This post is overly descriptive and flowered with sentimentality and exaggeration. Unless you’re a sucker for insignificant logorrhea, I suggest you skip it. Next post will hopefully be useful, interesting, and explain why I was in Brazil in the first place.

It’s 11:15 a.m. and I’m in an air-conditioned mall. I know, right? Rio de Janeiro and I’m pecking at my laptop in a windowless corporate bookstore on the sixth floor of a shopping mall that is identical to any other. This could be Singapore, Johannesburg, Monterrey; there’s no way to tell a difference.

Except for all the madness around me. A Pink Floyd-like symphony of cash registers throughout the mall are being counted out, closed up. The just-above-minimum-wage retail workers are pacing to and fro, nearly vibrating with excitement. A few girls with shiny, taught legs and painfully mini, denim mini-skirts are painting each other’s cheeks (not those ones, perverts).

I’ve gotten the look, it’s time for me to leave. Floating down the eternal sequence of escalators, white and black, indian and mestizo shop-workers are slamming down rattling security gates. They are all wearing green and yellow. The entire country is wearing green and yellow. Without exception.

There is a drum beat. Perhaps it’s not audible, but it’s there, at the foundation of it all. The logical rhythm to the otherwise insane madness. The deep call of horns fills the hallways and from outside a faint chanting: “bra-sil! bra-sil! bra-sil!” My own heart-beat starts to accelerate and synchronize with the rhythm. It’s the closest I’ll probably ever get to understanding the adrenaline-infused appeal of battle.

Out onto the street and I’m hit with a wall of sound, skin, samba, sex, and soccer. The drum beat was really there all along and now it’s everywhere. Teenage girls are dancing near the curb. Boys are running around, fighting over who gets to blow the plastic horn, and corner bistros are surrounded by scruffy men and their curly-haired wives and girlfriends holding flutes of draft beer. They are all wearing green and yellow. Everyone.

At 12 noon the game starts and the pre-game celebration turns to immediate severity. All one hundred pairs of eyes are locked in on the tiny 14-inch television rudimentarily attached to the bistro’s outside wall. Ghana versus Brazil. A sure win, despite the universal agreement that Brazil’s tournament appearance so far has been nothing but mediocre. Just five minutes into the game Ronaldo - neither fat nor out-of-shape - breaks through the Ghanian defense and makes the poor goalie look like a junior-level amateur.

The streets erupt. Perfectly sculpted hourglass hips shake back and forth, fireworks explode, confetti pours down from the apartments above, and everywhere … everywhere … is pure elation. More so than I believe I have ever experienced before. More so than, quite possibly, has ever taken place in the Sedated States of America.

This was not my first time in Rio. In 2001 Emily and I stopped by for five, brief, rainy days on our way from Chile to France. Those five days we spent with a friend of Emily’s from Cape Cod who came to Rio in order to meet his boyfriend’s (now husband’s) parents. The only catch: the parents didn’t know their son was gay.

You can imagine my disappointment. Rio, one of the most exciting, sexiest cities in the world and there I was with my girlfriend, her flamboyant, talkative, and all of a sudden very horny friend, and a five-day forecast of nothing but rain. We went out one night - and one night only - to an infamous nightclub called “Le Boy.” Hairless, greased-up men in leather danced in hanging cages. I was about the only person in there wearing a shirt. My ass was grabbed 10 times before I left early and walked back in the rain to our hotel by myself.

Evidently, I blocked those five days out of my memory because Rio, this time around, was a completely new experience. And it occurred to me that my impression of the city had been colored more by Alma Guillermoprieto’s Samba (given to me by the lovely Georgia) than my own previous trip. Guillermoprieto, throughout the book, describes Cariocas in terms of black and white. Likewise, the only Ethnic Studies class I ever took in college was taught by a Brazilian professor who consistently divided the entire country as either black or white.

So my first startling observation was just how few Cariocas fit into the dichotomy. The great majority were mestizo - with obvious features of “indigenous” america that never made their way into Guillermoprieto’s book nor my ethnic studies class.

Eli, my hyper-charming old roommate whose use of the English language would never be described as Shakespearian, all of a sudden was struck with blogger mentality. We’d be walking down some street, sticky with sprinkling rain, and out of nowhere he’d elbow me with an idea for his newest blog post. Or riding on the bus, something would occur to him and, in earnest, he’d say, “shit bro, I hope I don’t forget all of these.” It’s amazing to me when my good friends - people who I thought didn’t even read blogs - tell me they want their own.

In Rio he even became a playwright: “dude, like, we should write a play. You know, like, how all the fucking hostels all over the world are like the exact same scene? [He points around the room to emphasize his observations] You know, same crazy Euro dudes, same music, same so-so girls, couple dudes always playing guitar? So …” [he raises his eyebrow, about to tell me he's solved nuclear cold fusion] “… the hostel will be the set of the play!”

