The Luna Park Gazette

“What you resist, persists.”—Carl Jung I was just one stop away from my destination when it hit me. This the last leg of my trip to Wallingford, PA and I should’ve been happy. I had made all my connections, my train was about to pull into the station, and I hadn’t gotten lost, mugged, abducted by aliens or impressed into the British Navy. No, everything had worked out for me and, apparently, that was the problem. My shadow self didn’t have anything to get upset about, so he set about creating misery out of nothing. I suddenly started thinking about how I had wasted so much time in my life, how I caused my parents such anguish by my inability—(refusal?)—to find a career path. It was the usual stuff that often runs through my mind, only this was magnified several thousand times. It seemed to come from absolutely nowhere, but, of course, that isn’t true. Anxiety is a constant companion, only it rarely gets this aggressive—unless I’m an airplane and then I’ve got Xanax. ...

I emerged from the depths of Penn Station and the sounds of the city smacked me square in the mug. I was returning home from a night in the Philadelphia suburbs where I had gone to attend a friend and former co-worker’s birthday party. In addition to having a great time with fabulous people, I also achieved a personal milestone by breaking out of the Netflix comfort zone conundrum. In short, I got up off my ass and did something different. Now I was back in town, weary from the train ride and struck by the contrast with the environment I had left just hours earlier. I had rented a place through Airbnb in this beautiful woodsy area. The apartment was massive—I could move in there tomorrow—and the morning was so lovely and peaceful. So, obviously, the city with all its people, traffic and especially noise, gave me quite a jolt as I stepped out onto Seventh Avenue. But amid the honking horns, blaring music, and the voices of people roaring into the phones like they're co...

“There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” ---Leonard Cohen, Anthem Kintsugi is a Japanese art for repairing damaged pottery where powdered gold, silver or platinum is applied to the broken areas. The 400-year-old technique, also known kintsukuroi, or “golden repair,” treats breakage and repair as part an object's history, rather than something to disguise. Psychologists have applied the concept of kintsugi as a way of viewing emotional injuries so we that accept and embrace our problems and imperfections rather than try to hide them. I’d heard about the kintsugi years ago, but I googled it yesterday following a weird and ultimately wonderful dream I had that kicked off with me brawling with a total stranger and ended up with me meeting the love of my life. This mental midnight double feature occurred earlier in the week, and it started with a bang. For reasons that I don’t begin to understand, I’m in a small office somewhere kung-fu fig...

I know this looks weird but hear me out. If you were to walk into my house early on most mornings, you might be a little surprised to see me reclining on the living room floor. And you might be tempted to ask yourself, “hey, what is this stupid bald bastard stretched out in front of the TV like the town drunk when he’s got a perfectly good bed to sleep in?” A fair question, no doubt, and you deserve an answer. While I may look like I’m on an indoor camping trip, I’m actually working doing myself a world of good. I recently discovered a meditation technique called yoga nidra, or yogic sleep, a guided meditation practice aimed at creating a deep state of relaxation between sleep and wakefulness. Unlike most yoga routines, this one doesn’t involve twisting yourself up into a pretzel and getting all bent out of shape. Yoga nidra is typically performed in the corpse pose, or Shavasana, which, on the surface, could easily be mistaken for lying on your ass. But there’s so much mor...

James Lenihan was true to his unhappy country. That expression-- Fidelis patriae infelici —is the Lenihan family motto, one of many facts I learned from my late father, James Lenihan. A veteran of World War II, my dad fought in Europe with a division known as The Timberwolves, and I’ve been doing some research to find out more about his experiences in the army. Last week, I Googled the words “James Lenihan + NYC + World War II” and was delighted when I got a hit from a military history website. I clicked on the link and found James Lenihan, all right, but not the one I was expecting. This was a James Lenihan who was born in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1846 and who had served with the 5th U.S. Cavalry during the “Indian campaigns.” Private James Lenihan had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, “for gallantry in action on 2 January 1873, while serving with Company K, 5th U.S. Cavalry, in action at Clear Creek, Arizona Territor...

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. – G.K. Chesteron I saw the American flag on the ground the moment I stepped outside my house on Friday morning. It had apparently fallen from the front door grating where my landlady had put it. Any other day I would’ve immediately picked the flag up and returned to its place on the door. But on this day, I just kept walking. After a majority of American voters gave Donald Trump—a convicted felon--a return ticket to the White House, I’m starting to wonder if people really appreciate the importance of the Stars & Stripes. My father fought for that flag in a little shindig called World War II, which was started by a guy named Adolph Hitler, whom Trump deemed worthy of praise. When I look at the words “E pluribis unum” now all I see now is a meaningless phrase in a dead language. Maybe we should think of changing our national motto to “Hooray for me and fuck you” because that’s the direction we’re heading...

