wanderlust

I have what i call 'the disease'. And i can't decide if it is a good or bad disease. Wanderlust would be an easy thing to call it, but it is more intense and embodying than that. And the more i try to explain it, the more ridiculous it sounds, and i can never quite put words to it.

This video from one of my favorite catalogs caused the disease to really surface in me today.

David is one of the only people that understand what this disease does to me, he is a perfect cure for it. Or maybe not a cure so much because i am not sure i want to cure it, but he is a perfect partner for me and my disease. no questions asked. He found this bit in Travels With Charlie by John Steinbeck and sent it to me with the header

"John Steinbeck accurately describes your condition:"

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was
on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When
years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle
age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am
fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse
blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to
tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod
hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye,
the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other
words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the
disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to
inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of
a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet,
the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going.
This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons
to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a
direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go,
what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and
immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in
new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a
new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an
entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament,
individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.
And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after
years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters,
schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to
wreckages on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the
blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the
frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to
be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this,
although only those who have experienced it will understand it.