Look! you've got a naked man on your fork! The drug and antique worlds share a vocabulary. Both worlds thrive on human “have to have it” weakness. Certainly, as it is with junkies, I always …

God’s Dirt “It’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s pretty high-risk because they’re very, very, very, very perishable. When the flowers are bloomed, you have to pick ’em. And you have to sell ’em. Otherwise you …

Trigger Happy or Just Plain Happy? Who is David Medina? Dressed neatly in a white oxford cloth shirt with a blue pullover sweater, David Medina, a.k.a. “Happy,” pursed his lips and appeared to listen closely …

Trigger Happy or Just Plain Happy? Who is David Medina? Dressed neatly in a white oxford cloth shirt with a blue pullover sweater, David Medina, a.k.a. “Happy,” pursed his lips and appeared to listen closely …

Deadly Mosquitoes Breed in Our Urban Drool Of the 40 “sentinel chickens” used for early detection, 13 have converted to West Nile, including all 10 in Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, 2 in Oceanside, and 1 in …

Our Panther Our fair city does have one black jaguar resident, downtown, in Cat Canyon, near Sun Bear Forest, across from the Hunte Amphitheater, in the San Diego Zoo. He was born October 1992 at …

I think you’re wonderful. I’m driving my car and your name is on every mailbox. I’m kissing you and my shoes crawl away in darkness, sweet gadgets sing in my wrists, the life I dumped …

— for Claudia Criss cross apple sauce do me a favor and get lost while you’re at it drop dead then come back without a head my daughter sings for me when I ask her …

Before visiting San Diego's Zirk Ubu, the last time I'd gone to the circus, I'd walked out with 50 pounds of elephant dung in a cardboard box on my shoulder.

Odessa: it doesn’t sound like a particularly Russian word. Maybe Spanish, or Italian. Actually, it was named after Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s (if Homer existed) great epic poem, The Odyssey. Any word, when it …

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 …

Judith Moore called me in the fall of 1995, when I was living temporarily in Laguna Beach and teaching at UC Irvine for a semester. Judith was familiar with my poems and deduced from some …

Some people believe God to be the first hypnotist: He put Adam to sleep and took out a rib to make Eve. It's a leap, but today hypnotism is used as an alternative to anesthesia …

“I could love a duck!” the American poet Theodore Roethke wrote hyperbolically, manically, in one of an astonishing series of longish poems usually referred to as “The Lost Son” poems. I’ve always liked ducks myself …

One thing I’ve learned: go looking for fire eaters and you don’t know what you’ll find. After putting out the word that I was looking for fire eaters (I have a few, um, unique friends …

There is no night anymore. In or around cities, in suburbs and small towns, there is no night. It still gets dark, and the days still get longer or shorter. Lights are everywhere — large, …

In Bob Parks’s first (and only, as far as I know) brush with the law, he was presumed a corpse. He was about 11 years old. He’d been lying facedown, very still, for so long …

Cops like to tell stories. They’re good at it. They’re trained to think in specifics, to make precise observations. Atop an arrest report, right beneath “officer’s report,” it says “narrative.” On one of my first …

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

My father went to work 6205 days in a row, give or take a few, from 1945 until 1962. Until I was 16 and my cousin, Jackie, 18 or 19. We were both old enough …

Cars have gone over twice. One with three drunk sailors somehow jumped onto the railing and then over into the water. Was there a moment, a second or two, when the car teetered on the railing?

Simply shooting oneself, jumping off a bridge, hanging, etc., doesn't count.

The first two or three times I met Carl Glowienke he wore a tuxedo. We weren't at a society function. He wasn't on his way, each time, to the prom. For his day job — …

The boy has the ball in the air, right where he wants it, just high enough so he can drop his left foot and lift his right to keep it in the air (though he …

I’d been unlucky in love. Ergo: time to try poker. I hadn't played in many years and then I played badly, impatiently. But that didn’t matter. Only the adage alluded to above mattered. And one …

THE MUSEUM OF DEATH can be described as a bit of Ripley’s Believe It or Not by way of Barnum and Bailey (with the emphasis on Barnum, as in P.T.), a dash of Madame Tussaud’s, …

Dogs were a problem sometimes. The Pauma Mission Indian Reservation borders one side of the property, and sometimes their dogs pack up at night; and they, unlike coyotes, will attack a vulnerable cow, one giving birth.