The blogging life.

Blogging, I assume I'll wake up each morning, utterly empty-headed one moment, but very soon thereafter in possession of three or four ideas juicy enough to share with thousands of people. If it happens often enough, I don't worry that it will continue to happen, just like I don't worry that the next time I feel like standing up, the will to do it and the accomplishment will occur simultaneously.

What if there is no new flow of ideas? Maybe some day, some physical ailment will suddenly afflict my brain, and I'll mean to stand up and the familiar response will not take place. I'll be left to marvel that I ever knew how to do that. It won't surprise me. I plan to think: yes, this is the sort of thing I always knew could happen to me and now it has.

By the same token, I could open up the laptop and the newspaper some morning and find no inspiration, nothing coming out of me in response to that. I'll think: of course, that was going to happen sooner or later.

Guestblogging over at GlennReynolds.com this week, I'm having something of that feeling. I have ideas that I feel good about putting here -- that cat-borne parasite that makes you act like a cat, for example. But I'm inhibited from putting things over there. Nothing jumps out and seems right. I have a different threshold about what to put over there, where I'm a guest and writing under someone else's name. This place seems so cozily familiar by comparison.

Over here, I have a nice group of commenters. There are no comments at GlennReynolds.com, but I do get email. It tends to be quite different from the response of my readers here. Today, someone wrote an email that ended: "Neither you nor Jethro will respond because you're both whores, liars, and cowards." ("Jethro," in this emailer's parlance, is Glenn Reynolds!) What made us "whores"? Just blogging about Kerry's college grades. Yesterday's post about Clinton led someone to write: "Are you proud of what you've written? Brother, you are sick. This is the best of your sick, sick life. The horror..."

Now, I've got to go collect my thoughts, command my brain to think. It should respond, but maybe... Who knows?