The Luna Park Gazette

And I still have all that cheese. Last week started off like a blindfolded bronco ride through the darkest regions of Hell, but I somehow managed to survive. First I got sick or had an allergy attack or pissed off some local witch who put the horns on me, but whatever it was, I started coughing and sneezing and dragging myself through life like I was half-dead. It sucks to be sick, of course, and it sucks even harder to get sick in the summer, my favorite time of year when I like to think I have temporary immunity all those nasty germs and viruses just waiting to lay me low as soon as the mercury goes south. And what made things worse was the fact that I was scheduled to do a reading with my most wonderful writing class on Thursday. My sister was coming to watch and one of my classmates was zooming in from her new home in Tucson for God’s sake. And now I get sick? But the real Horatio Hornblower of the week was when my local laundromat, where I’ve been going for years, lost ...

The young man with the dreadlocks emerged from nowhere one foggy morning last week and began cleaning the windows of the ferry pilot house. Well, actually, he hadn’t come out of nowhere. He was a crew member performing his normal duties, but to me it looked like he had just beamed down to earth from God knows where because I was in a fog of my own making. Officially I was waiting on the 69th Street pier to catch the ferry to work, but my mind was so jumbled and unfocused that I barely knew where I was. When I forced myself to stop, look, and get real, I suddenly saw the guy doing his cleanup routine. The year is more than half over and I’m overdue to take stock of my efforts to make 2019 the best year ever (BYE). I’m not entirely satisfied, which is good to a point because you need to stay hungry if you want to keep improving. But I also think that I put an awful lot of expectation into radically changing my ways in the new year—even though I promised myself that I wouldn’t—...

You know for a little guy, Harvey had quite a grip. I met Harvey last night at a Mexican restaurant in Red Hook where my sister and I had gone for dinner. We spent the day with our friend Maria who lives out that way and afterward we stopped by this place on Columbia Street for a meal before catching the ferry back to Bay Ridge. Harvey wasn’t the six-foot rabbit from the Jimmy Stewart movie, nor was he the bruising goon who terrorized Ralph Kramden in an episode of “The Honeymooners”. No, this Harvey was an adorable 20-month-year old boy who was sitting with his family at the table next to us. We made eye contact as I was sitting down, exchanged silly faces, and things just kind of took off from there. I used my menu to play peekaboo and then unfurled my napkin in front of my face like a curtain. I waved my index finger at Harvey and he took this as invitation to grab my extended digit and swing my arm back and forth like he was pumping for oil. I probably should have sto...

I had just stepped off the ferry in lower Manhattan one recent weekday morning when I saw a young woman running down Wall Street. For a moment I wasn’t sure what was happening. She was dressed too nicely to be a jogger and I didn’t see any cops chasing her, so she clearly wasn’t Public Enemy No.1. And then in the next instant I saw a small private bus pulling away from the corner. I suspect this woman’s company uses this vehicle to take their people to offices in Jersey and other locations that are difficult to reach by mass transit. “Wait,” she shouted as the bus pulled away. “ Wait! ” I felt badly for this woman, as it was obvious she didn’t have a hope in a hell in catching that thing. “That sucks,” I thought sympathetically, knowing what’s it like to miss the boat or bus. “You’ll just have to wait for the next one.” This young woman, however, had other plans. As the van pulled away, she started running—I mean, running—as she rounded the corner and streaked down South...

So, about those thoughts and prayers… There was yet another mass shooting in America this weekend. This time it was at Virginia Beach when an armed psychopath walked into the city’s municipal center on Friday and killed a dozen people. The shooter, a longtime city employee who had just resigned, was killed in a shootout with police. I was having dinner in Manhattan on Friday night and I didn’t know what had happened until I checked my phone. We’re getting all the horrible eyewitness accounts, the hand-holding vigils, and the biographies of all the victims. We’re getting all the promises of how these massacres must never happen again. And, of course, they will. It’s strange—I haven’t really heard the right-wing politicians spewing their “thoughts and prayers” bilge in light of this latest slaughter. Maybe I missed their hollow words, or perhaps I’m automatically tuning them out because they are just so worthless that my subconscious is rejecting them upon arrival. I’ve go...