Stacy Horn

This is what I get for leaving the house. I have a cold. And the gas is still turned off (leak not fixed) so I can’t cook. Although it’s more accurate to say I can’t “heat” since I don’t actually cook anything, just heat stuff up.

I took this picture of the train sign at Penn Station on Christmas morning. By the way, I love saying the town “Ronkonkoma.” Ron-KON-ko-ma.

Aside from the cold which one of you gave me, thank you very much, I’m feeling pretty good. Starting to get feedback from the parapsychologists on the book, and corrections are coming in, but nothing major. (They might call them major mistakes, but if I can fix them in a couple of seconds to me they’re not major. I’m thinking purely in terms of time.) And aside from the mistakes, they seem to like it. Love it, they say!

Cannot wait to send this draft to my publisher, but I have a few things left to do. Meanwhile, so not feeling well. I wish I had a bunch of good food in the house so I could just curl up on the couch. I guess I should order in, but unlike the rest of New York, I do not like to order in. I’m uncomfortable with having people hand deliver my food.

Someone in my network posted this on Facebook. Love Eddie Izzard. Thank you universe and odds for producing him.

[Video removed because the link no longer works.]

Finney was going nuts at the kitchen window so I got up to see what was bugging him and there was Buddy, sitting in the bedroom window, also terribly interested in something in the airshaft. This is such a city shot for me. Bricks, airshaft. So New York. If you scroll down you will see what got their attention …

Yeah. A pigeon. Like they haven’t seen pigeons 16 thousand billion trillion times before. Hello??

Happy New Year from me and my no-short-term-memory cats. (“What’s this? A pigeon you say? I think it’s the most captivating thing I have ever seen in this window EVER.” Two seconds later. “Oh my God! What’s that? A pigeon?? Could there be a more amazing creature in all the world? Can we invite him in??”)

I called Con Ed and asked them to come back and check the gas again, and sure enough, they found a gas leak in my apartment. The cats and I have been sucking gas for three months. That can’t be good. Also, even though they turned off the gas, it still seems to be emanating from the spot I told them to check, and where they found the leak. I’m calling them back today. Ugh.

Meanwhile, remember the other day I posted about the old entrance to the country club my family once belonged to? My brother Peter took me there on Christmas Day so I could get a shot. This is about half it. But you get the idea. It’s lovely, right? The road itself is starting to collapse in. I wonder what causes that. This is in Huntington.

I was going to write a piece about the club, in fact I’d still like to. It started out as a men’s athletic club in Brooklyn, and then they bought space out in the “country,” the estate of someone named Roy Rainey (who I hadn’t researched yet).

From the September 8, 1892 New York Times: “Fine play and plenty of it marked the club handicap tennis tournament of the Crescent Athletic Club, Brooklyn, yesterday afternoon. The entry list was unusually large. Handsome prizes for firsts and seconds were offered in singles and doubles.”

It’s almost a fitting title, given the assassination of Benazir Bhutto yesterday. God, the world we live in. I sometimes think that I’m a very fearful person, and then this happens and I realize, not even close. I’m not even on the same planet in terms of intensity of fear compared to someone who could do that. Although it’s more complicated than that, of course. Actually, how does someone get that fucked up?

This is a short film of my brother Douglas getting us all together for a family photograph. Notice how at the end when he tells me to put my camera down I immediately obey.