It's so hot that walking 3 blocks feels like too much so am I really going to haul my bones over to the West Side (a mile or more!) to try to see the stupid comet? When I want to lie bathed in a/c reading the dignified gossip of Diana Athill? Even knowing that if I don't see it TONIGHT*, I won't get a chance again for 6,800 years isn't stiffening my resolve. I have suffered no repercussions from having missed Hale-Bopp in 1996. As for Halley's in 1986, we did go to the Rockaways, about which you can read in my story, published in Transfer a year or so later, "Me Turtle Be Dead." Is one comet enough for a lifetime? All that distance & silence. I want to be small not enormous I think.
* Apparently we have another week or 2, the deadline isn't tonight. So it ain't gonna be tonight!