“Better let him go.” The voice came from behind me as I walked down 87th Street early Saturday evening. I was supremely tired and anxious to get to the nearest subway station. I had spent the last four hours hiking through Central Park with my nature walk Meetup group and I was feeling it. There was a time when I would’ve walked down from 97th Street, where the tour ended, all the way to Columbus Circle at 59th Street to get the D train to Brooklyn. It was a beautiful day, there was still some daylight left, I was in no rush to get home, and I’d be walking down Central Park West—why not burn up even more calories? But I was especially beat on this day, and I had this nagging feeling that maybe I’m getting a little too old for these lengthy strolls. Gosh, I hope not, since I loved walking, and I get a real buzz when I check the step counter on my phone. But I’d skipped one subway station on the way down, so I reckoned I’d earned my ride home. I was walking toward the Museu...

I texted my sister a warning as soon as it began: “Ridley is singing!” We’ve been watching a British detective series on PBS called “Ridely” for two seasons now. It’s a decent show starring Adrian Dunbar as a retired cop who is lured back into service as a consultant. I’ve seen better, frankly, but it’s well done, and Dunbar is backed up by a fine cast and likeable characters. My biggest beef with the program is that our hero is part owner of a jazz bar and every so often—far too often if you ask me—he takes to the stage to sing. The songs, for the most post, are painfully bad, especially one number called “Open Up Your Door,” which had me jumping out my window. In addition, Dunbar singing’s voice is, let’s say…subpar, and what the hell does singing in a jazz club have to do with solving crimes? We all have our hobbies and side hustles, but this plotline seems arbitrary, and it is by the far the weakest aspect of the series. If the writers ever decide to jettison the sin...

“ It is forbidden to despair.”- Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav Thanks, Frank, I owe you one. Frank Sinatra did some heavy lifting at my gym this morning when he showed up to pull me out of a serious funk. I’ve doing been a number on myself over the last few days, lurching into my crackpot hitlist of all the things I don’t like about myself. I’m not sure what triggered this latest bout with the blues, but I suspect that it might be a simple case of The Bungee Effect, where I’m feeling good about life and my Jungian shadow self gets up out the darkest corner of my mind, roars “Oh, hell, no!” and yanks me back into the abyss. I honestly believe I’ve been making progress in my battle with depression, but I’ve been working on my emotional highway to hell for so many years that misery has become the path of least resistance. It started on Saturday when I joined one of my Meetup groups for the annual Gowanus Open Studios event in downtown Brooklyn, where artists and venues open their d...

I staggered through the depths of the Atlantic Avenue subway station Saturday afternoon ready to admit defeat. I had been so looking forward to this day, when my blogging buddy Xris of Flatbush Gardner and his partner would be hosting one of their fabulous get-togethers at their beautiful home. There was no hemming or hawing on this one; no debating if I should or shouldn’t go like I do before just about every other occassion that catches my interest. I happily RSVP’d the second I got the invitation. This was going to great, I thought. And indeed, it was. I had an absolutely wonderful time meeting new people whilst merrily munching away on all sorts of delicious eats. But I had to work my way through several circles of Hell before arriving at my destination, thanks to the MTA. I knew things were going to be rough when I learned that my local subway, the R train, had been shut down for the weekend for several stops in my neighborhood and replaced by a free bus service...

I stood at the corner of 9th Street and Fourth Avenue, checked my phone and made a decision. “I can walk this,” I said aloud. I had been waiting for a bus that would take me from Park Slope down to Red Hook. But there was no sign of one and I didn’t want to be late for an event being held down by docks, so I elected to hoof it. This was on Friday night and I was getting out of my comfort zone routine of Dr. Praeger's veggie burgers and Netflix. I prefer to lay low at the end of the work week, but I’ve been looking to shake things up a little and scrubbing my regularly scheduled hibernation seemed like a good start. I was attending the Scrappy Reading Series , which was being held at Compere Collective on Van Brunt Street, the kickoff for Red Hook Open Studies, where local artists’ studios and workspaces open to visitors for the entire weekend. “Celebrate all that it is to be scrappy with some of the finest locals on the planet,” the event’s organizers said in an onlin...

