A decade under the influence.

The two'by'two photo shows a kid with raggedy'long hair and a glazed near'drunken look in his eyes, who has no hint of what he's in for. Ten pages later the fresh passport gets its inaugural stamp as it leaves North America for the first time, to London via JFK. Even with no true knowledge of the sport, I'm aware that there's a major soccer tournament going on that summer and I'm looking forward to cheering England on from London pubs packed with fans. It's not until I land and see the massive headlines that I realize a horrendously'taken penalty kick by David Beckham has seen England go crashing out of Euro 2004. The only sliver of the games I see is a bore of a final between Greece and Portugal, the lack of action enough to reinforce all the negative American stereotypes about soccer. But the lasting legacy of the event is that the world is introduced to new superstars Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, and at the same time I'm introduced to the world. It's that summer I buy my first legal drinks, at 20 on Tottenham Court Road in London, and then a month later in Huntington Beach, California, minutes after the midnight I turn 21. It's that summer I first see something beyond America and Canada- even if it's merely a toe in the safe'harbored waters of England.

Two Junes later I'm up early to beat the gym rush in Orange County, already 10 minutes into a turn on the elliptical when Costa Rica and Germany kick off, beginning World Cup 2006, an event I didn't even realize had been approaching. But from the flag'clutching team entrances, most of the other necks around me craned up at the hanging television screens as well. Timid cheers from the majority as Germany scored after just 6 minutes. Groans from those same people and a yelling vocal minority as Costa Rica answered back after 6 minutes more. Germany taking the lead again after another 5. Three goals in seventeen minutes and the hook was in me. Forever.

I devoured the rest of the tournament. McBride's bloodied cheekbone from DeRossi's elbow (that I still haven't forgiven the Italian for). Ronaldo knocking his teammate Rooney, and all of England, out on penalties, Zidane's headbutt and his shamed walk off the pitch and out of the sport forever, Italy raising the trophy just a half hour later as champions. From there I began to follow my favorite US players, all of whom played for the same small club in London, Fulham FC.

My remaining years in Los Angeles, the addiction became something to travel for, near and abroad. All the trips down the 405 to Carson for the LA Galaxy, starting with Beckham's first game to the seasons of spending far too much on field'side tickets with my friend Jared. And when it looked as though Fulham was so terrible that they would be relegated, dropped to an inferior league in England's football hierarchy, I flew from Los Angeles to London for a long weekend, determined to see them play a match at their home stadium at least once in the top tier. It was London again, me somewhat more knowledgeable this time about the sport and the city itself, but still a total novice when it came to travel. Soccer was the motivation for the trip, but not the totality. It was Fulham that catalyzed my journey, but it's one I remember for getting to sit in the House of Commons during a Parliamentary debate, for flea markets by the Thames and an absurdly cramped Couchsurfing experience. And conversations over endless pints with my friend Jenn who came with me and my other ones I caught up with there. Being back in London after 4 years and seeing Rooney and Ronaldo play together in for Manchester United in person just gave the trip its symmetry.

A year and a half later, when I used my passport once again, it was on a daily basis. For 19 weeks that fall and winter of 2009, I memorized its number like a second identity, its blue and red pages rarely leaving my pocket. My four and a half months of backpacking started in Russia and next took me to Estonia, where I watched the Premier League season kick off in a packed Tallinn bar, with newly'met friends, including an Everton Toffee from Melbourne and a Liverpool Red from West Virginia- Dave and Jonny. Their hometowns separated by ten thousand miles, and their allegiances by only a hundred'acre park in the same city of Liverpool. Weeks later it was a seeing an unforgettable 4-3 Manchester derby from the stands at the "Theatre of Dreams." I started checking off the iconic stadiums with the same diligence as Europe's great cathedrals. Old Trafford, the Camp Nou, San Siro.

The list of how football intertwines with my backpacking is exhaustive, and that's only a sliver. Soccer has followed me on my travels both due to my love for the game, and its unique place in world conversation. Its all'pervasiveness makes it perhaps my easiest entrance into a Venn diagram with strangers on the road, akin to discussing travels with strangers when back home. When we backpackers discuss our journeys and are getting tuned out by others, what we're really discussing is self-discovery, introspection, self-awareness. Perspective. And when we're discussing football, we're discussing goals and golazos but also legacy, rebellion, historical context. Why FC Barcelona's motto is Més Que un Club, calling back to the days when its supporter stands were the only venue where the people could voice anti-Franco chants without repercussion. Where we were when Landon scored in the 91st minute against Algeria, to send the US into the group stage in South Africa. Our communal eruptions of celebration, and the instantaneous kinship when we recognize our team's badge on someone else's breast. Its corner flags provide tentpoles, allowing us a venue to discuss why we love the things that we love.

