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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader August 21, 2003)
It may be the ultimate irony of the conflict with Iraq that to glimpse the difficult home lives of our soldiers, their spouses, and their children, America needs a foreign war. And, even as those lives arise from obscurity, we have heard about of the front-line fighters much more than the base-bound families, especially the youngest, many of whom are poor and do, on occasion, go hungry. Proof of their need is how high the compassion index shot up this spring in San Diego. A half-dozen outreach groups and food drives were organized, among them Operation Homefront and Navy Wives Food Locker, to assist families. Some groups, however, are always on watch. One such is Military Outreach Ministries, sponsored by the county’s 33 Presbyterian churches and the Presbytery of San Diego. Begun in the early 1960s as Military Parish Visitors, the original band of volunteer women visited military bases, in times of war and peace, to ask wives about their needs. Today, the Ministries—its name now forms the acronym MOM.—runs bi-weekly food supplements and weekly bread drives to women and their children, who are surviving on an enlisted man’s salary.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader August 7, 2003)
Bienvenidos
In April 2001, 15-year-old Reina was leaving her home in Tenancingo, a high-plateau town west of Mexico City. She was happier than she’d been in a while, traveling north to Tijuana, in the company of Arturo López-Rojas. At 32, Arturo was nicely dressed, heavy, and short, barely five feet tall; Reina, with a pretty round face, was shorter by several inches. Arturo was taking her to the border crossing at San Diego to get her into the United States; he would then deliver her to her new job as a housekeeper, maybe with children to watch; he also vowed that once she had established herself, they would marry. This bundle of offerings excited Reina. She knew of other girls who’d made the trip to California, who were cleaning grand houses with grassy yards and swimming pools and sending money to their loved ones in Tenancingo—dollars instead of pesos.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader June 26, 2003)
"You won how much?" I asked again.
"Ten million," he repeated, as though it were the time of day. Then, just as flatly, he asked that his name not be used, though he would "throw" a few facts my way, careful to conceal his identity behind cryptic remarks. In 2001 the former San Diegan had won $10 million on the SuperLotto Plus (matching six of six numbers), after buying an "Instant Millionaire" winning ticket in 1994. "I’m really blessed," he said, "basically because I’m a really good person. To somebody who never had money, the first time I won was a nightmare. You get under a lot of stress when you make investments. I like to gamble—I’ve been gambling since I was 21—[so I] walk into these Indian casinos and right away, just because of my past, they think I’m doing something. My past is my past; it’s over with. Now I live a simple, humble life. I’m married and I have a beautiful dog. That’s the way life is. I still work for a corporation in San Diego," though now he’s moved to a high desert community, where he continues to bet on the Lotto.
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Essays and Memoirs
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(Raven Chronicles. Volume 10. "Writers Examine 9/11 and Its Aftermath." 2003.)
Gladys is a bulgy-eyed woman and, at 56, her reading glasses like little big-screen TVs magnify those eyes even more just as they’ve magnified the minutiae of insurance bill- ing receipts which, for the past three years, she’s been feeding into the computer at her desk on the twelfth floor where, at this moment, she is not returning to, though, post coffee-break, she almost has having just heard the “return to your offices” announcement, but, rather, in the melee, she has tripped on the balcony above the first-floor atrium beside a row of elevators and has fallen hard, the brunt on one knee, her glasses spinning away, and, reaching for them, she feels the explosion from within the building, then suddenly sees him, him, Hope, who’s right there beside her on the balcony, it’s him, she’d know that jowly face anywhere, despite its age—from those dingy TV specials, from those dingier road movies with Bing and Dorothy Lamour, it’s Bob Hope at One World Trade.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader May 8, 2003)
In 1940, the recently widowed and wealthy Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch bought a small estate in the Hollywood hills and sought counsel from a medium named Sardoney about her love life. Known also by his epithet the Human Radio, Sardoney channeled news that a fresh husband was in transit and that Clara could not “escape this appointment with Destiny.” The irrepressible Clara opened herself to the possibility. Soon she met and started dating a dashing Russian émigrè musician, who claimed to have conducted many of the world’s greatest orchestras and to be well-acquainted with several U.S. presidents. (Nearly all his claims were lies.) Jacques Samossoud was the man and Clara was smitten. In 1944, the pair were married. In a nod to the New Age, she wrote of their union as “positively miraculous in its multifarious strata of rainbowism.” He was 50, and she was 70.
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San Diego Reader
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 (San Diego Reader April 24, 2003)
It was no accident, said San Diego clairvoyant Dr. James Capers, that movie mogul and occult aficionado Steven Spielberg attended his lecture in February, when Capers demonstrated his "spiritual gifts" at the Los Angeles Conscious Living Expo. Capers surmises that Spielberg came to his lecture (which he describes as "sitting-on-the-floor-room only") because Spielberg had been cursed by an African witch doctor: "Mr. Spielberg should be afraid -- these demonic powers are quite real."
According to April's Vanity Fair, Michael Jackson had Baba, a "voodoo priest" from Mali, brew up death curses for Spielberg, Hollywood powerbroker David Geffen, and 23 other Jackson "enemies." Baba, who is probably closer to a witch doctor than a voodoo priest, nonetheless received $150,000 for the conjuration that included a ritual sacrifice of 42 cows.
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Articles
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 (Eclectica Magazine March/April 2003)
In San Diego where I'm a contributing writer to a weekly feature newspaper, I decide to profile the world of pedophiles and child molesters-those who prey on strangers (the youth group volunteer or coach who puts himself in contact with young boys and girls; the maker and sender of kiddie porn on the Internet) and those who prey on children within families (dads, grandpas, uncles, brothers who to molest children have opportunities that are difficult to detect). To begin, I contact the man responsible for prosecuting child porn manufacturers and distributors in San Diego, deputy district attorney Jeff Dort. We meet in his office on the twelfth floor of the Hall of Justice, a cubicle crammed with computers, stockpiled videotapes, pamphlets, files, and shelves of binders in which he is accumulating evidence for several cases.
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