The Luna Park Gazette

I keep reaching for my ID card. I’ve been out of work for about three weeks now, but I’m so used to clipping my company ID card to my belt each morning that it feels weird leaving home without it. The photo of me is atrocious and that little piece of plastic makes me feel like an animal that’s been sedated, tagged, and released back into the wild, but now I must admit that it’s a little scary not having one. My sister-in-law is into astrology and I asked her to do a chart for me—yes, I’m that loopy—and she tells me that September will be marked by not one, but two eclipses, which in the zodiac world are signs of great change. What kind of change, whether good or bad, is not specified and we don’t have any say in the matter anyway. It’s just that I’ve had a big change already in seeing my magazine shutdown and the eclipses ain’t even here yet. My sister-in-law tells me that these events are important for the mutable signs, like Gemini, which covers yours truly. The people in ...

I need to see an exorcist. I finally got my computer back, but I paid a heavy price in the form of time, money and what’s left of my sanity. On Friday morning I want to the repair place on Seventh Street expecting to pick up my machine two weeks after it croaked on me, and then zip on back home to write, blog, screw around on YouTube, and look for work. Well, that all went merrily straight to Hell in a hatbox as I had to wait nearly an hour before I got the goddamn thing, only to bring it home—via car service—to find that there was some kind of glitch with the email. So I called the repair place. Their solution? Bring the computer back to downtown Brooklyn—via car service again. I couldn’t believe my ears. I finally had the machine back home and now I had to do an about-face? So back downtown I go, and the techies fiddled with it while I burned for a total of five minutes before clearing up the problem—which they somehow couldn’t do over the phone. And then I had to call c...

I'll keep this short and sour. My computer is still on the fritz and I'm hunting and pecking this post on my I-phone. But wait there's more. I am also out of work, unemployed, and about to go back on the dole. The job I accepted just four short months ago has gone belly-up. It seems the publication I hired on to had been losing money for a while and could not be salvaged. I learned this appalling news on Tuesday during a conference call from the Chicago office. I actually thought it was a joke and I was ready to say "knock it off; it ain't funny." Only it was no joke. And it still ain't funny. I have to be honest: the shock has not worn off yet. So now it's back to searching the want ads, applying for openings, going out on interviews and hoping from hell to breakfast that I find something pretty damn quick. I go back to my dad's motto: scared money never won. I know he was right but it's hard not be scared at a time like this. B...

Well, at least I cleaned out the closet. That’s about the only good thing I can say about Friday, a two-ton, four-alarm fiasco of a day--except of course, for the fact that I got through it alive and managed to stay out of the loony bin. Yes, it really was that bad. It started early in the morning when my faithful Apple computer up and croaked on me after years of dedicated service. I pressed the On button, heard the familiar baritone beat, and looked at a shockingly blank screen. I hit a few buttons, did the on and off routine, and nothing happened. I felt panic surging through me, but I tried my best to keep my nutsy behavior in check. Check it tonight after work, I told myself, and if it’s still on the fritz bring it to the repair shop. And then I asked, please God, let this be the worst thing to happen me today. It didn’t quite work out that way. Absolutely everything I put my hand to promptly went belly-up. I was making stupid mistakes at work. I just could not get a...