This decade of speedballing, of having my three chief narcotics of soccer, traveling, and alcohol coalesce into one, reached its triple milestone this summer of 2014. The same summer the world's largest tournament, the World Cup, came back to football's spiritual home of Brazil. I wish I could say it was a lifelong dream to attend the Cup, but that would be a lie. When it came to the States in '94, my father asked the 11 year'old I used to be if he wanted to attend one of the LA games at the Rose Bowl, and the little shit thought only briefly before giving a negative shrug. That moment, the 3 seconds of my indecision and juvenile thought process, is one of the more complex regrets of my life. The untaken Yes would have meant attending the World Cup with my father, and given me a few hours, like many afternoons of then, that grows more potent in retrospect. Loves and admirations both intrinsic and intentional. A pinot memory that aged into something priceless much later, even if I could never appreciate it remotely at the time. But the well'bent No I've folded over mentally in the two decades since I spoke it is what set up this trip. The decision that became my obsession, to attend the World Cup in Brazil. For my experience of the event to be not a fogged recollection from preadolescence, but made as a world'weathered adult. Eyes and arms and heart and passport wide'open to a new experience on a barely'met continent. 

Eight years of longing and three years of saving delivered me to Brazil in June, along with my one of my oldest friends, Derek. Like Jenn joining on the Fulham trip, my crazy just contagious enough to recruit a traveling companion. Our World Cup experience would be one game at football's Vatican, our Hajj to Rio's Maracanã, followed by one United States game, so that our cheers could hail from our hearts as well as our lungs. And so we spent seven days at the world's greatest tournament; one where, unlike the Olympics, everyone is watching the same exact game, the many'practiced leg whips and deft, improvised genius applied to the same lone ball in unison.

The cheap but true answer is that it was everything I wanted. Rio was the biggest party I've been to in my life, with an energy and happiness so pure that it ignored language, homeland, one's innate timidity. We Americans screamed deliriously on Brazilian sand for an Argentinian striker's injury'time curler past an Iranian keeper. Messi delivering his distinct magic yet again. We joined in with the Belgians, and local Brazilians, in cheering on the Red Devils' flair against an unimaginative Russian squad's mundane plodding. If there was a complaint of the trip in recapping it to friends after I returned, it was that I didn't feel like I managed to see Brazil, but rather that I'd been to a country that was hosting the World Cup, which just happened to be Brazil. But such complete surrender, a total shunning of anything of the world outside the tournament festivities, is in itself something only Brazil could achieve. A country used to indulging in its passions, rallying and recruiting for its most central one of all.

Coming back from the Kentucky Derby two years ago, I overheard a group of friends at an airport gate near my mine discussing going en masse to the Cup as their next shared adventure.  A group of strangers instantly recognizable in that they were almost identical to the one I had just left. We six friends that had reconnected at the Derby, a mixture of age and gender, united by a thirst for experience. Part eavesdropping, part savoring the last of that trip's sensory, I listened in. "If we're gonna do it, it has to be Brazil. After that it's Russia... and then what, Qatar? You think we're gonna be in our late 30s and be like, Hey we should go to fucking Qatar?!" And I knew exactly how they felt. It had to be Brazil. 

Two years and seven weeks later, Derek and I shuffled with the communal motion of a packed crowd toward a subway station in outer Recife, the one closest to the Arena Pernambuco, where Germany had just defeated the United States, 1-0. We thousands, victors and losers, all left ecstatic. The result we'd just watched ensuring that both nations were moving on to the Cup's knockout stages next week. In 18 hours, we would be at the airport heading back above the equator, ending our time at the World Cup. In those last hundred yards before we reached the turnstiles and the trains taking us farther away from this moment, screaming children pressed up against the fences lining the way to the station. They screamed at us like we were rockstars, clamoring with the same furor as though we'd earned the jerseys we wore, rather than purchased them. They asked for pieces of memorabilia from us as their souvenirs; the minority calling for the absurd such as jerseys, but most of them for simple buttons, flags, bandannas. Some craned out arms and palms and hopeful smiles, content with just our touch. Brief high'fives. The children were mostly under the age of 10, the youth of the distant suburbs of a third-tier town in a developing nation, one criticized for its crime and its economic polarity. In the months since I saw them, they've lingered as part of my World Cup experience, just as much as the street parties in Lapa, or massive watch parties on Copacabana. A resonance I thought had to do merely with their exuberance, the unique feeling of importance they'd allowed us visitors to feel in those last steps within their suburb. Or they echoed in my emotions because they weren't the children that had attended the game, but the ones who were content just to see the spectators pass by, to watch as the world, for once in their lives, came to them. Or maybe because they were just slightly younger than the age I was when I said no to my father, chose not to attend a World Cup in my backyard. The child I was, the antithesis of their emotions, their excitement subbed for my insensitivity, my ungrateful lack of appreciation. 

But those guesses are only partially true. Those children of São Lourenço da Mata still echo because at age 10 and 8 and younger, they were born at the same time I first traveled. Their lives coincide precisely with my following of soccer, football, futebol. If my exuberance for the sport and for the world I've come to meet a border check and passport stamp at a time could be personified, that excitement given hands and happiness smiles and passion a voice, it was those that stretched and called out to us this June, from the World Cup in Brazil. 

The two'by'two photo now shows an older man with a determined look in his eyes. And though the Brazil visa is the first stamp of his newly-issued passport, the retired book that preceded it, one warped and swollen with use, means he knows what he is in for. He is in his early'thirties, but also in his preadolescence. Still coming of age, in a life that will inevitably decay and expire long before his passions do.