Legal Commentary

Orly had a wonderful post a while back on bloggers' guilt.  My own take on it is that blogging is like exercise: once you get out of the habit, it's very difficult to get back into it.  The common complaint about blogging, most pertinently about blogging by scholars, is that it can be a thoughtless, trivial enterprise.  It may thus be appropriate that the key to being a blogging regular is: don't think too much.  Once you start pondering and mulling, by the time you're ready to blog you'll either have missed the boat or will become convinced that the enterprise is so trivial that there's not much point in sharing your thoughts in the first place.  This is true of writing in general, and perhaps life in general, I think: once you start reflecting too much on the evanescence of any activity, it's just hard to get out of bed at all.  (Is this why I watch so much television?  No; better not to ask.)  When I get back on the horse, I pledge to be utterly thoughtless, so that I can keep up my end of the bargain with my co-bloggers and our audience.  (The alternative, of course, is to blog constantly and thoughtfully.  But there is only one Orin Kerr -- although it sometimes feels as if there are more.)

But, speaking of impermanence, I won't be back on the horse quite yet.  I had both my hips replaced almost exactly 17 years ago (and what a fun summer that was!), and, alas, they don't last forever, although I'm very grateful to my doctor, my artificial hips, and anything man-made and artificial in general, for all the miles they've carried me.  (Parenthetically, the fact that life without "artifice" would have been sheer misery for me explains why I cannot abide the frequent fetish for the "natural" over the artificial or manipulated.  Although I can understand why we might want to be prudent about the "unnatural," I am afraid Leon Kass is speaking in a foreign language as far as I am concerned.)  So on Monday I go in for "revision" surgery on one of those hips.  In keeping with my policy of using up every available holiday for surgery, the other hip will follow around Christmas or next summer.  (When my sabbatical comes, perhaps I'll go in for something more major: open-heart surgery, maybe, or cloning a Mini-Me.) 

Although I hope to blog once I'm recovering, since I'll have little else to do save watch the soaps and catch up on writing deadlines, I'll be going dark again for a while.  Wish me luck; and, of course, if anything goes terribly wrong, which is highly unlikely, make sure you appease my restless spirit by downloading lots of stuff from my SSRN page.