It is New Year's Eve, 2005. A cold rain lashes skid row at the corner of 16th and G Streets. David Ross, aged 71, pulls to the stoplight and hears a voice from the darkness …

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 …

It's been a long time since I did this: polling random folks on the street about their Friday nights. One reason is that I've become less and less likely to go out among the public …

Let me tell you about my leave of absence. Like you're dying to know. One letter poured in. It was hard to tell exactly what the writer was trying to express as it was written …

I pondered some more (having brought it up once before) on the fact that -- Peter Principle--like -- I rather don't belong in what could be construed as the position of a regular-Joe voice, blue- …

"Well, there's what I really did Friday night and then there's this version." This large stranger and I were in one of my favorite coffee houses that's too far away from where I live now …

I am writing this on a Sunday morning, actually, Father's Day. That's a small patch of history behind us (you and I) if it's any at all (was yours memorable?) It's an overcast, quiet day …

This is my least favorite time of year for many reasons that essentially boil down to the irrational. The clearest statement of the reasoning behind this is that this season is too hot. I have …

Memorial Day weekend is over as I write here and so this will not exactly be timely, but Judith Moore, a friend and long-time editor of this paper, died very recently. I see she is …

At Times It Was Like Shared Music, at Times Like a Skin Graft or Root Canal — Stephen Dobyns I do at a coffin sale — Dorothy Stewart A Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Cake …

Everyone should be married — once, I think, just as everyone should be fat — once. I am lucky in that I have very little at all bad to say about my one experience with …

Something about Friday, quitting time at work, is much like Christmas morning as a kid. Of course, nothing will compare with that, but the comparison stands in the sense of pleasant, pleasureful possibilities about to …

May Gray is getting to me, or it could be that I ran out of my anti-depressants some time ago, or maybe it was the fact that on Monday I learned an old friend had …

"Well, what did you think your Friday nights would be like?" one might well ask of oneself if one were in the habit of that sort of thing. Friday nights in San Diego cannot be …

I remember seven years ago decrying the choice of writing about bars and coffee houses simply because they were so obvious, but I did not count on the ineluctable factor of coffee and rock music …

The line at the border is once again a matter of at least three hours on foot to approach customs. I have Protonix or some Mexican version of the antacid, some Levoxyl for my thyroid, …

I am in somewhat of a state of confusion. Nothing new for those who know me or work with me or, say, my creditors to whom I am constantly imploring for an explanation regarding this …

This past week was a bear. A good word for a bad week, I suddenly notice, though I don't know why it fits so well. I have no real familiarity with bears; and while they're …

This Friday night I am doing homework. It is something of a reverse of the old image of a student muddling through a creative writing assignment, stretched out on the bed beneath the high school …

David Sipnick is a bookseller, mostly online in recent years, but with some of his small press stuff from the 1990s, Oberon Books Editions, children's (boys', really) adventure stories on consignment at specialty stores around …

The acronym for Thank God It's Friday is so universally recognized (I only had to explain it once to a swami who was actually from Long Beach, and I swear she was pretending ignorance) that …

The tendency to write about my own Fridays rather than others' has always been pronounced as there is something about another's Friday activity that is so — what do I want to say? — not …

Last Friday was Mexican Flag Day. It was that thought that prompted me to write about Mexico at all, and the column hijacked itself and had me write what it wanted. This is a beloved …

Spending a Friday night in Tijuana may have once sounded like a good time, but if so, distanced enough in memory to seem now a confabulated desire, a state of mind impossible to reconstruct. Still, …

Some weeks back I wrote about yet another one of my many minor complaints. More annoyances than problems really, meaningless grousings about something or other. Like the one about sentence fragments. Only this time, the …

Tomorrow, Friday the 10th, would be my father's 87th birthday. He was born of poor but honest parents, as he always began any bio material for his job at ad agencies, insurance companies, or for …

Having discovered such a thing as the Mars Society in San Diego and its Friday night events calendar, my column was clear. In a way. It will certainly sound odd to say that I have …

The end of January, the fourth week into the new year of 2006, and I'm trying to free-associate or something, trying to find match-ups in the fleshy RAM that is my memory, riddled as it …

It is Friday the 13th in the a.m. as I write this. (I always want to follow sentences like that with something like, "... time is running out. Within moments they will be upon me.") …

I think I might assume that I am not alone in the aftermath of the holidays (whatever you need to call them), surrounded by yet unchucked gift wrappings, batteries; maybe your tree is still in …

Maybe this happens to you: I've been going through a period of, now, more than three months during which I have been unable to complete more than three book-length works of prose. To neither brag …

The Illinois summer heat and humidity clamped down over Chicago's West Side like a damp electric blanket. Ozone filled the air with the promise of lightning. Gunmetal clouds brooded, purple with bad intent. Merrimac Street …

My first day in school was really my second day — Jangchup Phelygal The Radiators That Ticked Heat into the Room — Laura Rhoton McNeal Rear Rank Rudy — Jim Morris Forget-me-nots — Rosa Colwin …

It was the first week of September, must have been. I was 13 and it was 1964. JFK was dead less than a year, but the Beatles were making us feel better about it. I …

I was grounded, which was a worse proposition than it sounded in my house. I was 14. It was 1965. My father's decree, he knew not to what he was consigning me. A summer in …

“I’ve got doctors, lawyers, CPAs coming in here. They’re ready to buy.”

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. — Albert Camus, The Stranger …

Word on the street was that Jose Sinatra and the Troy Dante Inferno were about to take to the road again. The performer and sidemen haven't toured since April of 2001. That was the "bizarre" …

My exposure to and subsequent interest in Amici Park was a by-product of waiting inordinate lengths of time for the #16. I began to refer to it as “the bus that never comes.”

“I had the idea of an average San Diego guy, with a baseball cap, you know, and flannel shirt and Levi’s and burritos. He watches the Padres, and he’s a bouncer at a topless bar.” …

“It has nothing to do with someone being a swinger. I’m a polygamist. Anyone’s beliefs have nothing to do with how well you protect your children or how well you protect your wife or husband."

On the Friday night when Brenda van Dam was here at Dad’s, what would it have been like for her? Maybe the bouncers knew her, maybe she didn’t have to pay three bucks to get in.

Squads of men in denim, flannel, and baseball caps with the names Oscar de la Hoya, Budweiser, Corona, John Deere, and Jack Daniel’s, as well as whole phrases: Mi Vida es un Madre, shuffle with …

The Dorseys, Louis Prima, Duke Ellington, the “Sweet Bands” like Sammy Kaye’s and “Blue Barron.” Guy Lombardo and Ralph Flanagan, I figure they’re all here somewhere tonight.