Said Daniel Victor

I have a new companion in my bed.

Home for Thanksgiving, my mother arranged for my new bedfellow: A five-foot long body pillow of which, for some reason, she had extras. It is plain white, as body pillows do not get the luxury of pillow cases. Body pillows live beneath the sheets, so they need not fancy dress.

I had complained of consistent back pain, and my mother squared in on the fact that I can only fall asleep on my stomach. Google — the only voice I’d trust as much as my mother’s — confirmed that sleeping on your stomach is all sorts of bad for you.

It was time for a change, I decided. I’m going to train my body to fall asleep on my side and/or back, I decided.

This is an act of bold hubris coming from a man who can’t fall asleep on buses or airplanes, struggles badly when trying to sleep on couches and can’t sleep normally without going through a four-position progression that sends my arms and legs flailing across my full-size bed. The rare occasions in which another person joins me in bed usually means I won’t be getting any real sleep that night, so much is my normal sleeping process disrupted.

For me to declare that my sleeping habits will change, I thought, is to declare that leopards will change their spots. But fuck it — I’m doing it.

I wouldn’t be so bold if it weren’t for juggling. Friends mocked me at the time, but the Juggling 4 Wellness class at Penn State gave me reason to believe I could accomplish seemingly crazy shit as long as I make the effort with a fuck-it-I’m-doing-it attitude. Every student entered the semester with the same thought: There’s no freaking way I’m going to be able to juggle. Some blamed it on a prior lack of eye-hand coordination, some like me had kinda-sorta tried before and failed miserably, and it just looked so dang complicated. But by the end of the semester, every last one of us were nailing ridiculous tricks and keeping a simple progression alive for as long as we wanted. I left the class feeling like I could accomplish a lot of crazy things as long as I started off by saying fuck-it to my doubts.

With that in my pocket, I attempted to sleep Thanksgiving night. I followed the instructions that my mother gave me: Put the lower end of the pillow between my knees with the lower leg straight and the upper leg curled in. I followed the instructions that my Google gave me: Hug the pillow up top, making sure to not raise my arms above my head. Luckily I had been out late drinking the night before, woke up early for a full day’s work, drove an hour and a half in the dark to my parents’ house and had a stomach full of tryptophan — so I had some help on the first night. I was able to fall asleep that night without once turning onto my stomach for the first time that I can remember.

I have succeeded in falling asleep in each successive night while laying on one of my sides, but I’ve still got a ways to go. It’s taken me longer each night to fall asleep. In moments of weakness — “I just want to get some sleep, god damn it” — I roll over onto my stomach and feel that blissful mental emptiness that I’m seeking, but I quickly jolt myself out of it so as to ween myself off its dependence.

And falling asleep is only part of the battle. I haven’t been able to sleep the whole way through any of the nights, and each position shift is a mental exercise I don’t want to deal with when I’m in that state. How do I mindlessly shift from my left side to my right side while hugging a five-foot body pillow? At least for now, it takes some serious coordination and adjustments.

That I’ve fallen asleep even once while on my side is a mark of true progress, and I’m committed to changing entirely. I will not be defeated.

There’s a door in my third-floor apartment that leads outside to what passes for my back patio. You could call it a back patio, but it’d be more accurate to say it’s a filthy, dangerous rooftop without much of a purpose.

It brushes against other apartments on each side, and the Second Street garage swallows up any view I might be able to otherwise enjoy. I’ve thought about setting up a table and chairs out there and having people over for a party, but then I realized it wouldn’t even take a drink or two to see at least one person fall to her death. It’s relegated to the occasional breath of fresh air, the cigarette break for those who need it, once even a waving spree to the kind folks leaving their cars in the garage.

Last night, Lanette needed a smoke. I joined her out on my shitty patio for the air.

Then she did something amazing.

She climbed.

I’ve lived here for 2.5 years, been out there dozens of times, and it never occurred to me that there was something to climb. But there was, and it was right there all along.

It wasn’t even difficult. She didn’t ask for permission, didn’t say where she was going, she just spotted it and climbed. She went up the slight slope just to the right of the door, and the jump onto my own roof was only about three or four feet high. She kicked herself up there, not giving a damn about the dirt on her pants. She made sure not to spill her beer.

