The Luna Park Gazette

And so, another birthday has come and gone. I turned 62 Good-Jumping-Jesus-Years-Old on Friday and it’s time for some reflection. This is a period when I ponder the important questions of life. Why am I here? What is my purpose? And who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder? Then again, I could always say “fuck that noise” and go out and have a rip-snorting good time instead. Well, I decided to choose Option B this year and I must confess Birthday No. 62 was a trip. For some reason I was in a good mood this year and I resisted any and all attempts to deconstruct my senseless joy in the face of unstoppable decrepitude. I decided to draw strength from a timeless source of wisdom: a fortune cookie from my local Chinese restaurant that contained a simple message: “ The older the crab, the tougher his claw. ” Now who could possibly argue with such brilliance? People keep telling me how crabby I am. Hell, I'm the crustacean sensation and I am going to skip sideways ...

I took hold of the refrigerator door with both hands and cranked my shoulders back as far as I could. I was going to show this irritating icebox who was boss. This was Wednesday morning. I was running late for my ferry and now, for no apparent reason, the refrigerator door, which has always worked perfectly, had suddenly decided to stop closing. I’d closed the door and it would snap back open. I moved around some items on the shelves, convinced that I had removed the obstruction, and closed the door again. And it promptly bounced back open. Okay, I thought, there must be a logical reason for this. Let me and rearrange the stuff on the shelves again. This time I had it right. Except that I didn’t because the damn door refused to close. I have been trying to stick to my Hey 19 resolution for the (former) new year where I put a brake on the anger, one of my most destructive habits. I’ve been making some decent progress in this effort, if I say so myself, but this refrigerator...

I take back all the bad things I ever said about Newark. Well, to be honest, I don’t think I ever actually badmouthed that particular New Jersey city. In fact, I applied for a job there as the mayor’s press agent several years ago and I was set to move there if I had gotten the job. I never got the callback, but I didn’t take it personally. After that, I really didn’t give the place much thought at all, until yesterday, when my sister, auntie, and myself, roared over to the Holiday Inn near Newark Airport for an all-too-brief rendezvous with my brother, Jim, my sister-in-law Amy, and my niece, Victoria. We also got to meet Victoria’s boyfriend. They had flown in from Colorado the night before and were heading out to Ireland on Saturday evening. We didn’t have much time together, but we made the most of it. I had not seen my brother and his family in a few years when I went out to see them in Colorado. We speak on the phone, of course, and Victoria, who has made a second ca...

There’s a scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West sends her flying monkeys to kidnap Dorothy. In the process, they literally rip the Scarecrow limb from limb and toss his body parts in all directions. “They tore my legs off and they threw them over there ,” the battered strawman tells his companions. “Then they took my chest out and they threw it over there! ” “Well, that’s you all over,” the Tin Man says. Yes, it’s a play on an old expression, but it came back to me on Friday in its original meaning as it held up a mirror to one of my most unhealthy traits. I had just gotten to my office, taken off my jacket and hoodie but, instead of hanging them in the nearby closet, I draped them over my chair, sat down, and started working—with my back pressed against the hoodie. Now, oddly enough, this was extremely uncomfortable. But I didn’t remove the hoodie, I didn’t hang it up or even put it somewhere else. No, I kept on doing my job with this ungainly lump p...