It could be someone’s living room in 1969, say, just outside of An Hoa: open air — no bullet holes or mortar scars — a kind of scrub palm and bird of paradise dream of …

Marlon Castle, 22, got in line for the entrance to the San Diego Convention Center after having stood in line for 20 minutes at the will-call window for his ticket. The ticket is worn around …

It’s over, you know that. But it’s not. It’s never over. Year after year it comes back; and every goober, his brother, and his family will be there jamming traffic for miles on three freeways, …

Haven’t done this for a while. Seems indicated: recommendations for summer beach reading. In the past few months I have happened upon three extraordinarily excellent novels I’d like to share with any dear and constant …

Junior Wells and John Belushi must have been grinning up from wherever they are now — mumbling and slurring with cocaine-and-Tanqueray-addled approval at “Doc” Holliday’s riffing over the keyboard — a faux Hammond B-3 setting …

June has had damp cool about it. The sky, for most of the month, scallop and oyster clouds. Congealing bruises showed at intervals beneath the marine layer, a kind of lividity: the chill skin of …

Speaking with a few young dudes and a few chicks up here in North County, I asked, “What’s up with your weekend?” this past last Friday/Saturday of gloom and damp in May. Justin Daum is …

I am staying in Escondido. I am unfamiliar with this town (which is called a city) and so I set out to explore on a Friday night and a Saturday afternoon. For purists who demand …

How to explain what I was doing in Escondido as parking-lot cop on a Friday night in May for “Cruisin’ Grand: Pre-’74 American Hot Rods, Customs, Classics, Vintage & Muscle Cars.” Since I was 15, …

It seems as if the same number of people now spend their Friday nights watching YouTube (and other nights, and sometimes 24/7 — the meth users, for example) as once watched DVDs and VCRs (VCRs …

“Remorse, emptiness, relief, disbelief, sadness, feeling older, morally diminished.” These are feelings expressed to me in an email from a friend and fellow writer about the death of his son-in-law. But they could as well …

Not all Fridays — let’s face it — are fun, games, leisure, and license. Some suck. Not unlike a very recent one, a several-day visit to what I will call Palomino Hospital in the horse …

Friday again. Payday again. You’ve been down to Ramen noodle soup since Wednesday. You’re in North County, but you are far from retiring, much less retiring rich. Vons is on the bus route along Rancho …

Fridays are paydays for many working people, and it reinforces in some that sense of license implicit on the eve of the weekend. One example of this is the way people drive late on a …

I am writing this the day before that God-forsaken Hallmark idiocy, Valentine’s Day, and it is Friday the 13th. This seems to spell doomed love. There are other kinds of real affection. I have several …

In these harsh, Bush-shadowed times as the sun sets on the empire of the two Georges from Texas, it is not surprising that our Friday nights may find us with a shortage of funds slated …

One recent Friday your columnist started out from San Marcos after five days with his disturbed son — maybe ten hours’ sleep, total. The whole five days. Fear and heartbreak inform the ride to Carlsbad; …

On a recent Friday night I was staying at the downtown YMCA. Don’t ask. The irony in its being referred to as the “Y” for “Young” was not lost on me. I wondered if the …

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud pointed out. He would never have said the same thing about a house. Certainly Carl Jung would not. In my case, as I approach my former address …

Sometimes, on a Friday night, if you’re a kid and you live in the wilds of San Marcos, all you have are your friends, your skateboard, and a 7-Eleven. Here’re four guys; we’ll call them …

On a recent Friday I was at Interfaith Community Services in Escondido, where I encountered some beatific (I think that’s the word) people, a diabetic seizure, two movies, and some dozen or so miracles. The …

In the past minute or three I’ve been trying to determine what it is that so distinguishes one month from another. What is it that transpires from January to February? For comparison, I’ve thought of …

“…White people are obsessed with being in the right neighborhood and the Internet is no exception.” The above is from a popular blogsite called “Stuff White People Like” (“This blog is devoted to stuff that …

Here is a post-holiday column possibly welcome only to readers who spend inordinate amounts of time taking the rectal temperature of cats. It is about winter, after the holidays. There are other names for it; …

