It’s been awhile. September, I think. Liz reminded me often that it had been a long time since I posted anything on the blog. Then Frank, a cousin in Connecticut, e-mailed and said something about … September, I think.

Then I started to hear from former readers of the column I wrote for 28 years in the Albuquerque Journal. Are you going to blog again?

I don’t know that I have an explanation for why I stopped. Maybe because I’d grown tired of hearing the sound of my own voice. And you don’t have to look around the Internet much to see that we are not suffering from a lack of opinions. We seem to have enough to go around.

A good deal of the “blogging” I was doing didn’t involve the soap box factor anyway. It consisted of linking to news stories that caught my eye, a kind of amateur “aggregator,” if you will. A handful of friends can tell you all about that. Blog or no blog, they are the frequent recipients of these “aggregations.” (Isn’t it fun to make up words as you go? But then I’ve been away. Maybe they’re the commonly accepted currency now.) The chances are good that the “aggregations” will continue in this space, assuming of course I can remember how to link.

So I’d been thinking about warming up the blog again.

Then came that afternoon I was driving around Corrales and the West Side, tending to errands, channel surfing on the radio, tuning in for a moment to KKOB to hear what they were exercised about that day.

That’s when I heard the caller to the Jim Villanucci show say of the President of the United States and any other Democrat the caller disagreed with: “Kill ’em! Kill ’em all! Take ’em out!”

For about week, the memory of it rolled around in my head and wouldn’t go away. Finally, I thought: OK, I’ll blog.