It was a tough game for the Philadelphia Eagles today. They were even through the first quarter as neither they or the Dallas Cowboys scored. Then in the second quarter after the Cowboys gained their first touchdown the Eagles immediately returned it. An eye for an eye it seemed. And right after that it seemed the Eagles caught an interception very near the Cowboy’s goal line and for that instant things looked good for Philadelphia. Troy had to continue the details of this game as he reported back to his brother and cousin who had been out on a secluded fishing trip and missed a whole day of football.

Troy was a huge Eagle’s fan and though he lived in a small town upstate of Philadelphia, he frequently makes the trip to attend a game at the Lincoln Financial Field, though he continues to refer to it as Veteran’s Stadium as that was the name of the field when his grandfather took him to his first game there in 1979. It remained Veteran’s Stadium until 2003 and though it wasn’t the original stadium name, it was what it was called for almost all of Troy’s life. And even some of the staff at the hotel Philadelphia where he would stay called it the Stadium.

Fortunately his cousin and brother had already heard that the Eagles did not win the playoff game before they encountered Troy so he didn’t have to deliver the whole blow. And that refers to Troy’s passion for the team and the difficulty he would have had proclaiming the loss, not the reaction felt by his audience who were oddly indifferent to the game’s outcome. They were interested in the details of how the score became so lopsided and Troy had to continue on with the devastating second quarter, during which the Cowboys scored a total of 27 points. The second half of the game was not as gruesome as the first and neither team scored much. Ultimately, the final score was Dallas 34 and the Eagles 14. It wasn’t a shut out, or as bad as last week, but it was still bad. Troy’s cousin and his brother decided they needed to take him out that night. It was good for Troy, but didn’t help his precious Eagles much.

New York City gave me a cure for insomnia, but perhaps only because it also made me an insomniac.  The first months that I lived here, I did not sleep.  I had just moved from a small town in Montana, and I was ready for anything.  The rugged life I knew was sufficient preparation for what was ahead, this I felt in my gut.  To be honest, it was excellent preparation for many of the mean surprises the city has in store, but in no way could have prepared me for the war with my own head.  Not a war in a dramatic sense, because no hard reason could have helped me come to terms with the fact that deep down, I am totally neurotic.  This means, of course, that I belong here, much as this may hurt my credibility in the cowboy poetry circuit.

I had not slept in two months.  Aside from occasional moments of dropping off for a few minutes in the subway, or waiting for a friend in a park, or sometimes while I was giving readings.  It helps to be someone who lives at variance, because you can get away with peculiar behaviors.  The only time I did sleep through a night was when I was visiting an out of town friend at a Manhattan business hotel, where the sounds of the city were far away, and I dreamed of crickets.  And I smelled sage and mesquite.  I had a friend who also worked the poetry circuit, and she had a side business in homeopathy, and she would prescribe my placing small white beads under the tongue.  She also recommended hot baths where I could be away from it all.

The one time I decided to try taking her advice, I found myself lying in a bathtub at 11pm, my head half-submerged so my ears were under water.  I tried to think of an open field, but instead came to realize that I was in a very crowded city, in a very crowded neighborhood, in a very small apartment, in a small room in a small apartment, and at that point I lost my last thread of sanity.  It was at that moment that I realized that homeopathic cures wouldn’t help my condition, because I had just become a New Yorker, and I didn’t want a cure for that.