The Luna Park Gazette

One of my favorite Rodney Dangerfield bits has the legendary don’t-get-no-respect comedian imploring his audience to give him the OK sign. “All my life, all I ever wanted was one of these,” Rodney said, joining his thumb and index finger and spreading his remaining digits. “I never got one of these.” It’s been a crazy week, with all sorts of nonsense chasing me down, driving me nuts, and refusing to go away. But I’ve decided to overlook all that grief and take a moment to blow my own horn, pat myself on the back, and give an OK sign to my own reflection for an incident that happened on Wednesday. I had strolled up to the 7/11 on Fulton Street to feed my bottomless Diet Coke habit and I wanted to treat myself—or abuse myself from a nutritional standpoint—by getting one of those big drinks with tons of ice. Yes, I know I shouldn’t be guzzling that swill at all, but there is a good side to this story, I promise. I loaded up one of those monstrous cups with ice cubs, stuck it on...

“ You must learn to be uncomfortable! ” The cycling instructor at my gym made this comment well into Saturday’s class and I confess I was a little taken aback. Her classes are always gloriously difficult, for which I am incredibly grateful, as this is what I’m paying for, and what I currently need, given an annoying weight increase I’ve recently experienced. ( Oh, cheese , how could you do this to me?) And as a card-carrying Catholic school survivor, I live to be uncomfortable. I sprint from happiness like a deer flees a forest fire. Maybe I didn’t write the book on being uncomfortable, but I sure as hell added several new chapters. Of course, my instructor was talking about a different sort of uncomfortable. She was referring to short-term physical strain leading us to better health and trimmer waistlines. Saturday’s workout was quite different from her usual torture sessions and thus a bit disorienting—which is how you improve and grow. I, on the other hand, traffic in e...

Maybe Erich Segal was wrong. The film Love Story became famous for the catchphrase “Love never means never having to say you’re sorry,” and while the line made it to No. 13 on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 top movie quotes, I think there are times when a sincere apology can do wonders for a relationship. I’ve been on a TV nostalgia ride for several months now thanks to the cable station known as MeTV, which presents a slew of old programs from my childhood. It’s a blast seeing the work of famous actors, writers, directors early in their careers, but I must say these shows display a serious lack of diversity. In fact, it doesn’t exist at all in this world of all Caucasian male all the time. And lately I’ve been picking up on some seriously hateful attitudes toward women in a couple of shows I otherwise enjoy. Have Gun Will Travel is probably my favorite of the old TV westerns. For the young people out there, the show starred Richard Boone as Paladin, a kind of Ren...

The woman in the white veil has no idea how much she helped me. I was sitting in a pew at Our Lady Victory Church at Pine and William streets in Manhattan one day last week trying to reassemble my brain. I was recuperating from a brutal case of self-sabotage where I had done pretty much everything but ram my head into the nearest brick wall. I’m not exactly sure what exactly set this particular disaster in motion—something to do with my computer at work, I think—but I remember getting frustrated and then I turned the anger on myself, bitterly regurgitating all my past missteps, mistakes, and missed opportunities. I was so angry, so miserable, and so hard on myself that if this had been a prize fight, the referee would have stepped in and stopped the one-sided barrage immediately. It was the exact opposite of the mindset I’ve been trying to cultivate for 2019--my Hey 19 effort--where I do everything I can to have the Greatest Year Ever. Instead of thinking positively and ef...

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...