The Luna Park Gazette

“There are no great men, there are only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.”-- Fleet Admiral William Frederick Halsey, Jr. Who would have thought that such a minor decision would lead to such a fabulous experience? Most mornings on my way to the office I stop by a local drug story to pick up my daily supply of that satanic beverage known as diet soda. (Yes, I know this crap is bad for me, but that’s not what this story is about.) The store is vast and it is part of what was once the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building, but now it belongs to some orange-haired reality show psychotic whose name escapes me. There are registers one either side of the store and I usually check out on the Wall Street side, rather than the Pine Street side. On Thursday, however, I felt like a doing something different, breaking my routine even in the slightest way, to see if there’s any truth behind the whole Butterfly Effect business. The Pine Street register is us...

It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time in my life when the phrase “active shooter” did not exist. No one told you to “shelter in place” and there were no such thing as bulletproof backpacks. A security consultant came to our office this week to give us a rundown on emergency procedures. I’ve been in the workforce since the Eighties so I’ve heard these routines many times now. The consultant covered such topics as blackouts, explosions, and natural disasters. But then he started talking about active shooters, reflecting our changing times and deteriorating society. Mass shootings are not new, unfortunately, but they were a hell of a lot less frequent when I was younger. And I don’t recall getting safety tips on what to do if one some gun-toting lunatic shows up at the office. Now we have run, hide, fight scenarios, though I’d hate like hell to stand before an armed killer with nothing but a stapler and a swivel chair. The consultant talked about sheltering in place,...

"There’s a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.”—Don Miguel Ruiz That was one rough night in Charm City. I’ve never been to Baltimore and after a hellish experience I had recently, I’ll be putting off the experience indefinitely. Fresh off my vow to shine a light on my darker emotions, I went on an emotional search and self-destroy mission last week that was so hideous I ended up behind bars. Fortunately, this prison stretch wasn't real. It was just a bad dream, although the word “just” hardly does justice to the heinous horror show I subjected myself to the second I closed my eyes. The madness started Tuesday evening when I attended a get-together at a restaurant in lower Manhattan. The room started getting rather crowded and I felt that reflex anger of mine starting to kick in, so I came up with yet another coping mechanism for my psychological tool box. It’s based on an old fire safety drill on what to do in case your cloth...

I threw the light switch on in my bathroom Friday night and winced in surprise. The bathroom lights had fizzled on me earlier in week, the same time I was hacking my way through a cold, and the return to normal service had caught me by surprise. I had been living in both darkness and denial, hoping that the situation would somehow work itself out on its own, and the lights would come back to life like Tinker Bell. Oddly enough this approach—which I apply far too often in my life--did not work, so after a couple of mornings of showering in the dark, I decided to arrange for an electrician to stop by and take a look. This plan proved to be successful and now I can shave without having to wear a miner’s helmet. I’m feeling better now, but I decided to permit myself a little more TV time this weekend, which allowed me to check out an old Twilight Zone episode called “ I Am the Night-Color Me Black ” that deals with a much more toxic kind of darkness. I had already seen this epi...