The Luna Park Gazette

I came extremely close to getting a tattoo on Friday. Two days later, I came extremely close to getting run over by a motorcycle. More than just coincidence? Well, probably not, but I’ll connect the dots anyway. On Friday I was drunk, blitzed, wasted, and polluted. Tattoos are often a by-product of this condition, or so I’m told. You wake up with a splitting headache and discover he image of Rutherford B. Hayes tattooed to your keester. I was sober on Sunday, but I was preoccupied, concerned that I might have lost my latest Netflix movie. The schmuck on the motorcycle may not have been sober, as he sailed through a red light, but I'm pretty sure he had tattoos. I don’t know if he belongs to Netflix. I started my weekend by going to a Meetup event at the Crime Scene bar on the Bowery. For those who don’t know, the Bowery has changed a lot since the days of Slip Mahoney and Horace Debussy Jones. It’s not the end of the line or the bottom of the barrel, where wayward drunks either cle...

Okay, so last night I watch the video of the guy getting zapped by cops while ranting at John Kerry. “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” he shouts for all of You Tube to hear. I think I hear a country song title happening here. You know, some juke box lament about a guy being zapped by his ex-wife’s lover. The guy could be just trying to sneak a peek at his ex-love when the boyfriend comes up from behind and lights him up like a Christmas tree. “ Don’t tase me, bro ,” our hero could wail, “ I only wanted to see her one last time… ” Hey, I like the sound of that. Somebody get me a banjo. Remember that famous Beatles’ song, “ Tase, Tase Me and I’ll Tase You ”? No? Maybe I’ve got the title wrong. It sure sounds like a lot of my relationships. If nothing else, we could at least get a t-shirt out of that phrase, printed in jittery letters to make it feel like you’re getting shocked while you read it. Then I read about an armless artist killing a romantic rival with a head butt. Yes, you read correctly: ...

I took the wrong train home from my shrink's office the other night. I can't help but wonder what Sigmond Freud would have to say about such behavior. Dummpkofp! Read der fuhking signs! Yeah, he might have said something like that. Or he might have said taking the wrong train signifies my reluctance to return home and face my problems. He might have said that taking a train into a Harlem might reveal suicidal tendencies. I think I'm just tired. In any case, I felt like a real out-of-towner when I saw those street numbers climbing in time with my blood pressure. I thought I should wait and get off at an express station. This way I could remain underground and possibly save my hide. I've got the unlimited Metrocard, so there was no chance of losing a fare, but you have to wait about 20 minutes after using the card before you can use it again. Otherwise people would be buzzing their families through. I had no idea when the next express stop was coming up and I might have b...

I took my annual walk around Ground Zero today. The weather is terrible today, overcast and rainy, such a stark contrast to Sept. 11, 2001, when the sky was so perfectly blue you’d swear we’d never hear from winter again. This foul day seems more suitable for mourning. There were thousands of people there, of course, milling around the spot where the World Trade Center was destroyed six years ago. I wanted to go to the exact spot on Liberty Plaza where I stood when the second plane hit the south tower, but the cops had blocked the area off. I went during my lunch break and missed the official ceremonies that had taken place earlier in the day, but there was still a lot going on. I followed a steady beat emanating from the area of the PATH station, and saw a group of people holding up their fingers in the peace sign. A group of drummers, whom I assumed were Buddhists, were seated on the ground hitting on their drums. There were flowers and balloons attached to the fence around the futur...

Can somebody show me the way off this island? I went back to Coney Island again last night through yet another of my infamous nutzoid dreams. Maybe I should sell tickets to my brain, stand outside my subconscious mind and shout like a boardwalk barker, "hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up and see the Amazing Bizarro Boy and his demented dreams!" The setting was no doubt related to the video shoot I did out there last week, and, the memories of visiting my father in a nursing home on the boardwalk. That all makes sense: it’s what happened within the dream that has me going in circles. The dream place doesn’t really look like Coney, but somehow I know that’s where I am. I am with a woman, an older lady with tattoos and rather bad teeth—perhaps a view missing, it’s hard to recall—thank God. She wears a sleeveless t-shirt and jeans. One notch above being homeless, she is clearly a victim of some kind of substance abuse. Sounds enticing, no? Well, apparently I thought so because—th...

I got a wrong number last night at my local grocery store: $6.66. I'm not a superstitious man--knock wood--but I wish I hadn't come up with the devil's number on my bill. It was probably the Diet Coke that pushed me into perdition; the offending bottle cost 99 cents with 6 cents deposit. Like anything else in this life, if I had tried to do this, it would never have happened in a million years. "That's a bad number," I said half-jokingly to the cashier, who kind of shrugged and proceeded to bag my things. Jesus--and I mean that--my aunt is always after me to quit this stuff and now in addition to the chemicals, I have to worry about murderous crows, snarling devil dogs, and all those other satanic freaks from The Omen movies. Of course if I had gotten a larger bottle of Diet Coke I would have been in the clear, too, but don't tell my aunt that. I was out of town for the long holiday weekend, up at her place in the Berkshires for my own private exorcism. I...