This Friday I’ve got to get out of the house. I’ve been told my recent stuff is pretty bad...all this “I’m old and in the way” sort of thing. Okay. What do we do? My …

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which “are” there. — Richard Feynman Friday nights at D.G. …

It was precisely when your English instructor introduced you (assuming they did) to T.S. Eliot’s most famous phrase, “April is the cruelest month,” that it was determined whether your sense of paradox and irony might …

Having just recently turned 60, I am pulling up the rear of what has commonly been termed the Baby Boomers. Apparently the generation dates from the end of WWII or 1945, so that would place …

“Beware the ides of March” is a quote from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a warning regarding the emperor’s impending assassination. For a time, the dusty old quote enjoyed a new life as a reference to …

Unlike, say, rock-and-roll bands, classical musicians in a quartet are not required to exhibit personalities as they perform. A tuxedoed homogeneity and a serious sameness of expression will do nicely, thank you. If the performers …

March may have blustered into San Diego like a lion more than once but never often enough to earn a cuteism like June Gloom or May Gray. Nothing like, “Ah, yes, just like clockwork every …

This column will appear several weeks after the particular Friday morning on which I am working on my laptop in the sunlight, and it is nice to think that this genuinely spring-like weather might continue …

If romantic love is a chimera, then so is its annual namesake. Our most convenient (if sometimes sketchy) online encyclopedia will give you this next paragraph — and more — but as for “Who was …

I had hoped that by now things would be looking better than they are for a still new year, but any momentary anxiety I might have had about running out of things to complain about …

Looking at the last weekend in this first month of a new year, dawning decade and still infantile millennium, I am confronted with some unavoidable recollections of my first experiences in this city in January …

The third week of January, and it seems about the right time to check in on how any New Year’s resolutions might be going. Me? Since you ask, I no longer make them. That is, …

Going to the jasmine in my mind... It is 5:00 a.m. this Sunday winter morning in the new year and I can’t sleep. I’m staring at the tube: a marathon infomercial for “The Singers and …

Composing this page fully two weeks before it will appear either in print or online, I wonder just what might have been a common experience for imagined readers (I am always vaguely surprised to learn …

Not everyone need agree, and it is unlikely everyone would, but I am certain I could walk out my front door and get a consensus of ten people within ten minutes that 2010 sucked more …

Nary has a Christmas gone by without my thinking of a string of years — in the late ’70s and early ’80s — when my then wife and I would prepare ghost stories or stories …

Arriving in mid-December was hardly guaranteed, though, I’m mostly pleased to be here — or anywhere, as a tired joke would have it. Come to think of it, an uncomfortable number of my life’s aspects …

Two days ago I was discharged from UCSD Hospital after open-heart surgery, during which one of my coronary valves was replaced with a metallic (rather than porcine) one. I have been moving very slowly since …

Dead of night. Dead of the week. Dead of November. At 1:15 a.m. I am looking north at the unhurried, shimmering serpent of Highway 163, up from Mission Valley to a borderland of gaudy neon …

I consider the ghost story essentially optimistic: it presupposes something, after all, beyond this mortal coil. This first week of November promises to continue the interesting variety of autumnal as well as desert coastal weather …

October has been very good to me. I’ll miss it. Rain and chill, overcast skies; one could squint and imagine oneself anywhere in reality as opposed to Southern California, which I never thought quite qualified. …

Countdown to Halloween right here on TGIF: the Gutenberg cyber all-hits all-the-time blogorama and alternative weekly fishwrap and freaky friday funfest!!! your DJ? Whaddami sayin? Your KJ! That’s keyboard jockey — Johnny Lira! Comin’ at …

If San Diego (and I don’t think we’re alone) can take Halloween as a month-long theme, why not me? And why not here? I don’t think the chamber of commerce has adopted the once-pagan holiday …

San Diego is a town that loves its Halloween. I noticed this when I moved here in the first week of October 1980. Retail shops displayed PVC pumpkins and skulls amid ubiquitous floor-to-shoulder-height displays of …

Coming in to work today, I found on my desk a five-year-old copy of this publication. Pretty much five years ago to the day I had written, “It is not the usual thing for the …