There we saw an empty bottle of liquor aside a filthy blanket and pillow, an obvious indication that at some point a neighbor of mine made this same discovery and found it a beautiful place to spend a night.

Like a child on an urban jungle gym, she continued to climb. This time she got a running start and impressively leaped onto the next rooftop over, scaling a five-foot ledge to get there. I joined her, making sure not to spill my beer and not caring about the dirt on my work pants.

And this one was even more beautiful. I had never seen my street from above like this; I have one small bedroom window with a very narrow view, and I rarely make my way over to it. Now I had a level view of the treetops, a fantastic vista into the nearby city lights, and a fantastic gust of air. It was a perspective I never knew existed.

I later found it all to be powerfully symbolic. That someone could enter your space with a curious eye, get some dirt on your pants and introduce you to something pretty incredible that’s been right under your nose — that’s a wonderful thing. It occurred to me that it’s exactly the kind of person you need to surround yourself with.

I went back out there tonight, hoping to find inspiration for this post. I wanted to measure the walls, take in a fuller view of the city, experience that air again.

And I made it as far as the first leap when I saw the raccoon staring at me with its evil little beady eyes. This raccoon has been the bane of my past two weeks, twice hanging out outside my front door, once appearing right at my back door. This time, I found myself at his door.

Perhaps I’ll be able to carve out some symbolism in that one, too. I’m not sure where getting rabies fits into the picture.

As memorable as Friday’s championship parade was in Philadelphia, the lasting memory from the event comes from just three words.

In case you don’t want to watch, the beloved second baseman/legend Chase Utley began his speech by saying:

“World Champions.”

(Pause for applause.)

“World FUCKING Champions!”

While TV stations and the FCC fretted, everyone older than 10 rejoiced. My mouth and my eyes opened wide as I cheered. It got by far the loudest applause of the day.

He said exactly what we were all thinking, and no one could have imagined anyone would ever actually say it.

The appropriateness of the comment aside — I don’t much have an interest in debating the challenges of parenting, and I don’t much care how many Philadelphia-area 8-year-olds repeated the phrase in class the next day — I’m fascinated that he was able to so succinctly compact the breathless emotions of an entire city in just three words.

It said everything. It captured the can-you-believe-this-is-really-happening feeling better than any other three words could ever hope to.

It wasn’t, as the tsk-tskers of our language like to say, a crutch to compensate for an inadequate vocabulary. There isn’t a word out there that’d create the same, wonderful feeling he accomplished.

I love wordplay. I love finding the unexpected word that needles the consciousness.

Sometimes it takes the collision of social values to make that happen. When its not worn down from excessive and lazy use, profanity can be one of the most powerful weapons possible. That’s nothing to fear; it’s something to appreciate.

I am less than an hour away from what could be one of the most memorable nights of my life.

I am not an emotional wreck. I am not pacing, nor am I fighting to contain my glee. I’m just here, and that confuses the fuck out of me. Something ought to be happening.

For years I have wondered what this would be like. I simply had no idea, no basis of comparison.

Champions. Champions! For so long it has seemed such an unattainable word.

I was not yet conceived the last time a Philadelphia team won any kind of championship. Since birth I have invested far, far too much of my time and energy into rooting for all sorts of those losers. Losers of all stripes, losers of varying degree, yet losers all of them. The life lesson my Philadelphia fandom has taught me is to get your hopes up, sink everything of yourself into your passion, then watch it swiftly disappoint you in a violent way. Not such a great lesson.

So close now, I imagine what that moment will be. Will I scream? Will I cry? Will I stare blankly at the TV?

Will I be able to sleep tonight? Will I float on top of a cloud tomorrow? How long will that cloud remain? A day? A week? A year?

How will my life change? Does this open my eyes to new colors? Will I notice buildings I’ve never noticed before? Is there a new dimension, occupied by only those who have experienced a championship for their favored sports team?

When you base your entire identity on being a loser, what happens when you win? Do you disappear?

Less than an hour away, these questions baffle me. And the thought that they stand to be answered tonight, after years of watching the Phillies every night when I get home from work, after years of endlessly prowling over Phillies message boards and blogs and news articles, after years of this unreasonably abusive relationship — it just doesn’t compute. My brain — my soul? — hasn’t evolved far enough to process this.

I’m not totally ruling out spontaneous combustion here. Unlikely, yes, but so is the idea of the Phillies actually winning the World Series.