I have been accused (and convicted) of throat-clearing in my writing, but there is plenty of space-time for it now, and the need for a clear throat has never been clearer. Sarah Palin's tweeting and now her TV show . . .

which I have not watched. So let me begin. Some of the words I would like to apply to this blog: "deliberate," so justly associated with Thoreau; "familiar," "conversational," and so forth; "allusive," but not so indirect as referenced, footnoted, and linked in the new style;

Moominpapa's Memoirs . . . what if I were to write the already written story? If it's not written about, it has no chance of having happened.

I had a feeling of 85% today. That is, I would fall short in every category, despite making a defensible effort. Then, I found the battery charger for the 10 year old Sony camera, one of my electronic friends. Watching its tiny icons darken on the LED screen as power flowed in, I learned once again that all is not lost, just misplaced.

Later,

As of 6:36 p.m., I have deactivated my Facebook account. I hardly like the word "deactivated," but I suppose it suggests that I may have defused a time bomb . . . that is, something which was going to blow up more of my time.

Like the Tea Partiers, I am getting belatedly interested in reading history. There is some comfort in knowing that the events, at least, are over, and we can't be held responsible for changing them. And there is an even greater challenge in knowing that these events have repercussions, ricochets, and rebound effects that are not over. Some things we might do better the more we know, or at least the more we think. "Heart of Darkness" leads back to "King Leopold's Ghost" and forward to "Apocalypse Now" and back to "Heart of Darkness," and so forth, and back. Unlike the Tea Partiers, I don't believe that the Europeans necessarily had better ideas than the people they overwhelmed.

It has taken two years and a series of recent events to make me quit Facebook. Ah, the humanity, illustrated by the dog and cat photos; oh, the futility, illustrated by the 2010 election commentary; ow, the microscopy, illustrated by my own short-sighted observations and the lack of energetic reaction to them; and certainly the reminder of mortality as my father-in-law died at NHC on Oct. 17 after living for more than a year as a stroke patient. He hadn't arranged for an obituary to be published or a memorial service to be conducted, so there couldn't be anything to say about it on Facebook. Here, there ought to be, and that is the sort of event which I hope to handle here.