Category: Columns

Restaurant Review

Hector’s Mexican and Seafood Restaurant
1224 Rosecrans St.
San Diego, CA 92107
619-221-9138

Several weeks ago I met someone that asked me if I had tried Hector’s. He said it has been in Pt. Loma for years, and, to be honest, I had never even heard of it. (It is located on Rosecrans as per address, but I was directed to take Locust Street and then Carlton to get to it. It is very close to West Marine, and it is easy to miss because it is on the back of the parking lot of the Mail Boxes Express.)

The person that told me about Hector’s said that he makes the best breakfast burrito in town, and has an excellent homemade salsa.

One of the great pleasures of San Diego in the summer is joining the gaggle of tourists and bike riders for the short trip across the bay from downtown to Coronado.

Like Allen Ginsberg who, in his poem “A Supermarket in California,” touches on Walt Whitman’s book and feels absurd–but wanders through the aisles dreaming nonetheless—I stand in line with young couples holding hands and whole families grinning and gabbing in the midday sun and muse about that which connects us all without our knowing it.

What would we do without wishful thinking?

Not much apparently. According to some of the most recent science on the way our brains work, the Zen Buddhists and psychoanalysts are up against it. No matter how much we try to focus on the present, we’ll be pulled away by the Utopia of the next moment.

As a New York Times piece on some of the most recent science of the brain explained:

[I]t is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.

Restaurant Review

Jake & Eggs
1774 Sunset Cliffs
Ocean Beach, CA 92107
619-419-1207
Open 8-1 – Wednesday – Sunday

By Judi Curry

When this restaurant closed down a few months ago I was sorry that I had not patronized it more often. I was thrilled to see that it reopened in May, and when Marilyn came into town from Ohio today I decided to go back and see if it was as good now as it was originally. I am happy to say it is!

While not a standard breakfast menu, there are plenty of items to choose from. And, for those of you that need gluten free meals, almost all of the items have a “gf” designation.

The menu starts out with French Toast ($10); and goes to Short Rib Machaca Burrito ($11); Sweet Potato Hash is $12 as is Biscuits and Gravy. There is a Kimchi Fried Rice ($14); Chilaquiles Stack for $13;

Our noise is everywhere. Just try to sit for a moment in your house and experience a moment without some kind of artificial noise, whether it be passing traffic, the sound of your neighbor’s television or stereo or the now nearly ever-present buzzing of somebody’s ear buds.

But let’s say you want to head out beyond the sprawling reach of the homogenous exurban landscape, past even the glow of the Walmart on the edge of Small Town, Anywhere to what is left of the great American wilderness.

Any peace there?

Apparently not, according to the most recent research on our never-ending din.

By Ernie McCray

Hey, y’all, have you heard?
Everybody’s talking ‘bout the “I” word.
“Impeachment,” in other words:
throwing The Donald to the curb;
finally fed up
with him on our last nerve
like a cowboy riding a wild bronco
wrangled from the herd;
realizing it is
extraordinarily absurd
continuing to let this “I” word
be deferred and deterred and misheard and/or
unheard and slurred and unstirred,
considering that we have a leader
who is emotionally disturbed,
who, on his own,
has made himself the last word
when it comes to
lacking political decorum…

Summer is here and it’s time to take a break from my usual column and stretch the form a little with some chronicles. As I explained when I started this summer series a couple of years ago, the chronicle is a literary genre born in Brazil:

In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil [The Brazilian News] not as a reporter but as a writer of “chronicles,” a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, “allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes.

By Ernie McCray

Tina Turner once sang “What’s love got to do with it?” And, ordinarily, as one who is a “love my neighbor as thyself” kind of guy, I’d answer: “Everything.” Giving my love is pretty much how I’ve managed to survive in the Milky Way. I don’t know any other way. But how loving am I? Really? I had never asked that question before receiving an email recently from an old friend, a high school classmate — in response to something I had written about The Donald. She wrote:

Dear Ernie. I believe that Mr. Trump is a deeply disturbed man. The only way I know of to soften that pain in my heart and gut is to send him love.

“I Love My Dog, but….”

Let’s get one thing straight. I LOVE MY DOG, SHADOW. And I love his playmate “Rolle”. I love Shadow’s cousin “Toby”. There have only been two dogs in my lifetime that I did not love – the German Shepard that bit me when I was 5 years old, and the Pit Bull that attacked Shadow two years ago causing me to break my leg in three places, as well as my ankle and the cheek bone.

Other than those two dogs, I cannot think of any dog I don’t go “gaga” over. So when I received a note from a neighbor – Barb – saying that there is a lot of discussion about “service dogs” and other animals being brought EVERYWHERE, I decided to do some investigation and see what I could find out.

By Ernie McCray

PRELUDE: What’s written here are words that poured from me when I tried to, just for a few moments in time, air my mind of all the mania that seems to come from the White House from time to time aka all the time. It’s as written, word for word, with punctuation added to tidy it up a bit.

By Jim Miller / Kelly Mayhew

These are dire times for public education. With Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education leading the charge for big budget cuts, charter schools, and a radical privatization agenda, the possibility that free quality public education for all in America could soon be a thing of the past is real.

One would think that such clear and present danger to a cornerstone of our democracy coming from the right would unite Democrats behind the mantle of defending public education.

By Ernie McCray

Jim Comey. My man! I wish I could shake his hand. I mean I’ve got to put aside my deep deep deep disdain for the FBI to give props to a man who has come through with something I’ve so much wanted somebody from a high place to do — call Donald J. Trump out for what he is: a liar. For all the world to hear and see.

Of course he was stating the obvious but it needed to be said just as he said it: out loud – because some of us and the media keep cutting him slack with witty intellectualizing about what a lie really is, how a lie might not be a lie if it wasn’t intended to be a lie. What a lie all of that is.