I think about it and the man has a point. It could make for some great theater: the idealistic 20-something reaching for new horizons, the jaded 35-year-old Australian who stays at hostels only to sleep with naive college girls and sell drugs, the Scandinavian girls who won’t talk to their fellow Western travelers but bring back various local guys every night.

Anyone who has spent a good amount of time in a hostel knows that there is no better laboratory for sociological research. Sex, as per usual, finds itself at center stage. Young women, hoping to publicly reject their international suitors, stick to their roaming packs. Young men, desperately seeking alpha-male status in a worldly 21st century context, improvise ingeniously to establish their pack-leading credentials without appearing to make any effort.

In other words, when adults enter high school-like social situations, they still act like high school students.

I’ll admit, the entire tournament I was rooting for Argentina. More so than the United States and more so than Mexico. It was arbitrary really, but I decided they would be my team and I stuck with it.

Brazil and Argentina, I found out, have quite the rivalry. My friend Murilo told me as we watched Brazil play at his mother-in-law’s Niteroi beach cottage, “I think you’re the only one in this entire country who wants Argentina to win.”

The next week I was drinking too many beers by myself at a corner bistro while Eli surfed Copacabana and Argentina played Germany. Germany, a team that shoots penalty kicks like Michaelangelo sculpts marble. When Argentina missed their second consecutive penalty kick and a couple players started to cry, all of the Brazilians began chanting “llora, llora.” An Argentine loss was apparently as delectable as a Brazilian win.

The next day Brazil was to play France. France. Zidane. The last team to defeat Brazil in World Cup play.

The morning arrived hung-over and hazy, but the Cariocas weren’t preparing for the game with the same festivity as when they played Ghana. The entire city seemed to be holding its breath, chewing on its fingernails. Our Brazilian friends told us where we would celebrate that night after Brazil’s victory, but their plans were without conviction.

Eli and I needed to get out of the smoky, incestuous hostel. We walked a few blocks to a hidden-away bistro where we had watched Italy play Ukraine. I was too hung-over to either eat or drink, but I ordered a flute of draft beer to keep us company.

Zidane played magically the entire game, with the sort of composure and professionalism that made today’s out-of-nowhere head butt so difficult to comprehend. Brazil, on the other hand, looked disorganized, exhausted, and even nervous. It was obvious from the very first minutes and everyone at the bistro knew that Lady Luck would help determine the game’s outcome. In the 56th minute Henry flew in (with wings) to the far post and footed the ball in mid-air. It wasn’t spectacular, but it won the game.

When the last whistle blew, the chins all around us started to quiver in astonishment. Not france. Not again. People took off their yellow jerseys, folded them up in anger and disappointment, and stared past the blinking TV with watery eyes.

Walking back to the hostel it was clear that those who had invested in Brazil’s win with lines of coke were now at a loss for what to do. Loud techno blared from some apartments above, but nobody was dancing.

As it turns out, I arrived into the third world block of concrete and linoleum known as LAX on the 230th birthday of the country where my mother happened to give birth to me. All the late-nights-turned-early-mornings in smoky Rio clubs had caught up with me and I was nursing a full-blown head cold. I was too sick, too beat, too resigned to get ragingly drunk with my friends as had been planned. Instead, taking a 20 minute hot shower and falling asleep in a real bed with real sheets was like cool nectar from the gods.

I woke up alone, not knowing immediately where I was nor how I got there. I love that sensation, those two seconds of absolute confusion, complete mindlessness, until the details begin to clue you in and remind you were you came from and where you think you are going.

The next day, the I-5 to San Diego was melting with fierce summer heat and gridlocked with post-holiday traffic. I’ve never had the patience to inch along at five miles per hour and that day was no exception. Nosing my way to the nearest off-ramp, I descended down the hill to the turquoise water of Dana Point and parked my car at the beach. Sun-burned, obese dads appeared from RV’s whose shadows always included waving American flags. Blonde teenage girls, armed with two or three glossy magazines, would occasionally slip a thumb under their bikini top to check the contrast, the progress of their most valued vacation souvenir. A group of hyper-muscular 14 and 15-year-old boys were skim-boarding with their rented boogie boards. “Faggot!” “Dumbshit!” they’d yell at each other, over the roar of the waves, when one board bumped into another.

I walked back to my car and changed into my own board shorts. The water was cool, refreshing, cleansing. Diving into the first wave, I felt the pressure all around my sinuses. I swam out 20 or 30 meters - far from the tourists and far from the breaking waves - and I floated on my back. The only noise was the lapping water on my skin. I could have been in Thailand, Barbados, anywhere.