The Luna Park Gazette

Now there was a flashback I could’ve done without. Every so often—too often, come to think of it—Facebook resurrects photos from yesteryear. I do come across some pleasant memories, but then I’m quickly appalled at how much time has flown by since I’d taken the damn picture. Last week Zuckerberg’s time suck machine hacked up a selfie I had taken some eight years ago when I hospitalized for double-knee surgery following a slip on the ice. Yikes, I thought, why would in God’s holy name would I want to be reminded of that flaming fiasco? I clicked off and I forgot all about it. Until Thursday. I was walking home from the gym that morning and decided to take a different route to my house. Well, it was a different all right, as I took a sudden trip down Memory Lane, which felt a lot like the highway to Hell. It was cold and I was wearing my recently purchased facemask, which, while making me look like a bank robber, it does keep me warm. I was passing a house near N...

Okay, this is getting weird now. I’ve been on a wild journey down nightmare alley for the last several evenings while recuperating from a nasty cold. There was the David Letterman comedy show fiasco that I described in last week’s post. But prior to that I dreamed that I met up with an old frenemy I haven’t seen since the Eighties and another instance where I had a telephone chat with a long-lost girlfriend. I believe these are both straightforward examples of wish fulfillment. In the case of the frenemy, my subconscious mind wanted to bring back the friend part of this guy’s personality and ditch the enemy, the one who liked to mock me in front of other people and then claim it was all a joke. The ex-girlfriend call was a case of letting her know that I was okay, that I had recovered from that distant time when she quite rightly parted ways with me. I was a mess back then, to be honest, and I was doing nothing to climb out of the hole I had dug for myself. There was no ...

"I wouldn't give your troubles to a monkey on a rock.”--David Letterman Now that was a bad set. Over the years, I’ve been told many times that I’m funny, with several people even suggesting that I should give stand-up comedy a try. I never pursed the comedy route, though, favoring fiction over joke-telling. I’ve gone to a few comedy clubs, and I find them a bit tiresome after a while, where even laughter becomes a chore. And let’s be honest, fear is also a factor here because I dread the idea of facing a roomful of heckling drunks. I had a shrink who once gave a blunt assessment as to why I didn’t take the stage. “You’d be good at it,” he said. That observation hit a nerve, which, of course, is what I was paying the guy for. I do have a long and miserable history of self-sabotage, but I have also suffered from that most malicious malady known as the Disease to Please, where I crack jokes hoping—usually in vain—that people will like me. I also kid around wit...