The Luna Park Gazette

“Music is the soundtrack of your life.”--Dick Clark. In 1983, German musician Peter Schilling had a hit single with the song “Major Tom (Coming Home).” The song, which features a character unofficially related to Major Tom from David Bowie’s 1969 song “Space Oddity”, peaked at No. 14 in the U.S. on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart during the final week of the year. I remember hearing “ Major Tom (Coming Home) ” while working out at a neighborhood gym and one of my buddies starting whistling along with the chorus. “ Earth below us, Drifting, falling, Floating weightless, Calling, calling home... ” The song faded from my memory for the longest time, but it made a surprise comeback a few days ago when I decided to enlist Major Tom in my Mental Health Hit parade. Let me explain. I struggle with depression, anxiety, hostility, and a slew of other issues that circle my brain like a colony of vampire bats swarming around a 20-story blood bank. But I’m on a journey to become my...

The minute I saw the guy I knew it was time to end this thing. The guy in question was a former friend and fellow blogger whom I had not communicated with in three years. But then here he comes walking back into my life and I say to myself, enough already, just go over and talk to him. Life is too short for this nonsense. So, I approached my friend, stuck out my hand, and said I was sorry that we had disagreed. He returned my handshake, and for a few seconds, I was feeling pretty good. Until I realized he was dead. Well, all right, the guy isn’t dead in real life. This was a dream, so none of what I just described actually happened. I had met this man through blogging several years ago. He was so supportive and friendly and he always left these wonderful comments on my posts. I’ve been blogging for nearly 20 years now—oh, God, is that possible?—and, to be honest, there were times along the way when I felt like calling it quits. But then I’d read one of his glowing...

Hey, what’s the deal with San Antonio? That may sound like an opening line from a cut rate comedian, but seriously, people, why does this Texas city that I’ve never visited keep popping up in my life? San Antonio is the second-most populous city in Texas after Houston, as well as the site of the Alamo Mission, where Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and many others died in 1836 in the infamous battle with Mexican troops. The city of 1.4 million people is also known for Paseo del Rio, a 15-mile-long river walk, the McNay Art Museum and the Natural Bridge Caverns. I once had a five-minute crush on a woman from San Antonio many years ago. She was an operator for a credit card company, or some other outfit and I was just so pleasantly surprised by her kindness. We chatted for quite some time, long after she had helped me solve whatever problem I had called about. The conversation was flowing so naturally that I dropped a hint that, hmm, maybe we should stay in touch? I know this ...

In 1957, a year that will live in infamy for many baseball fans, the Brooklyn Dodgers packed up all their cares and woe and headed west to Los Angeles. Brooklyn fans were devasted by the news and they directed all their hatred toward Walter O’Malley, the real estate businessman who acquired majority ownership of the team in 1950. The 2007 HBO documentary, “Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush,” noted that if you asked a Brooklyn Dodger fan whom they shoot if they had a gun with only two bullets and were facing Hitler, Stalin, and O'Malley, the answer would be “O'Malley, twice!" Now, all you of old time Dodger fans, please put down your weapons, because, as I note in my blog’s bio, I was “born in Brooklyn in the same year the Dodgers moved out”-- and I had absolutely nothing to do with it. The team was once known as the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, which was reportedly coined by Manhattanites to mock the Borough of Church’s extensive surface transit system. Tr...

I knew I saved that fortune for a reason. Whenever I do one of my wonton-soup-and-movie nights, I like to get a stack of fortune cookies to munch on whilst I enjoy my flick. I’ll readily admit that soup and fortune cookies don’t make for the healthiest meal plan, but I like to give myself a pass on the weekends. And I make sure to read every single fortune in the pile—both for entertainment as well as instruction because good advice can come from anywhere. The other day I found an old fortune on my kitchen table that read “we are taught by every person we meet.” The concept is not new, of course. I’ve seen a couple of variants on Instagram, including one attributed to John C. Maxwell that says, “each person we meet has the potential to teach us something.” The important word here is “potential” because we can’t learn a lesson unless we are willing to receive it. This can be quite challenging when we run across the seemingly endless supply of dopes, dickheads, liars and ...

I had to ask. It’s cold in New York right now, cold as a bastard, to be honest, and car owners of a certain generation might be familiar with the expression “dead as Kelsey’s nuts.” I was speaking with my brother Saturday morning while walking face-first into a freezing wind and he reminded me how our father loved to use that colorful phrase, which means something is done for, kaput and out of commission. After speaking with my brother, I recalled how Dad had dropped that line on me one time in the Eighties after he’d gone out to start up my old Toyota Corolla, which had given up the ghost in our garage. “It’s as dead as Kelsey’s nuts,” he said upon walking into the kitchen. I was too angry and upset about my lifeless car to ask him where the hell he had gotten such a weird expression. This was one of many phrases my parents used to say that hark back to an earlier time, such as “another job well done by your Treasury men in action,” which my father liked to say, and whic...

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