This is something I heard in an anonymous setting: I said, ­“I’d like to steal this story” and was given permission to do so. “Just change my name,” Rick (­let’s call him) said. “Maybe ­it’ll …

This weekend, the second one in September, now (as of publication) passed, I will be doing something I have never done before: reading a second book in a row by Norman Mailer. I sense “T.G.I.F.” …

I must write this on the eve of Labor ­Day’s three-day weekend, so I ­can’t very well tell you how it went, how it was — what the hell. There is a distinct shade of …

Late August and early September: the light shifts, even in Southern California. The sunlight is almost subliminally tinted with a faint amber as if in re-creation of an old daguerreotype, lending the world a certain …

Friday and Saturday this week, the 27th and 28th of August, the San Diego Symphony Summer Pops series is hosting singer Michael Feinstein in concert under the banner of “The Sinatra Project.” I’m not sure …

This last full week of August promises to resemble summer to some degree, but that would be divination, I suppose, as ­I’m writing this a full week earlier. “Promises”; this reminds me of a blurb …

Writing this on the eve of the first full weekend of August. Coolest summer remembered in 30 years here. Chilly in more ways than one: the buses and trolleys are peopled with more than the …

My son will turn 33 this August, on a Friday coming up. It is a significant age for a man, at least in Christianity, and it is one-third of 100 years. He was born in …

­I’m writing this toward the end of June — Friday, the 18th — and just beginning to breathe (some wheezing involved) sighs of relief at what I hope are indications that some of the worst …

Settling down in a Starbucks on Fifth in the Gaslamp on a drizzling Monday morning, I am attempting to pore over the U-T to see what I missed over the weekend — what, maybe, I …

“People who have hallucinations after operations sometimes ­don’t seem to come all the way back. Part of them gets lost. The hallucination can be at least as good, as powerful and compelling and meaningful as …

I was once told by the editor who enlisted me into these pages to “write everything as if it is the last chance ­you’ll have to write anything at all.” This ­isn’t always possible, of …

It is an age-old cliché that when in the process of shuffling off this mortal coil, one’s entire life flashes before one’s inner vision (“eyes,” they say, but I assume “inner eye” is what is …

It is the Sunday after Thanksgiving, two days after “Black Friday,” a term originating (according to Wikipedia) with the Philadelphia PD in the 19th Century to denote this holiday’s weekend traffic that is a bitch …

This, as far as I can tell, is a true story. I did not have a tape recorder for Jack Burnham’s story, and my own memory is increasingly unreliable. This took place two weeks before …

To be thankful for anything much at all requires humility, I believe. I have little enough of it; in fact, I have a dichotomy common to alcoholics, and that is a combination of both arrogance …

To Be Thankful Requires Humility — John Brizzolara This Year, We’re Staying Local — Pamela Hunt-Cloyd Eat What the Politicians Feed You — Don Bauder This Is How It’s Supposed to Be — Barbarella Thanksgiving: …

For me to write of family strikes me as vaguely pretentious if not outright hypocritical. Possibly we all feel like failures in this area, at least to some degree. Those who do not I tend …

It may well be behind us as this sees print, but I will comment again on the fascination this part of the country has with the macabre at this time of year. Between Halloween — …

My friend Christian Cullen was telling me a story of how he was robbed in his apartment at dead-blank, carotid-artery range by two inept assailants with a .45. They mistook Cullen for a major marijuana …

Here is a tale told to me on a Friday night, one that may sound like so much ramadoola (an old hepcat word I miss) or worse. I cannot prove a word of it, but …

Do this on a Friday or Saturday night — almost any night, really. Impress your date, your friends, kids, mom or dad, freak out your dog; it will only cost what you want it to, …

Gregory Page is back from Australia, where he toured on his own, then hooked up with Steve Poltz to re-form the Rugburns Down Under. Page being the rugburn — or “Sideburn,” as he termed it. …

Another hot — really freaking hot — August weekend. A Sunday morning, actually, and I’m greeting the (in theory) post-church crowd in and around Horton Plaza with the perfectly civil question, “Wassup? Know I’m sayin’?” …

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your …