or not, fantasies make the world go round. And if you are one of those people that claim you don’t have fantasies, then you are obviously some sort of computer that needs to be unplugged from the grid. 

On Conan a few nights ago the fantasies of my wife and I practically collided.  The guests slated that night were panty-dropper himself Adam Levine and a character from FX’s highly acclaimed fantasy football based series The League. 

Although Wendy missed the episode, both entertainers did their jobs of perfectly satisfying their followers’ fantasies .  Levine made every girl in the audience feel like they were just mentally touched by the singer, while Nick Kroll (Ruxin for The League followers) made everyone laugh, portraying fantasy sports as an OK, albeit nerdy, pastime that funny-ass people play.

At the end of the day, Wendy will never hook with Adam Levine and Ill probably never own a real baseball team or know the true meaning of “being with Megan Fox”.  But, as long as we realize where the exit door is, there is always time to waste in the land known as Fantasy.