The Luna Park Gazette

It feels like it's never going to stop. It's been raining all week here and now on Friday night, it's raining even more. I got soaked coming home from work and I feel lousy, like I've got some cold or virus or voodoo curse and I'd like to hop on the next plane to Bermuda and never come back. Not that I'm bitter, of course. I'm just feeling kind of low and torrential downpours do little to cheer me up. I've been fighting this cold all week, and I'm even angrier because I was feeling pretty lousy just two weeks ago. I've had problems with my health for years now, ever since I came down with mono back in...Jesus...what year was it? '84? '85? Oh, hell, no, don't tell me that. Well, whenever the hell it was, it was a real turning point in my life. Prior to that I'd get sick like anyone else, get better, and that would be the end of it. But then one day I woke up and felt like I had been run over by a freight train. At that time I was w...

Later Man, Later Man, Puts things off as long as he can Trouble's near, danger's great, he'll just ask, Can't it wait? I was leaving work the other night when one of my co-workers bid me goodbye with the words, "Later, man." The phrase stuck in my head and by the time I got to the elevator I had come up a bogus superhero--Later Man. I played the old "Spiderman" cartoon theme in my head with new lyrics, describing my hero's amazing power of procrastination. I pictured my satirical superhero putting off saving the world to do something--anything--else. He possessed a unique combination sloth, fear and ADD that made him impervious to completion. I saw him in my mind's eye, masked, the big "L" on his chest sitting in front of a TV while his wife tried to pull him off the couch. It could be a funny bit, I thought. But it took me a few days to realize that Later Man already exists. I see him every morning in the mirror when I shave. Later...

Who the hell are you people? I started this blog to showcase my writing and the hope was that people would read my work, be overwhelmed by my powerful prose, and leave adoring messages under the "Comments" section. That hasn't quite happened. Instead I'm getting message like these, from my devoted fan, Joern Lillehagen, who took the time to write: It's time for the best of the Weblogs, Inc. Network. The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Hi there! I just visited your blog and it`s really cool! I have a coastal vacationns site/blog. It pretty much covers coastal vacationns related stuff. Come and check it out if you get time :-) So first old Joern plugs something called Weblogs, then he greets me and praises my blog and finsihes off by pushing his "coastal vacationns site/blog" and related stuff. Gee, thanks, Joern, I'm so glad you like...

My father fell down in his room last night. I was working on my computer when I heard this terrible crash and at first I thought it was the people upstairs. They're a pretty noisy bunch and I figured one them tipped over a bureau or some other large piece of furniture. But I knew in my heart that the sound was a body hitting the floor and hitting hard. I walked out to the living room where I thought my father was watching TV and saw the couch was empty. Then I got frightened. He's 84 years old, suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and he can't afford to fall down. I ran to the back to his room, and, through the darkness, I saw him on the floor. He looked like an infant struggling to get to his feet. I did my best not to panic. I asked him if he hurt himself and when he said he was okay I helped him to his feet, coaxing him gently all the way. He told me he had been reaching for the bed in the dark and missed. I think that's been happening to him a lot lately. He reach...

Thank God for the cannoli. That beautiful Italian pastry was the only thing that pulled me from the edge of madness tonight. And just barely. I COULDN'TA BEEN A CONTENDA The day had started out all right. I did some chores, grabbed lunch, and headed into the city to take a gym class and then meet up for happy hour with some of my over-forty amigos from MINY. The boxing class was hell on earth. Not only was it brutal, but there were only two people in the entire class, so hiding in the back of the room was not an option. I think the instructor, a young Arabic-American fellow named Saadi, has a future in the torture business, since he is quite inventive and seems to enjoy his work. Sprints, suicide runs, wheelbarrow races, squat thrusts--take that, skinhead! Why didn't I go to Pilates? Then Saadi decided we should spar--just hitting to the body--and he proceeded to whale the tar out of my middle-aged body for three seemingly endless rounds. It's amazing seeing his skill in th...

There it was sitting in the deli freezer, ready to tear my throat out. I had just come in to get some orange juice, when I looked down and caught the label on a carton of ice cream: Violent Swiss Almond. Say what? I'm just reaching for my wallet and I'm being threatened by a psychotic drupaceous fruit in lederhosen ? Then I looked again. My eyesight is going, along with everything else in my system, and I had read the label too quickly, reading "Violent" when it actually said " Vanilla Swiss Almond." Maybe I should contact Ben and Jerry. Yeah, I need glasses, or contacts or one of those laser zap jobs that'll give me X-ray vision and the power to read men's minds. Of course everybody will probably be thinking hey, stop reading my mind, you stupid bastard, and get some glasses . Yesterday I had a number of these little eyeball malfunctions. First, I was reading an item about a man who had a "stinking resemblance to Robert Reford." Come agai...

When I was a child, I used to watch in amazement at my mother's reaction whenever she saw an actor she liked in an old an movie. "Oh," she'd say in disbelief, "look how young he is!" To my kid's mind, this made no sense. Someone like Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart looked like they always looked. I didn't see any age in their appearance--they were all adults anyway, which automatically made them old in my eyes. What did it mean for someone to look young? All right, I'm older now, probably close to my mother's age when we were watching TV in the livingroom on the old Motorola. Now I watch DVD's on my computer (Jesus, this was all Flash Gordon stuff when I was a kid. And if you don't know who that is go change your diaper) The other night I watched "Taxi Driver" on my computer. That movie--brace yourself--came out in 1976, the year of the bicentennial. It'll be 30 flipping years old in a few months. And I looked at Robert DeN...