The Luna Park Gazette

My father fell down in his room last night. I was working on my computer when I heard this terrible crash and at first I thought it was the people upstairs. They're a pretty noisy bunch and I figured one them tipped over a bureau or some other large piece of furniture. But I knew in my heart that the sound was a body hitting the floor and hitting hard. I walked out to the living room where I thought my father was watching TV and saw the couch was empty. Then I got frightened. He's 84 years old, suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and he can't afford to fall down. I ran to the back to his room, and, through the darkness, I saw him on the floor. He looked like an infant struggling to get to his feet. I did my best not to panic. I asked him if he hurt himself and when he said he was okay I helped him to his feet, coaxing him gently all the way. He told me he had been reaching for the bed in the dark and missed. I think that's been happening to him a lot lately. He reach...

Thank God for the cannoli. That beautiful Italian pastry was the only thing that pulled me from the edge of madness tonight. And just barely. I COULDN'TA BEEN A CONTENDA The day had started out all right. I did some chores, grabbed lunch, and headed into the city to take a gym class and then meet up for happy hour with some of my over-forty amigos from MINY. The boxing class was hell on earth. Not only was it brutal, but there were only two people in the entire class, so hiding in the back of the room was not an option. I think the instructor, a young Arabic-American fellow named Saadi, has a future in the torture business, since he is quite inventive and seems to enjoy his work. Sprints, suicide runs, wheelbarrow races, squat thrusts--take that, skinhead! Why didn't I go to Pilates? Then Saadi decided we should spar--just hitting to the body--and he proceeded to whale the tar out of my middle-aged body for three seemingly endless rounds. It's amazing seeing his skill in th...

There it was sitting in the deli freezer, ready to tear my throat out. I had just come in to get some orange juice, when I looked down and caught the label on a carton of ice cream: Violent Swiss Almond. Say what? I'm just reaching for my wallet and I'm being threatened by a psychotic drupaceous fruit in lederhosen ? Then I looked again. My eyesight is going, along with everything else in my system, and I had read the label too quickly, reading "Violent" when it actually said " Vanilla Swiss Almond." Maybe I should contact Ben and Jerry. Yeah, I need glasses, or contacts or one of those laser zap jobs that'll give me X-ray vision and the power to read men's minds. Of course everybody will probably be thinking hey, stop reading my mind, you stupid bastard, and get some glasses . Yesterday I had a number of these little eyeball malfunctions. First, I was reading an item about a man who had a "stinking resemblance to Robert Reford." Come agai...

When I was a child, I used to watch in amazement at my mother's reaction whenever she saw an actor she liked in an old an movie. "Oh," she'd say in disbelief, "look how young he is!" To my kid's mind, this made no sense. Someone like Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart looked like they always looked. I didn't see any age in their appearance--they were all adults anyway, which automatically made them old in my eyes. What did it mean for someone to look young? All right, I'm older now, probably close to my mother's age when we were watching TV in the livingroom on the old Motorola. Now I watch DVD's on my computer (Jesus, this was all Flash Gordon stuff when I was a kid. And if you don't know who that is go change your diaper) The other night I watched "Taxi Driver" on my computer. That movie--brace yourself--came out in 1976, the year of the bicentennial. It'll be 30 flipping years old in a few months. And I looked at Robert DeN...

It was four years ago today that I looked straight into hell. Four years since I heard the first jetliner hit the north tower over my head, and then, a little while later, ran for my life when the second jetliner struck the south tower. It was my father's 80th birthday and my buddy Hank was playing a set somewhere in the Village. My mother was at Lutheran Medical Center being treated for the lung disease that would take her life 10 months later. Four years since I sought refuge in the lobby of a senior citizen's home near the Brooklyn Bridge, while the towers and the world as we knew collapsed in a heap of dust and ash. I remember that terrifying walk over the Manhattan Bridge, where I felt like a sitting duck in the middle of the sky, with jets screeching overhead. Only later did I find out that those were American fighters, scrambled much too late. I was walking with a woman from Long Island, Eva, who is an attorney from Long Island. After the attacks she didn't know how ...

So I get up this morning to find that the city's dueling tabloids, the Post and the Daily News, have identical headlines: "Baby Stab Horror." They were referring to the same terrible incident, where some psycho on the street stabbed an innocent baby. I confess I never got around to reading either paper's version of the story, having been stopped in my tracks by the Siamese front pages. I was a police reporter for five years so I've covered my share of terrible stories, but something about these headlines are so awful. All they do is make things even worse. After I saw the headlines, I went about with my own life, like everybody else around me. This was my third day of my new job and I expected it to be a tough one, a kind of make or break deal that would separate the men from the boys, put it all on the line, and all that kind of crap. It turned out to be quiet manageable, but I had no way of knowing that, and being the King of Catastrophe, I just worried all morn...

...and I didn't come? Tomorrow I start my new job as a reporter for thestreet.com and I am not very happy about it. I know I should be thankful, given current economic conditions and my own lengthy jobless stretch, but I'm just not enthusiastic. The money is not good, the job sounds like grunt work and I'm sick of business writing anyway. So I'll be working at a job that I can't rely on and doesn't get me enough money to live the life I want. Great. I'm thinking of it as a temporary assignment, sort of like life, and looking forward to my nex t gig, but I don't want to fall on my sword here. (I'm good at that--if sword falling were an Olympic event I'd be wearing a gold medal around my neck.) There are the obvious complaints: full-time work means less time for writing, research, and piddling crap like shopping, bill-paying. I guess I'll have to join the human race and make the time for these things when I can. I envy people with careers, real...