The Luna Park Gazette

At the end of William Goldman’s 1960 novel Soldier in the Rain , Eustice Clay, a beleaguered soldier who’s been on a run of appallingly bad of luck, looks up into a stormy sky and expresses his true feelings. “Fuck you,” he says to the angry clouds. After the week I just went through, I know exactly how he feels. I, too, was standing in the middle of deluge, only I was outside Pennsylvania Station, and instead of directing my rage up to the stratosphere, I aimed my anger straight into my smartphone. “Fuck you!” And I wasn’t talking to the Almighty, the Fates, the weather gods or any other such supernatural being. I was shrieking at a car service dispatcher who just told me that there would be no car to pick me up on this horrific night—even though I had reserved a vehicle the day before to take me and my luggage the hell home. This was a fitting climax to my three-day business trip to Philadelphia. Nothing seemed to go right during this conference. I was bouncing in a doze...

I like to do this visualization exercise where I imagine a beam of pure light coming down straight from Heaven and going right into the top of my head. The beautiful light clears away all the negative thoughts and emotions in my head, breaks the mental chains that are holding me back and allows me to look at the world with a fresh pair of eyes. The light moves down to my nose, mouth and throat, where it sweeps away all the germs that may be lurking there, a perfect image for a hypochondriac like yours truly. From there the light surges through my entire body, clearing away and fixing up all my various ailments both real and imagined. This routine may sound corny to some people, but I love it. However, the other day I got silently tongue-tied when I thought to myself “the light clears away the fear germs.” Fear germs? There’s no such thing, I told myself. But now I’m starting to wonder about that. Fear can grip us like a terrible disease if we let it take over our minds. Pret...

Every morning when I meditate I start off with a little message to myself. Open all the pores of your skin, I say, borrowing a line from a qigong DVD I bought years ago, and listen to God smile. That last bit is my own creation—the DVD says “Listen to a sound from far away”—and while I’m not sure what it means, I do like the sound of it. Meditation involves listening to silence so you can quiet your mind, step outside of your problems and worries, and, ideally, become a better person. It’s Easter Sunday and I made sure to meditate on this most blessed morning. This is a time of rebirth and renewal, where we look forward with hope and let go of the grief behind us. I know these are big words and I say them every year, but I’m just a sucker for a happy message. I must confess that I didn’t make the most of Lent this year. I didn’t get my ashes on Ash Wednesday; I ate meat on nearly every Friday of the season, and let Palm Sunday blow by like it was somebody else’s religion. ...

Several years ago one of my coworkers was showing me some headshots he had taken for the company ID card. He was smiling broadly in the first shot, but the grin slowly slipped from his face over the course of the next three pictures. “Death of a smile,” I said, looking over the images. That phrase came back to me this week when I saw that Turner Classic Movies was showing back-to-back Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and Woody Allen’s Sleeper , two of my all-time favorite comedies. Or at least they used to be. I’ve seen both these films again in the last year for the first time in decades and I had the same surprising, and rather sobering reaction to both of them. While I had laughed uproariously at these two movies the first time I saw, I could barely crack a smile during the most recent viewings. The scenes that I had found hilarious back in the Seventies now seemed hackneyed and stale. Young Frankenstein mercilessly mocked the old Universal horror movies, right down ...

It was a dark and stormy night—seriously. A rabid storm system barged its way into Brooklyn on Friday and the rain was so nasty I started humming that godawful song from Titanic . I was in the middle of my Friday ritual, where I order up a vat of wonton soup and a small mountain of fortune cookies from the Hot Wok, my local Chinese place, and park my rear end in front of the TV for a night of Netflix and "Law & Order" reruns. Exciting, no? Well, actually it did get a little suspenseful as the wind roared so loudly that at one point that I hit the mute button just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. It was only the wind, all right, but that was enough. This was one of those nights where you thank God you’ve got a roof over your head. The rain kept on going and my mind floated back to another brutal storm and even though this one happened in the middle of the day it was one of the blackest times of my life. It was a cold day in November and my father was st...