The Luna Park Gazette

Okay, so let’s try that again. The new year got off to a decidedly rocky start for me when I got a nasty cold just five days into 2026. As if that didn’t suck enough on its own, the torment was compounded by the fact that I had been sick just a month ago in early December. Nobody likes being sick, but I’ve had health problems for most of my adult life, so getting hammered by back-to-back illnesses really rocks my world. I have been absolutely miserable for the last several days, wallowing in a rancid stew of resentment, regret and rage. My subconscious mind has been working extra hard to replay all my mistakes and missteps in glorious technicolor. It started last Monday with a series of seemingly endless sneezing fits. I was hoping I was having some kind of allergy attack, but I had to finally throw in the tissue and admit that was I sick once again. I had been so high on starting the new year on the right foot and now I could barely stand up. I wound up taking two days o...

I limped through the snow with the words of Rudyard Kipling rolling through my skull. “ Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again! ” The poem, which was first published in the 1903 collection The Five Nations , imagines the repetitive thoughts of a British Army infantryman marching in South Africa during the Second Boer War. The 1915 spoken word recording of the poem by American actor Taylor Holmes has been used for its psychological effect in U.S. military Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape schools. That recording also makes an appearance in the horror film 28 Years Later and I can tell you from firsthand experience that it was as creepy as hell. And “Boots” came to mind last week when my family visited the New York Botanic Gardens to see the annual holiday train show. The event, which is more than 30 years old, features model trains navigating through miniatures of New York City’s most famous building made entirely out of plant parts. The display inclu...

Everybody took their seats at my kitchen table on Christmas Eve as I lit up the holiday candle. I looked around at my dinner guests: my parents, my Uncle Joe and my brother Peter. They have all died—Peter and Joe both this year, actually--but that didn’t slow down the proceedings. Years ago, my shrink introduced me to the concept of chair work therapy as a way of processing grief. The idea is that you imagine a deceased person “sitting” in an empty chair and speak to them as if they are alive. The empty chair technique was popularized by Gestalt therapists, but it was first developed and demonstrated by Jacob Levy Moreno, a student of Sigmund Freud’s, in 1921. Some possible positive effects of the method include reducing harmful thoughts toward yourself, experiencing greater insight into your own feelings and finding peace and acceptance. “Engaging in an empty chair session can often be emotionally intense,” according to PsychCentral , an online resource for health and...

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...