The Luna Park Gazette

Who is this guy? He looks like me. He sounds like me, lives in the same place and works at the same office as I do. But he sure is one furious son-of-a-bitch. Too bad he won’t go away. I’m finally recovering from yet another nasty virus that has been hanging around my neck for three tortuous weeks. Between the horrendous weather and my poor physical condition the second month of 2014 has been so bad I've renamed it "Fuck-You-Already." It’s the usual scenario: my body temperature drops, my stomach rumbles like a dormant volcano coming to life and my energy sinks into the negative numbers. This is part of the chronic fatigue problem that I’ve been having for many years now and I thought I was getting better at controlling my emotions, but apparently not. I started off fairly calmly, taking a few days off from work to rest and watch a lot of bad TV. I was feeling better by Week Two and told myself that I was over the worst of it. But I went into Week Three st...

I ran into an old friend last week and it was so nice to see him. He was an older gentleman who used to hang around a candy story in my neighborhood and he came walking out of the wilderness of my memory after an absence of nearly 35 years. I never knew his name, where he lived, or what he did for a living. And I don’t know whatever happened to him, though I’m pretty sure that after all this time he’s probably gone to his reward. All I know is that I was his buddy and that when he was around I was the most important guy in town. I can picture him very easily, even after all this time, a stocky man with a ruddy complexion, gray hair, and a smile you could see from two blocks away. And I can still hear his voice. “Hey, buddy,” he’d say whenever I ran into him. “How’s it going?” I was in my early 20s when I first met him, just out of school with a head full of dreams about all the great things I was going to accomplish with my life and absolutely no idea how I was going to do i...

This was too good to be true. I was in a Park Slope bar on a recent Saturday night speaking with a young woman about science fiction movies. We covered some of the modern flicks, like The Hunger Games , and then I brought up my favorite sci-fi epic of all time. “Have you ever seen The Thing ?” I asked, referring to the 1951 masterpiece The Thing From Another World that has been scaring the screaming beejesus out of me since LBJ was in the White House. My new friend rolled her eyes. “Only about 20,000 times,” she said with mild exasperation. I was overjoyed. I was starting to think that I was the only one who still enjoys this spooky tale of a murderous alien plant creature who goes on a bloodcurdling tear at an Artic outpost while a hardy handful of US Airmen try to torch his tuchas . Everybody’s into the teeny-bopper vampire flicks and other such CGI chazerai , I constantly grumble. No one cares about the classics. But now here was a kindred spirit. Or so I thought. M...

My high school gymnasium was so big it spanned three time zones and two climate systems. All right, perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but the place really was huge and it was filled with all sorts of old timey equipment like trampolines, pommel horses, and, hanging over by the windows, that dreaded piece of apparatus—the climbing ropes. I hardly used any of this stuff because back then I wasn’t the least bit interested in anything athletic. I hated team sports and I think I associated exercise with football and baseball, which still don’t interest me worth a damn. (And yes, I know it's Super Bowl Sunday.) I climbed the ropes exactly once in my four years of high school and that was only because we were being tested. I still remember how terrified I was as I raced up the rope, touched the metal support beam and climbed the hell back down, vowing never to go near those goddamn things for as long I lived. I had no way of knowing that some 40-odd years later I would not only ...