For all my angst-ing ahead of time (“On the Subject of Being the Subject“), I very much enjoyed my conversation with Josh Pantalleresco of “Just Joshing“. Although it occurs to me that I did rather deflect from being-the-subject by asking him questions… You would too, I think—he’s literally walking and hitching across continents (Canada, then America, next up: Mexico & South America) looking for his place in the world. Not figuratively—literally. He’s looking for where he wants to BE. You’d have questions for him too!

He also has a guru-like wisdom about him, and (despite my deflecting), he draws a person out naturally. I spoke of my lifelong dream of living and traveling on a sailboat, and how that dream took solid shape when we bought our sailboat, and how now I don’t know what shape the dream is again, since we’ve decided to sell that particular boat. We also talked about Wile E. Coyote (and the RoadRunner being a dick); and just skirted politics by talking about some issues; and about how he determines the “character” of a place when he visits, literally pounding the pavement through the world; and about my tendency to want to control events and surroundings when that’s really an impossible (imaginary) task; and he repeatedly seemed to be channeling my Sponsor! “If you want to make God laugh… Make plans!” (I should have told him that God’sHumor is one of my blog’s most-used tags!)

As the hour drew to a close, he asked playfully if I wanted his “psychoanalysis.” Of course!

He asked me if I’m a fan of Moby Dick. (And how! My whaling novel is entwined almost inextricably around Moby Dick.) “It’s ironic that we were just talking about Wile E. Coyote,” he said, “because the RoadRunner is his white whale, right? And you wonder what he’d actually do if he caught his whale. I think the sailboat is your white whale. And if you catch it, you have to figure out what to DO with it.” He spoke about how things are always changing, you’ve never nailed down a situation into a firm shape that will stay that way, because “stillness is a lie.”

And then came the guru-like advice: “You’ll have to let yourself go past the white whale—it opens doors.”

Oh, and after we went off the air, I asked him about his numbered rules. (I’d referred a couple times to one I heard him quote in an earlier podcast: Rule #8, stay uncomfortable.) My favorite is #10: When faced with two paths that are otherwise equal, choose the one that will be the most FUN!