About a year ago, back when I thought that Howard Dean might win, I wrote this. Outlandish Josh :: The Big One:

Struggling with the opposing pulls of the professional and the radical. There's something inside me that's holding back. Ginsburg (who posthumously turned me on to the Ohm) said that the only way he had any indication of whether or not what he was working on was any good was when it scared him. My job scares me....

How radical are we? Are we for the elimination of poverty? Global equality? Are we for a cultural shift that moves away from television, fear and blind consumption and towards something else?...

Maybe we can end up in some emergent utopia. Maybe we'll build spaceships instead of bombs, an exploratory/industrial complex. Maybe we'll make reaching out to the world, to the universe, a central part of how we live; quit dwelling in caves, you know? It might be really grand fun. Wire (or rather, unwire) the world, make it all equitable and efficent, an end to meaningless toil. Forget opening new markets to Wal-Mart; let's go build fuel-cell powered internet hookups in Africa, start a whole new thing.

And it goes on like that for some time. Still Good Stuff, I believe. One thing to note is that my job stopped scaring me a long time ago, and that's one of the reasons I'm glad I'm not doing it any more.

What scares me in that good good Ginsburg way these days? That's a good fucking question. The idea of this big summer road trip inspires some fluttering, as does the idea of trying to write something for real-live publication, and the notion of performing again. We'll wait and see what avenues open up in Politix and whether any of them spark that kind aprehension.