Thanks

I want to thank my guest-bloggers for their industry, energy and diversity of view this past week: Megan, Ross and Reihan. Please visit them at their regular haunts: here and here. The blog will now return to its virtually normal self. These thanks are more than formal. Blogging can become something very much like an addiction, and quitting it - even only for a week - brings that home. There are the withdrawal symptoms - continuing to post a little, twitching involuntarily at the latest gobbet of news, scanning the traffic. Then there's depression, as the come-down hits, and you find yourself listening to a mentally disturbed mass killer in a hotel room in Chicago at 2.30 am. Then the strange experience of a weekend without a moving deadline, a chance to read the paper just because you feel like it, or take a bike ride, as I did yesterday, just because it was a beautiful early summer day, and the final blossoms in Washington were falling to the ground. This is what not-blogging is like? And now the bafflement at having to have an opinion 200 times a week. I'm sure the synapses will start firing again and I'm relieved to know that if my opinion well runs dry, yours still won't. Thanks, again, Megan, Reihan and Ross, for the brief glimpse of what life was once like again.