The Luna Park Gazette

It’s Halloween, the perfect time to chase some old ghosts out of my life. I finally moved all of my stuff out of the family home and now the house where I was raised is scary empty. You can actually hear an echo when you speak or walk around on the wooden floors. The weather was hideous on Saturday, which seemed strangely appropriate seeing as how we had a monsoon a few months back when I moved to my new place. Apparently the weather gods don't like to see me changing addresses. Now I’m sitting in my home office surround by more boxes than a FedEx driver and I keep telling myself that I’m going to get this stuff in order and the place will look fabulous when I’m done. I think if I say it enough times I might even start believing it. One package that did not make the trip was a box filled with my old diaries. I had been putting off deciding what to do with them for the last few weeks, but now that the clock is winding down to the closing deadline, I had to do something about this s...

I got a non-contact palm reading the other night and high-fived the hand of fate. I had gone to Pret a Manger on Friday in hopes of getting some of their fabulous turkey chili. The place is a block away from my office, but it took a while to get there because I walked out into the lobby of my building just as a group of demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street came marching down Broadway. “ We are the 99 percent! ” they chanted. “ We are the 99 percent! ” I was going to wait until they went by but then I realized that I’m the 99 percent, too, and thus should be out there walking with them, if only for half-a-block. I marched, but to be honest I’m not much of a chanter. Pret wasn’t serving turkey chili, so I settled for soup and a sandwich and grabbed a table in the back of the room. There were a number of people around me who appeared to be part of OWS. An older gentleman with a full gray beard stopped as he walked by my table and looked down at me. “Press?” “Is it that obvious?” I aske...

When you’re trying to remember something, the worst thing you can do is to try to remember it. I find that when I forget things like movie titles or actors' names—and this is happening more and more as I grow older—the missing information will often pop into my head when I’m busy doing something else. Like true love or an audit by the IRS, these things always hit you when you’re not looking. I’ve been breaking this little rule lately as I try to recall an exchange I once had with my mother and predictably I'm getting nowhere fast. I don’t remember the time or the occasion, but I know I was trying to get a rise out of my dear mother and I succeeded admirably. I remember how angry she got, but I can’t recall what I said. Her reaction was vivid as she put her hands on her hips like so many Italian ladies do when they’re furious, and snarled—I swear to God—“You worm !” Yes, you read that right. My mom compared me to a slimy crawling thing that lives in the mud and manure. And I ha...

That didn’t take long. I’ve been in my new apartment for about two months and I just had my first decorating catastrophe. I’ve been trying to change. For years I’ve never really bothered to put a personal mark on any of my apartments--mostly because I was living in towns I didn’t like, working at jobs I had grown to hate. It didn’t seem worth the trouble to make my place homey when I was always dying to find another gig and skip town like an escaped convict busting out of death row. I’m going to do things differently with the new place. Not only am I only going to keep it neat, but I’m going to put up posters, photographs, and knickknacks to make it look like someone actually lives here. And I’ve got plenty of stuff to choose from since we’ve been cleaning out my family’s house. One of my favorite items was a wall-clock sized thermometer from Hatfield Quality Meats that had been hanging in our home for several presidential administrations. This thing is a kitsch classic, emblazoned wit...

It’s been eight years since New York’s anti-smoking laws drove cigars, cigarettes and Tiparillos out of the bars and restaurants and sent smokers out into the streets. You won't hear me complaining. I don’t miss the smoke stench that would take root in your clothing after a night out on the town, or that smoker’s cough you’d get, even though you didn’t smoke, you didn't chew and you didn't go with girls who do (or did). I grew up when smoking was still acceptable, when cigarette commercials ran on TV, and movie stars didn’t hesitate to light up. Some of the stranger, more personal, artifacts from that distant era have been turning up in my family’s house in the form of ceramic ashtrays that we made as children. I had forgotten how my fellow Cub Scouts and I used to make these things for our arts and crafts projects. Now let’s think about that for a moment: children making ashtrays. Kids were actually aiding a deadly and disgusting addiction by making one of its ...