The Luna Park Gazette

You know things are bad when your smartphone tells you to watch your mouth. I could claim that I had been provoked, but then most hotheads say the same thing when they want to justify their temper tantrums. I was walking down 69th Street one morning last week lugging my prized parka and searching for a cheap tailor. I had broken the zipper on the damn thing after a hunk of fabric got caught up in the teeth. That was bad enough, but it got even worse when I found out that repairing the thing would cost me 34 freaking bucks. Do you people know I’m out of work? I’m trying to keep my bills down and now I get blindsided by this grief. And of course the temperature was all set to swan dive straight to wind chill hell. I politely bailed on my regular dry cleaner and hiked up to my backup guy only to get the same shocking price quote. I was feeling pretty frustrated as I walked home and I guess I was also pretty distracted because I dropped the parka on the ground. “ Fuck! ” I...

I stood on line in the pouring rain on W.57th Street with one question rolling around my mind. Why the hell did I ever leave that sauna? I had gone—quite reluctantly--to the Holiday Inn to attend a job fair where I planned to take a brief look around before going the hell home. I didn’t want to go to this thing at all, but unemployment can drive you to do the strangest things and I was afraid to pass up a chance, no matter how slim, of landing a job. When I reached 57th Street I saw a group of people with umbrellas standing in the rain and mistakenly took them for mourners attending a funeral at a nearby church. But these were not mourners, at least not in the conventional sense. They were job seekers, just like myself, standing in a long, unmoving line of like-minded individuals who were trying to get into the job fair. I don’t know why I was surprised by the turnout. Hedge fund managers and real estate moguls may be doing all right, but plenty more people are hurting and ...

Well, I said I would consider all possibilities. Ever since I became a free agent earlier this month I’ve been scouring the online want ads in search of reasonably honest work. I confess it’s been a little eerie not having any place to go during normal working hours. I still go to my early morning boxing class in lower Manhattan twice a week and, in an effort to expand my job search, I approached two of my classmates to let them know I was looking for work—and promptly learned that both of them were unemployed as well. On the way home last week I ran into a tsunami of commuters bubbling up out of the R train station at Rector Street and I struggled against the human tide to reach the Brooklyn bound platform. On Friday morning I saw my bus, the X27—or my ex-bus— picking up passengers at Ridge Boulevard for the commute into Manhattan. But I wasn’t on board. That evening I took the subway into midtown to meet some friends and I watched a woman on the D train carefully putting a...

There was a moment during a recent morning commute when everything came together for me. I had just settled into my seat on the X27 bus when I began my tradition of silently reciting the 23rd Psalm. This may sound a little nutty to some people, but I find that it helps with job-related stress. On this particular morning I had just started when the bus pulled up to an intersection and a fabulous ray of sunlight beamed right into me. I could feel this purifying energy penetrate every cell of my body and it seemed like I was levitating right out of my seat, as I truly feared no evil. Well, I’m going to need that kind of light, power, and courage since I have parted ways with my company of eight years and I am now officially unemployed. I’ve been hinting at this situation in earlier blog posts, referring to a personal crisis and similar code words. Well, this is what I was talking about. When I handed over my work ID on Monday morning, I felt physically lighter, somewhat expo...