Some days I feel like this...

Sometimes you just know that the boat can't pull you. Of course, sometimes it can get you up and out of the water, and then you're embarrassed by all your naysaying (which is my word of the day BTW...I'm going to use it no less than nine times today) and the negative energy you were chucking out to the world. Sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. I should get that tattooed on my hand.

I've got me some funk in the middle of all this sunshine, and it's not the good kind of funk, you know, like George Clinton style funk...nope, it's restlessness and some weird psychological stuff, something oddly in between Imposter Syndrome and some Dunning-Kruger Effect type stuff...either way, the definitions are annoyingly academic, and nowhere near accurate, so I'll keep on feeling like Jumbo at Cypress Gardens.

Strangely enough, I started reading Walter Kirn's Up In The Air yesterday and the first chapter felt like my life, you know, minus the Palm Pilots, rental cars, salted almonds, Kevlar luggage and nameless suite hotels...the airports too.

It was the feeling of that first chapter that echoed in a voice I recognized. On the go, relatively rootless, passing strangers all day every day but the job is to bridge that gap between stranger and friend...instead of air miles I get mileage cheques. It was so familiar that it made me feel at home right at the very moment I was, in the structure of my usual day, without a home. I use other peoples offices and telephones. I win over their secretaries and assistants so that they'll help me with what I need help with, and so that I get their oh-so-helpful fly on the wall perspectives. They typically have no right to give me access to what kind of information they give me access to but since I ask nicely and I swing in and out of their cubicles and lives, it's an easy exchange. I smile a lot an mostly I mean it...97% of the time, which I'm sure is more than most.

I know about your problems, and your family's problems. I know what people say about you, and what you say about them. I'm Switzerland. I'm perpetually balancing on a narrow fence rail. I know people...who you should call, who will be cool, and who won't. I can tell you if that application is going to get approved or not. I'm racking up miles like you've never imagined. I'm regularly pinching off 2,500 kms a month or more, and that's just on the highway. Emotionally speaking I've got miles and miles of road behind me...the problem is I've got just as much ahead of me every day when I crawl out of bed. It's what I do, and it's what wears me out some weeks.

It's also what inspires me other weeks. This week I'm choosing to be in a bit of a funk...the key is choosing. When I lose my ability to choose I'll be doing something else. Sometimes it just feels better to know that the boat can't pull you. It sure feels better than a mouth full of more water than air. Ironically, it doesn't feel half as good as walking on water.