Sometimes the collection of evidence becomes impossible to ignore. Like when I think I’m doing fine and then I catch my heel on a street grating, almost fall and drop my stuff, encounter a silly obstacle or a rude driver, and the next thing I know, I’m sobbing at some retail counter, receiving the awkward consolation of a minimum-wage stranger. It’s as good as an injury for making me stop and notice myself.

It doesn’t happen often, but something like it just occurred. I got a clear message that it was time for me to go to my room.

I guess the first signs of annoyance came yesterday, over the Internet. For some reason I got tired of deleting all the unwanted e-mail marketing messages, and I started attempting to remove myself from each mailing list.

I was surprised when most of the “remove” routines acted like they were working. There were a few that required me to send a remove reply by e-mail, and one of those was undeliverable, according to DAEMON, or whatever they call the mailer who governs my traffic. But most of them shot me over to some Internet “remove service,” which appeared sincere and only asked for my patience. I agreed to postpone my irritation for the 72 hours the service said it needed.

The only sender that fried my cookies (or perhaps refused to fry their cookie) was WallStJournal.com. I once had an online subscription. I never paid for it; my daughter received it as some sort of reward for donating to public TV, and she gave it to me. It was supposed to be a free year, but it wasn’t. I didn’t use it often, but I noticed that theWallStJournal.com’s idea of a year was the time from when I signed on (mid-May) to December 30. I didn’t even get December 31. I know because that was one of the very few days I tried to interact with the interactive online service. I sought closing market prices. But on December 31 the only thing I was allowed to do was either click a button that would let me pay for another year, or exit. I exited.

WallStJournal.com had been sending me little headline e-mails ever since I first signed on in May, and kept sending them to me after I declined to resubscribe. The e-mails were useless to me, because if I tried to visit the site to which they were linked, I was informed that the page was for paying subscribers only. And I get headlines I can follow up, from the New York Times and elsewhere, all free and not bothersome.

So I got to viewing the headline e-mails from WallStJournal.com as spam. They arrive uninvited, and they clutter my inbox with text I don’t want. Yesterday, when I received yet another, I attempted to have myself removed.

The headline was about the conviction of Arthur Andersen Company for obstruction of justice (file shredding). No big deal. Not big news.

At the bottom was the following message:

TO REMOVE YOURSELF from this list, see: http://online.wsj.com/user-cgi-bin/searchUser.pl?action=emailalert

So I clicked/visited. Guess what? The page is for subscribers only! My choices were to give a credit card number for their charge, or exit. I exited.

I could have called customer service and complained. But I didn’t want to complain. I was done interacting. I just wanted out, quietly and without undue notice. Pheh.