So now I finally know the real story behind Max Paradise. Back in 1980s there was a horror anthology show I occassionally watched called Tales from the Darkside . It was a kind of Twilight Zone knockoff and while there were a handful of decent episodes, there were a lot more misses than hits. The series aired in October 1983 with “Trick or Treat” with Barnard Hughes, which was one of the better episodes. Another favorite of mine was “Going Native” whivh concerns an alien who infiltrates a therapy group so she can study human beings up close and very personal. Kim Griest plays the extraterrestrial and she spends a good portion of the episode narrating her observations over a series of still photographs depicting earth as cruel, savage place. The episode accomplishes a lot on a low budget and few locations. And then there’s “Distant Signals”, which stars one of my favorite actors, Darren McGavin, who was the lead in Kolchak: The Night Stalker in 1970s. Mr. Smith Goes...

I was watching an old Sixties spy show on YouTube last night that opens with the hero being ambushed at Lincoln Center. Three bad dudes start shooting at him in broad daylight at this legendary location, managing to both miss their target and avoid any contact with the police, who apparently were out of town that day. Our hero reacts to all this flying lead by turning tail and running away from Lincoln Center as fast as he can. After our treatment at the famed performance space on Saturday afternoon, my family has a pretty good idea how that guy must’ve felt. Granted, nobody reached for his shooting iron, but we did have to contend with some high caliber attitude and bulletproof indifference. This was supposed to be a day at the theater for me, my sister and auntie. We’ve done many such outings over the years, where we agree on a show, pick a restaurant and enjoy the day together. On this we were all set to see Iron Man star Robert Downey, who was making his Broadway debut...

Thank God there was a bathroom. As my body ages, I find that I’m heading to the loo a lot more often than I did in my younger days. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll check the location of the lavatory upon entering a new place before scoping out the fire exits. I understand that this is a fact of aging, but there’s no law that says I have to be happy about it. I spent the day on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn on Saturday after signing up for The 48 Hour Film Project, a contest where teams write, shoot, and edit films in the allotted time period. I had done this last year with the idea of getting more experience on a film set and gaining enough confidence to shoot a short film of my own. A year has gone by without me making that film, so I figured I’d join this competition again as way of acquiring additional knowledge so I could get my rear in gear. Like last year, I was the director. I wasn’t at all happy with my directorial debut and I was determined to do a better jo...

The greeting was written in chalk on the sidewalk outside of P.S. 102. “Welcome back,” it said. This was the first day of school in New York and the buildings were gussied up to encourage returning students and put a positive spin on the least favorite day of a kid’s life. At least, it was for me. Another message in chalk encouraged students to “Dream Big.” A wonderful sentiment, but I couldn’t help thinking about a school in Georgia where chalk was probably being used to draw body outlines and the only dream was the living nightmare of yet another mass shooting in America. By now, I’m sure we all know about the massacre at Apalachee High School, where a student at the Atlanta area school killed four people—two students and two teachers—using the mass shooter’s special: a “black semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle.” Gee, where have I heard about this weapon before? Oh, yeah, that’s right—at just about every other mass shooting in this demented country. Welcome to America...

“I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.” — Friedrich Nietzsche I was rolling by the produce aisle in my local supermarket yesterday when I got a sudden craving for some citrullus lanatus. As we all know, this is the formal handle for watermelon, that famed flowering plant species of the Cucurbitaceae family. Watermelon was synonymous with summer when I was a kid, and I’d have a healthy helping of the stuff nearly every single day. There were some nice pieces in the refrigerated section, and I thought about treating myself to some of this large edible fruit. But then I stopped. This was the last of August, meaning we were hours away from September, which means summer is over and I shouldn’t indulge in warm weather eats. I’ll have to take out the air conditioners, pack away my beach chair, break out the cold weather gear and prepare for months short days and freezing temperatures. I’ll relentlessly complain that summer goes too fast and th...

“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” -- Bruce Lee I can’t remember the last time I drove a car, but whenever it was, you needed a key to open the door and a rearview to back up. After moving back to New York in 1997, I decided to get rid of my battered old Toyota. I didn’t want to deal with the traffic and parking headaches or the hideously high auto insurance costs. I decided I didn’t need a car in this city with its subways, buses and ferries. Yes, I hate the subways with a passion, and I constantly complain about them, but the truth is that the trains are a pretty efficient way of getting around. But I had to reacquaint myself with the latest in auto technology last weekend, when my sister, auntie and I traveled to my aunt’s farmhouse in the Berkshires. My aunt and her late husband bought this old house in Cumming...