The Luna Park Gazette

On March 18, 1985, three men were arrested on drug and gun possession charges as they were driving through the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. This would not have been big news except for the fact that one of them was Joe Pepitone, a former New York Yankee who had been a three-time All-Star. I barely knew who the guy was, but I remember seeing him on TV as he was taken out of the police station in handcuffs. “You let us down, Joe!” a man shouted off-camera. “You let us down.” It was quite dramatic and looking back, I can’t help but think of the little boy who, legend has it, approached Shoeless Joe Jackson and pleaded with him to “say it ain’t so, Joe” after the beloved ball player was charged with helping to throw the 1919 World Series. But I didn’t feel that way at the time. I recall being annoyed at what I considered this unseen guy’s pathetic hero worship. You’re a grown man, for Christ’s sake, I thought. Why are you moping over an ex-jock who doesn’t give a damn...

“Mind is the creator of everything. You should therefore guide it to create only good.” – Paramahansa Yogananda, The Law of Success. Now that’s more like it. I had another whopper of a nightmare this week, but this time at least there was a motive for my madness. In my last post I discussed this terrible dream I had where I was the gun-toting villain in a mass shooting scenario. The episode was bad enough in its own right but things got so much worse when I woke up because I couldn’t not nail down a direct source for this mental massacre--and I still haven't. I wasn’t angry at anyone at the time and--as far as I know--I hadn't been influenced by anything that I had seen on TV. And yet there, I was blazing away like Elliot Ness at a bootlegger’s barbeque. The experience left me quite shaken, but I’m relatively happy to report that my nuttiness took a more discernible path in the latest slumber time epic. In this dream I’m working at some company with a f...

At the climax of “Falling Down,” William Foster, the main character, comes to shocking realization. “I’m the bad guy?” he asks. “How'd that happen?” Foster, portrayed by Michael Douglas, is a defense worker in the 1993 film who is having an extremely bad day. After losing his job, he abandons his car in a traffic jam and hikes across Los Angeles so he can reach his ex-wife’s house in time for his daughter’s birthday. His fury escalates as the film progresses until he is committing murder and firing off a rocket launcher. And despite all this destruction, Foster believes he is the injured party. I haven’t seen the movie since it first came out, but I remember finding it a bit heavy-handed in depicting this angry man’s story. And some critics complained that many of Foster’s targets included Asians, Latinos, and African-Americans. Shooting Star The film comes to mind now after I had a kind “falling down” experience of my own last week, though, this was only a ...

It’s funny how things work out. You’re walking down the street looking for a unicorn and you wind up finding a mermaid instead. Let me stop here just to say that I haven’t been experimenting with LSD or spicing up my salads with hallucinogenic mushrooms. I’m just relating a rather intriguing experience I had last week with synchronicity. This is a concept first introduced by Carl Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection." Synchronicity arose with Jung's use of the ancient Chinese oracle I Ching, and, by the way, it’s also the name of a 1983 album by The Police. I became interested in Jung after reading about his concept of the shadow self, which he saw as the uncivilized, even primitive side of our nature. It is generally made up of the parts of ourselves we deem unacceptable. Heart of Darkness Suppressing the shadow self can prevent us from reaching our full potential, which is something that re...