It will have been some weeks after the San Diego comic convention by the time this sees print, but it hasn't happened yet as I write this. I'm hoping to avoid the thing if possible, …

Hot enough for you? I’m counting on the heat still being a predominant if subliminal influence this first week of August. As I often do this time of year, I find myself reaching for science …

This last weekend of the month I find myself in Mission Valley, poolside at the Promenade luxury-resort condominiums, across the street from Sears. I’m with my son at the home of my high school friend …

In six weeks or so it will be nine years since I started this column in 1999. “TGIF” was the brainchild of senior editor Judith Moore, who died in 2006, just after publishing the critically …

“We’re 52%!” the sign read. It was being held aloft by a very young man with unkempt hair grown past his ears and a sparse and nascent cinnamon beard. He wore a yellow T-shirt bearing …

The price of gas. I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked, “When are you going to write something about the price of gas?” To which I have been answering for months now, “I …

“Blackwood stopped writing here, unsure how to proceed. Was he writing a column for The Free Weekly (otherwise known as the Freek), his column — called, imaginatively enough, ‘Weekend’ — or a Gratitude or Serenity …

Thoughts on Independence Day: I have very little at the moment. Independence, I mean. I have plenty of thoughts, Bub. I’m back in the hospital with an infected ankle incision, and I am dependent on …

This approaching Sunday, the 29th, will be the birthday, assuming he is still living, of Andrew “Legend” Stevens. Andrew was best man at my wedding on July 29th in 1977. Born in Cornwall, England, in, …

As I begin this I am looking out the back door onto the rain-spattered deck, which in turn looks out on a common garden area and its foliage bowing and scraping to me in the …

I suppose it can be classed as a superstition that I have an irrational fear of things going too well. I look forward to these: Fridays falling on the 13th of a month. It appeals …

This is being written amid days in a row of May Gray. It may be a safe bet that you are reading it in the early part of June Gloom. Possibly not, but it doesn’t …

I am sitting on my patio in mild shadow under the blades of a broad-leafed banana tree and late-spring sky washed with high clouds like feathers, angels wings, and fish bones. It won’t be long …

Vocabulary is a word I rarely use. When I do, it is usually in the context of a word not in someone or other’s vocabulary, in an effort to define him or her. As in, …

“They were strict vegetarians, even shunning eggs, and throwing away any food that the ‘shadow of an Englishman had crossed.’ ” This is a quote from the Wikipedia entry for J. Krishnamurti, describing the man’s …

Did you miss Mother’s Day? Did you fail to observe it and your mother is still alive? I did for many years, even as a child. It was, after all, my mother, Mary Jane Arburn, …

“He had become a public figure, as no composer had done before. Unlike composers of the preceding generation, he had never been a purveyor of music to the nobility he had lived into the age …

Having lived in San Diego since 1980, one would think that I would have long ago gravitated to residence in the northern portion of the county. It seems, by consensus, to be more generally livable …

ZZ Top, those Southern Dukes of Riff Rock, will be at Harrah’s Rincon Casino a week from this Saturday night, the tenth. I’d like to go, but it is a bit more bother for me …

I am asked fairly often what I write about, and I can’t let it go as simply “Fridays.” There is love, death, cabbages, kings, my childhood, say, or some broken appendage, chemical dependency, or misanthropy …

The dates attached to Thursday through Sunday of this week, or rather weekend, have a series of associations for me. Let me have my coffee, let the old brain percolate on the back burner as …

I have pretty much done this anyway, but I should make a more formal proclamation, I suppose, that TGIF encompasses weekends as well as Fridays or simply Friday nights. In fact, I have been fairly …

Spring is in the air and a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. My thoughts are turning to an old love this morning as I inhale the odors coming from the cheap eatery …

There is no way around it, not for several more weeks; I can’t get out, cruising on crutches to look into neat stuff to do on Fridays or weekends. I am reduced to poring over …

Friday, today, I took a taxi to the office. The driver looked familiar, though I had forgotten his name. He told me but wishes to remain anonymous. I’ll call him Mel, and he reads this …

