Stacy Horn

He looks so innocent in the picture below. I took that not long after bringing Bleecker home for the first time. How could we have known that to this day his favorite thing in the world is jumping on the back of my poor old arthritic and diabetic cat Finney, then wrapping all his legs around Finney’s belly while he chomps on his neck. He just did it again! Just now, as I started to describe it! He doesn’t chomp hard, he just wants to play.

But Finney most definitely does not want to play. We have tried to make this clear to Bleecker, but he pretends to not understand. For the millionth time: Finney, I’m sorry for bringing the monster into the house.

I’m still reading my friend’s book, The Country of Ice Cream Star. It’s going to take me a while because of work on my own book, but it’s just blowing me away. I recently read this line in the book:

“The worst thing about a war, senyora, is that it produces war heroes.”

Aside from the death, yeah. And actually, maybe it is worse than death because making war heroes leads to even more death.

Crowds at the America’s Cup. We do love a hero, don’t we? We make them all over the place.

See that small patch of evergreen trees in the distance? That’s my favorite spot to sit in Washington Square Park. Weirdly, I don’t have to fight for it. It’s not at all popular and there is always an entire bench free. I like to sit a little bit away from them so I look out at them.

Kantorei of Kansas City has started a Kickstarter campaign in order to record an album of Christmas music. They promise to include “previously unrecorded gems of the late Renaissance” (by Melchior Vulpius and Blasius Ammon)! There is never enough Christmas music in the world, and to have pieces we’ve never heard before is a great gift!

A view of the Municipal Building from the Hudson River. The Municipal Building is across the street from the beginning of Chambers Street, and I walk up to it whenever I visit the Municipal Archives. Is the west side higher than the east side? It can’t be, right? But this view seems elevated to me.

I passed by the group pictured below on Saturday, on my way to the America’s Cup race. I asked someone what they had gathered for, it was very Russian-centric and clearly had something to do with WWII, but I couldn’t understand her answer. I was also terrified that I would reveal some gross lack of knowledge. (I googled it when I got home and decided it must have had to do with VE Day and Germany’s surrender.)

Whenever someone posts a video on Facebook where they ask people something very obvious, like the one I just watched asking people about WWII coincidentally, I feel pity for the people who don’t know anything. One person had never heard of WWII, another had never heard of Hitler, another couldn’t name the countries we were fighting against.

First, I panic when I’m put on the spot about what I know. My mind goes blank. Second, I’ve forgotten a lot of what I once knew. Third, I can’t think of a third. Oh. Third, I’m not very educated to begin with, except in areas that coincide with my various obsessions.

My big fear is someone is going to shove a camera in my face and ask me to name a supreme court justice and the only names I will be able to come up with, if any, will be the conservative judges.

So I sympathize with the people being questioned in the video, and not the know-it-alls interviewing them. Except, I don’t like that the people being interviewed don’t seem to care. I think people should be educated and informed, and if I learned for the first time that there was something called World War II that was bigger and deadlier than any other war and involved nuclear bombs being dropped, genocide, and fucking so on, I’d be shocked to the core. I wouldn’t be standing there going, “Nope, never heard of it, hahaha.” Except maybe that was just a defensive response.