The Luna Park Gazette

Well, at least I found my umbrella. I cleaned out my desk at 195 Broadway on Thursday and tomorrow morning I start at my company’s new location across the river in Hoboken. Moving out an office is a scaled down version of moving out of an apartment. You find stuff you’ve forgotten about, useless crap you wonder where you got and why you kept, and you take a personal inventory, looking back on your life and wondering what the hell you’ve been doing with your time. I’ve been working at the downtown Manhattan location for close to seven years and I don’t relish a longer, more expensive commute, but I’m trying to think positively. My old building is beautiful; it’s the original headquarters of American Telephone and Telegraph and Western Union, and the lobby itself is a work of an art. A scene from the Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was shot there, but you don’t really see much. I always talked about shooting a short film in this fabulous location, but like a lot things that I talk...

“This life is a master novel, written by God, and man would go crazy if he tried to understand it by reason alone. That is why I tell you to meditate more. Enlarge the magic cup of your intuition and then you will be able to hold the ocean of infinite wisdom.” --Paramahansa Yogananda I turned 58 years old today and so many thoughts are running through my mind. I’m thinking of the shocking passage of time, and how I’m quickly closing in on the 60 year mark. I’m thinking about my late parents, and my grandmother, who shared a birthday with me, and how I miss them all very much. I’m also thinking about a couple of kids I saw in Shore Road Park last weekend. (That may sound awkward, but please bear with me.) These two boys went racing by me as I sat on a park bench. The older one was on a razor scooter and he was pulling ahead of a younger boy on a bicycle. The little guy was having a hard time with this. “Stop doing that,” he yelled. “Stop it!” But the older boy kept on going...

And now comes the time when I have to let go of the old and prepare to walk through fire... I’ve been going through some difficult times lately and today I treated myself to another fabulous energy session with my healer Kathryn . This was the culmination of a tremendous weekend where I met up with an old friend on Friday and made some new ones on Saturday. I've had more positive excitement in the last few days than I've had in the last few months and it felt good to put my troubles aside for a little while. I’ve been worried about my life for so long and so steadily that I’ve gotten used to the tension. Except of course when I’m irritable and exhausted and then I realize that I’ve been wearing this burden like a hair shirt. I decided I needed a treatment as soon as possible. Once again Kathryn had me stretch out on her table and then she put her fabulous hands on me. I had been worried that we wouldn’t be able to match the power I felt during our first session , but a...

" God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers. " ― Ruyard Kipling I have this distant memory of getting into a terrible fight with somebody in my family. I forget nearly everything about that day—whom I was fighting with, how old I was at the time, or what it was all about. I just recall sitting on the living room couch fuming, so righteous in my anger. My mother was sitting next to me, trying to talk some sense into me—a lost cause if ever there was one. I had decided that I was the injured party, I had been thoroughly wrong, and I demanded satisfaction—from somebody. And then I fell completely apart, weeping and wailing while my mother put her arms around me and said, “Mommy loves you all up!” Chronologically, I was well beyond the age when I should’ve been crying on my mother’s shoulder. Clearly my emotional state was another story. The story comes back to me on this Mother’s Day as I work my way through a personal and professional crisis. My mo...

I took one look at Deno’s Wonder Wheel on Friday night and told myself this ain’t happening. I had journeyed all the way out to Coney Island to attend Parachute Literary Arts’ Poem-a-Rama, which included poetry readings on board the famous 15-story thrill ride. Yes, on board. Participants were cordially invited to get into one of those little cars that looked an awful lot like cages to me and then slowly climb 150 feet into the air while a poet read his or her work. This was taking art to new heights. (C’mon, you knew that one was coming…) Now given my, ah… issues with high places, I suspected that this event might present a problem for me, but I promised to do more of those funky things that you can only do in New York and this one really seemed to fit the bill with a vengeance. It was just five years ago that I had taken my life in my hands and my heart in my mouth to ride Coney’s legendary Cyclone roller coaster. How could I possibly walk away from a chance to take on t...

I took my last walk down Reade Street on Thursday. For the last four years I’ve been taking a bleary-eyed stroll down this quite block to attend a 7AM boxing class twice a week at the New York Sports Club’s Tribeca facility. There was a time when getting up so early for such a brutal workout was absolutely unthinkable to me, but I gradually got used to it and now I actually prefer the dawn patrol routine. The people in the class are great and you once you’re done, you’re done for the day. But like so many other businesses in the city, the Reade Street gym got muscled out by Manhattan’s stratospheric rents. The building’s owners jacked the current fee from $21,000 to forty grand a month and the NYSC front office elected to shut down the gym down rather than fork over the dough. It was a surreal experience having the class on that last day of the gym’s existence. The place was sparsely populated, the young woman at the desk didn’t bother checking our IDs and I had to ask her...