I am not alone this Friday. Much of the county — certainly North County, where I am holed up, my foot encased in fiberglass and elevated — is rendered nearly as immobile as I am. …

“With some important exceptions, scholars and translators, from the 19th Century onwards, have been virtually at one in their indifference to Seven Against Thebes; an indifference which has been deflected from time to time only …

Tourism is, of course, huge in this town. Myself, I never thought of San Diego as a destination. I’d given the place pretty much no thought at all — it was filed away under an …

San Diego Theatresports: The Funhouse (6822 El Cajon Boulevard) When: Fridays at 7:45 p.m. Saturdays at 7:45 p.m. Saturdays at 9:45 p.m. “A cross between improvisational comedy and Family Feud, the Funhouse combines improv with …

I am looking forward, many weeks down the road, to getting out on a Friday in this town, a payday for me like millions — maybe billions — of other people in the world, and …

Checking online listings for things I am missing out on (as I recuperate with a broken foot I’ve gone on about), especially Fridays, I happened upon “Bodies” for Friday, February 8. This exhibition (which closes …

It has been suggested, and rightly so, that I have gone a bit far afield regarding what’s going on in San Diego on Friday nights. I have been given much freedom, and it seems it …

Friday nights here at what I will call the Mayflower Villa Apartments in San Marcos are a far cry from what goes on those same nights in, say, Pacific Beach. I am learning about this …

My original thought here was to write something about winters in the near future — you know, with global warming in mind and all — but my science fiction writer’s instincts seem to have atrophied …

Thank God it’s January. All of January is the New Year, I’d say, and the equivalent of a Saturday morning on a close-up of a calendar. In this case, this January, it is a Saturday …

I won't bore you with why I was in the hospital yet again, but I will tell you I was pretty much kicked out around sundown on a freezing, raining December night. I was given …

"The secret police? What is this, California?"

This past 90 days or so have been the worst of my life. Even 14 months of cancer treatment in '86 and '87 weren't worse. Since late August, I've been either hospitalized or drunk in …

I am 57 years old and hardly into video games. Any sort of gaming, for that matter. With the possible exception of Scrabble, all board games bore me. Gambling bores me, even if I'm winning. …

I spent last night, a Friday night, in a Motel 6 somewhere off I-5. I don't know where exactly, but it is right around the corner from that mock Dutch windmill you see from the …

I have been living with my 30-year-old son for three days now. He invited me here while I transfer from one living situation to another. As yet I don't know what that will be. For …

A recent Friday night in San Marcos, at the Melrose apartment complex, indicated to me a whole new level of the living comatose. Toe tags should be issued by the score for those in these …

It is certainly tiresome to me to keep writing of the same thing. Some have said they enjoy the hell out of my descriptions of affliction. I refer, of course, to alcoholism. But it is …

Guess where this column has been. Regular readers will have a pretty good idea, and others won't much care. While in an inpatient therapy group after surgery during which new chest hardware was installed over …

This great Friday night: fly-blown and beer redolent, resounding with the subsonic backbeat booming from the trunks and rear seats with words of racial hatred, fantasies of bullet-riddled cops echoing up Texas Street, the odor …

I would have thought I could find at least one more joke, yet another gag along the Dean Martin, Foster Brookes line of humor, that oldest of joke butts since the prostitute and/or lawyers: the …

Busy Fingers Are Happy Fingers — Joe Deegan Mother Reader — Barbarella Build Your Writing Muscles — Ollie Let the Tape Recorder Do the Work — Matthew Lickona Faith — Abe Opincar Make Something Better …

Aside from my father, the only real, if informal, writing teacher I've ever had was Judith Moore. I met her in 1989, when I was working at Hunter's Books in La Jolla, one of the …

His name is Alex Mohamed or Mohamed Alex; he doesn't seem to mind either or both or in any particular order. My height, short and curly grayish hair, trimmed beard, large, gray-rimmed glasses, Mohamed wears …

On June 19 at 220 Broadway, just outside room 30, the courtroom of Judge Timothy Walsh, an unlikely group gathered in the narrow hallway to "represent," as it were, at the sentencing of Alissa Valencia. …