It was a Sunday morning, the last in November and just after Thanksgiving. The Time Machine, the 1960 George Pal version, came on one of the classic-movie stations, and I could not get out of …

Christmas is getting harder to dodge as a topic, and I may have outwritten that one. I think I have columns running right past that date. Either way, allow me to indulge in a favorite …

Christmas is on my mind. As a season in San Diego it is to me as cruel as April was to the poet T.S. Eliot. New Year’s, I maintain, does not matter so much. My …

We have all by now — or most of us anyway — found ourselves familiar with the phrase “random acts of kindness.” I first saw it on a bumper sticker some years ago: “Practice Random …

I will (the mountain or Allah willing) have turned 58 years old by the time this appears, assuming it does at all. Anything I might be ready to carve in stone looks increasingly like folly …

Maitland is standing, fourth from the teller, on Friday afternoon at an undisclosed Hillcrest bank. He is holding a paycheck for $1050 and a deposit slip. His cell phone at his waist is ringing, a …

Give us, Lord, a bit o’ sun,A bit o’ work and a bit o’ fun:Give us all in the struggle and SputterOur daily bread and a bit o’ butter.— On the wall of an old …

Visit the sick, it is said in scripture, somewhere. I try to do that when indicated, possibly because it is pretty much always the last thing I want to do. Often I’ve found that can …

“I had a feeling that something was wrong for a long time.” Fifty-six-year-old David Clark says as he lies recovering at a friend’s home from a liver transplant he received on June 13, 2008. He …

It would have been two weekends ago, All Souls (morphed along our border into Day of the Dead), a date I have had fun with in the past. It is, if nothing else, an opportunity …

Shall I give Halloween a rest? I don’t much think so. Why me? In fact, I notice it growing on me day by day, and I’ve been paying more attention to its utility as, if …

Fall is the most fun season to write in and about. I have exhausted the famous Hemingway quote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in one of their letters, used it time and time again in this …

Now is the onset of a delicious annual malady that might be called the Halloween syndrome, particular to Southern California. Why Halloween seems to be so thoroughly milked in this part of the world is …

You’re standing on a street corner in San Diego. It is summer in, say, North Park: the corner of 30th and University. Actually, you’re a good light-year away; you have to be; it’s brutally hot, …

I am, I guess you could say, a bit of a cutup. It’s true. I’m known for my wry sense of humor in certain circles, and more than once, believe me, I have left fans …

As always, it is a little odd writing this column at something of a remove, a matter of a week or two, sometimes as much as a month, though I try not to do that …

I arrived in San Diego on the 4th of July, 1979, on a Greyhound bus I had boarded in Louisville Kentucky after two previous bus changes out of Port Authority. I was 27 years old, …

Only three months until Christmas! It’s enough to throw me into a panic now, weeks earlier in September. This gives rise to my thoughts this morning on drama. I, for one, have been surrounded by …

Visitation weekends are an anxiety experience for Baldwin, punctuated by sheer bliss. Baldwin is in his 50s and lives in Mission Hills. His little boy is 32 years old. Since 2003 he has registered bipolar …

“Everybody in the hotel read The Little Dog Laughed, everybody; a story to make you die holding the page and it wasn’t about a dog, either; a clever story, screaming poetry…Mrs. Hargraves read it and …

Over halfway through September. I can’t wait. I’m still stuck here in these dog days, maybe all of us are. My sentences are too long. I hear this from readers. On spell-check now I’m getting …

Sitting down to write this column, I checked the exact date this would appear and was immediately transported to that morning of 9/11/01. It is such an obvious choice for a topic that I am …

By now, huge portions of San Diego’s literate and book-buying public know that Chuck Valverde, owner of Wahrenbrock’s Book House on Broadway, downtown, died on Saturday, August 23, from respiratory illness and complications at the …

Many people will tell you, when the subject comes up, that one’s dreams are uninteresting to others. I do not find that to be the case, but what I do find is that most people …

The end of summer is at hand, and I may well miss it. Jumping the gun a bit, but not by much, I find myself less disgruntled, overheated, and dying for that sense of “death …

We San Diegans are a self-congratulatory lot; the weather itself is, to us, a kind seal of approval on our meritocracy. After 28 years here, I see it much this way if I don’t think …