Having pretty much exhausted the possibilities in writing about the examining of and disappearance into my own navel (put less delicately by one reader and with an alternate but equally unaccommodating orifice suggested), I have …

It is close to my son's 30th birthday. In most ways he is much younger than this, and in even more ways, he is older. Geoffrey is on disability. It sometimes seems as if the …

December 2006 Sitting in the Learning Resource Center at San Diego City College. I am among at least 100 empty chairs, many of them comfortable enough to sleep in, though I hesitate to say so. …

Summer seems to be more and more a reminder of mortality -- traditionally, poetically, ass-backwards from the norm, I would think. When my English teacher Mr. Grey asked the class of high school sophomores why …

Cozy up to writers at your own peril. -- Truman Capote In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths. -- Graham Greene In spring of this year I wrote about a friend …

June 23, Saturday afternoon, a celebration of fun, sun, food, tunes, jewelry, junk, and groovy funkinabulation on the planet Obie -- a cluster-funkinabulized vibefest of love. The outpouring of Obecians and pilgrims to the time-warp …

Though I have owned and used a computer since 1983, I am like a man who owns a perfectly fine V-8 engine automobile and uses it only to listen to the radio -- that is …

Did you ever notice how when you go to sit down at your computer at home to do some work, you notice it really needs some Febreze? Well, maybe you do and maybe you don't, …

We all took turns at sound check as I recall. Now those last three words are key to everything that follows. It may have been Robin Williams who made famous the joke about how if …

This is in response to multiple requests for shorter sentences. Re: previous columns, "People are stupid don't you think? I do." Well, that's about it in a nutshell. Join me, won't you, for bitter, curmudgeonly …

A column of this size is perfect for the brief essay, and I have done this, in a sense, several times. Never have they been formal and rarely have they been entirely serious; the more …

Today would be one of those Fridays at the end of the school year when "pupils," as we were known then, would find whatever was outside the classroom window inordinately fascinating. I can remember one …

A friend recently posted a comment on the TGIF Web page. It was in response to a column (TGIF, May 10) in which I quoted another reader's electro-feedback. The blurt or blog, beyond its butt …

David Ross, known as "the Water Man," was doing what he does every day in the ghetto, sometimes twice a day, and that is distributing water, purchased at his own cost, to the homeless -- …

Sitting in William Heath Davis Park, diagonally across from the Horton Grand. It is, I imagine, like a patch of old, un-drowned New Orleans here in San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter. You can't pass it without …

Contributors to the message site have suggested it, and other more conventional letters-to-the-editor types have urged that I get a sex-change operation and "whine on Oprah." I have puzzled over this probably more than I …

I have owned and used computers since 1983, and yet it is only in recent weeks that I feel I may have something in common with anyone to whom publications such as Computer Age are …

"I don't think I've ever met an alcoholic I didn't like." Thomas Clarence Kennedy was born and raised in San Diego. A product of Saint Augustine High School in North Park and the United States …

I just got off the phone with the Specialist; on the job, she's the Specialist; off the job, she's Bugspray: full name Rocker Nutley Bugspray. I've written about her before. We were talking about music …

I read Kurt Vonnegut throughout the '70s, a bit in the '80s, and then didn't. The last of his novels I read was Timequake. I don't remember much of it, but the memory is a …

George Orwell once said something to the effect (which is why I won't put quotes around it, but I need to attribute it to him) that, ahem, deciding to write a novel is to deliberately …

I like to think of Barry Rovner as my personal driver. Last week I interviewed taxi driver Ellen Rae, whom I met through Barry, as it was his day off, and I will take the …

Longtime driver for San Diego Cab Ellen Rae has her own anagram for Friday and that is P.O.E.T.S. day. This was tossed off to her in parting from a British fare like a verbal tip …

People often ask me, "John," they'll say, "What's wrong with you?" Well, no one seems to know in any general sense. That is, if we're not settling for some facile cleverness like, "I'm an idiot!" …

It was music -- rock and roll, really -- that brought me to California in 1969. Since then, music and I have treated each other with various degrees of love and dismissal: gaudy and debilitating …

A friend from Los Angeles visited the other day. We hadn't seen each other for nearly ten years. Now, any ten years are significant in a human life, but the ten years I missed with …

One TGIF I have always meant to do is about that happy Friday-afternoon ritual of standing in line at the bank with your paycheck in hand. This can be a social hour (and it often …

This is a rare occasion; it really is. I am sitting at my desk, where I have produced tens of thousands of words in just a few months since I bought the desk; I'm staring …

A longtime friend of mine -- a professor in Tacoma who worked with me at Hunter's Books in La Jolla when he was going for his PhD and his divorce at the same time -- …

It has occurred to me that the publication date for this column is the day after Valentine's Day and what a shot for me. I'll say I forgot; just give me one more day. This …

February 7th would have been my father's 88th birthday. I've never visited his grave. Though, of the two of us, I'm probably the more sentimental, I think his belief in the afterlife was stronger than …

One month into the New Year and already I'm striking out in the resolutions department: quit smoking; get a new battery installed in my pace- maker -- a $20,000 proposition with no insurance (my fault …

The Specialist, known in certain circles as Rocker Nutley Bugspray, said that she was willing to bet that recurring nightmares about my mother would recede, then fade, shortly after Mom's death almost two years ago. …

It was a recent Friday night in Normal Heights and University Heights, each to either side of my address on Adams; I'm not sure in which I reside. My son was visiting for the weekend. …

It is almost precisely equidistant, like the fulcrum of a scale or lever, between two imposing monuments to San Diego's vanity, its corruption, its detachment, and the city's characteristic insistence that All Is Well, America; …

Pat Robertson, the TV evangelist, got me thinking. Another sign of the apocalypse possibly, but there it is. I saw him on The 700 Club this morning after a channel-flipping moment of desperation born of …

You started Friday afternoon at the office party, you think. Technically it was Friday morning with the eggnog instead of a second coffee by the fax machine where you started talking to Danielle. Okay, that …

A few more revolutions of this ball of rock and all of us happy water molecule coincidences can introduce ethanol molecules into our organisms and party like it's 1999, or if you prefer, boogey oogey …

The year was 1965, and the perversion I was about to perform would, within a matter of months certainly, even the final six weeks of that year, that winter, pale to "a harmless giggle" by …

The opposite of Friday, I pointed out some columns back, is Monday. Of course I'm talking about the old Friday of the mind and conversely Monday's mental set. This past Monday, the 11th, I turned …

Christmas shopping. I'm against it, personally. The hostility out there is incredible. It's a miracle more people don't kill each other outright at this time of year. They certainly seem to want to. I was …

Halloween, Day of the Dead, and Thanksgiving have passed. Because you are reading this, you have survived. I am writing this between All Souls and Thanksgiving, so I cannot speak for Thanksgiving and myself, but …

My friend Adrian and I approached the darkened North Park apartment, and I sensed something wrong. It was and is my own apartment, one I share with my 28-year-old son, Geoffrey. The hour was early, …

The transition between youthful cynicism and the attitude "What's to be grateful for?" was characterized by "Things could be worse" in my late 30s, when I couldn't avoid flat-out gratitude for surviving lymph cancer. Actually, …

Allow me to list the many ways for which we thank the deity (or agnostics thank "goodness," a safe but pointless exercise, pretty much like being agnostic in the first place), or don't allow me …

What really puts the God in TGIF? Crappy jobs, of course. The Lowardaah...works in the shadow of sufferngaah...and the kingdom and the glory that is Far-Ry-Dayaah...would verily be cast down among those weepingaah and them …

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 …