Feature Stories
Pete tells Wayne about survival food, the bazooka. Wayne rubs his brow with an Amtrak napkin. Pete says that one night, in Detroit, when he’d smoked too much crack— ‘‘You guys know crack?” he asks and we nod obediently.
You are merely tolerated. They do not need you. You love them anyway.
I doubt any of you who grew up with brothers and sisters can easily imagine how intensely the only child (even as an adult) looks forward to his lunch or squash game with you.
I got a phone call from Bruce, a housepainter in Fallbrook. Bruce owned a two-story rental unit in East San Diego, and his tenant had moved out. He needed help getting it ready for the next lucky person.
Dogs: are too worthless even to kick. Kicking a dog is like beating a rug; killing a dog is like washing one. Dogs are stupid and breathy, rugsmelly, dogloyal: who needs ’em?
The WELL evolved from the back-to-the-land utopianism that produced Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and Brand, who writes on The WELL as SBB, was one of the system's founders and developers.
I carried a drink outside and squatted down on the lawn in the lee of the big bottlebrush, an ancient beast gone from shrub to tree with a trunk as broad as my waist, and I thought some about the frightening new notion of home ownership.
The voice of Sue Delany on KGB-FM every weekday afternoon between 3:00 and 7:00 p.m. (the coveted afternoon drive slot) is one of the most distinctive on the airwaves in San Diego. Slightly hoarse and …
“What I hate, what I’ve come to dread, even after five years of divorced parenting, is that feeling you get late Sunday afternoon, about five blocks from your ex-house, where your ex-wife lives with your …
Some kids burst when they came within a couple-three yards of me. A female 2-year-old sees me, whimpers, her ma’s embarrassed, pushes her closer: WAAAAAA! (Ma takes a candy cane for later.)
"Maybe this is a real broad statement to make," Schneider continues, "but when I meet someone like you, for example, I have a pretty good idea you’re not waiting in the welfare lines when you leave here, right?”
At 75 he still mourned his mother. He dreamed about her often. Stood, like Babar, in the window, remembered her. Saw her in her coffin. Dreamed of my mother. The house we’d lived in.
The sailor came here in 1974. San Diego was an exotic port. He felt strange and free. The attraction was aesthetic. There was no snow. (He was from Minnesota.) There were palm trees and beautiful …
Early in the couple’s marriage, Ellen made Vincent promise that he would see to it that she died in her own bed next to him and not among strangers. Whether this promise will be kept drives Gordon’s novel.
"Should the court decide to incarcerate me, I will freely accept this as an opportunity to suffer with my unborn sisters and brothers who are daily sentenced — unjustly — to a permanent and irreversible removal of their human rights."
It had been five years since I had toured the bars, discos, strip joints, and dollar-a-dance whore emporiums of Tijuana. I had been writing a novel back then, and I wanted to walk in the …