T.G.I.F.
Green milk curdled: ash and smoke dumplings in ham and pea soup. Cigar and pipe smoke wafted against white fluorescence, hovered like the slow and fat flies near the entrance to the Tijuana coroner's office …
Sitting at the child's classroom desk I use at home, allowing my eyes to find focus where raindrops bash themselves against the screen to dissolve dirt into rivulets and make archipelagos of gritty islands against …
I don't want October to end. This has been a fine one. Three-quarters of the way through my favorite month I have to look around me and say, this is good. I have a theory …
The origins of the Friday the 13th superstition are, as any reader of The Da Vinci Code now can tell you, the events of 13 October in the year 1307. On that day, "French authorities …
The Café Noir on Ninth Avenue near Island Avenue is painted a flat charcoal so that it disappears after sunset, leaving only the small, red-neon rubric, "Café Noir," unblinking, a cyclopean Cheshire cat's bloodshot eye. …
Mention the words "club owner" to me and you can watch my eyes narrow. I'm probably picturing a beer gut sausaged into a too-small T-shirt, a few days' growth of beard from which sprouts an …
A Friday night's diversion, without making a point of looking for any, presented itself when I walked into Borders Books downtown, at Sixth Avenue and G Street. Shelf-surfing at Borders (any bookstore) is a kind …
The second Friday in September. I'm not there yet, and if you've picked this paper up in a timely fashion neither are you. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say …
Isaac ("Ike") Curtiss has been playing on the streets and beaches of San Diego on and off for years. I have never done that, but I joined Curtiss, a long-haired, late-40ish guitarist with an Eric …
The Volunteers of America at 1111 Island Avenue is in trouble. The wrecking ball is waiting in the wings. You can almost see its shadow from Market Street. It's the only detox facility in town …
Last Friday I went to the beach for the first time in a year. Why didn't I think of this through the endless, mind-numbing heat wave all summer? I went to Coronado and spread my …