Drink your juice.

I recently set my screensaver to a photo collage that throws your iPhoto files around in fun and visually-appealing arrangements, and I’ve been surprisingly affected by the photos from the time I spent in Africa in 08 — specifically a set I took one day after smoking a lot and then grabbing my camera and deciding to “document the space” we’d lived in those couple months. It was one of my last nights at our house before I left for a one month camping trip and then came back to the states.

They’re mostly just photos of things I knew I’d forget otherwise; the way our laundry looked hanging from the line in the alley, the soccer ball caught in the branches of the tree in the yard, the one flowering vine on the cinderblock retaining wall — but I think what’s surprising about the photos isn’t a sentimental feeling (it’s not like that soccer ball changed me 4evr), but how tactile and immutably vivid each little index card of a memory is. It’s not stories that are evoking things for me, it’s details — that sense of momentum that comes from ostracizing yourself completely from all your contextualizing nouns and forcing yourself to learn a whole new set of facts. New currency, new slang, new streets, new faces. Everything expanding and informing what you already know and forcing you to use your brain and your social skills and your loud stupid mouth.

That weird sense of running in sand — of never really having a firm foothold but just moving anyway, letting the ground give underneath you and not fuck with your pace.

I don’t really know what idea I’m circling around here other than I guess things have stagnated a bit. I went from living on three continents in three years to accidentally anchoring myself within a twenty mile radius of where I grew up, and it’s not that I’m unhappy with where I am (I’m not), but that sense of momentum is gone. That sense of being able to do literally anything any time without any real justification is receding into some quiet space we save for vacation planning and Groupon deals, and maybe I’m in mourning.

I don’t know who has that lifestyle for an extended period of time, though. A National Geographic writer? A war reporter? Someone who gets melanoma and wears a lot of khaki and never really settles down because they’re running from something, right? Some 50 year old man with skin like a leather shoe and one night of really good bar talk in him before he gets depressing.

But I don’t think I’m running from anything, really. I’m Forrest Gump. I just feel like it.