It’s not easy to come to terms with your physical and emotional health when you try and put on your shorts in the morning after getting out of bed and you find yourself shoving your left foot through the opening of your right pant leg — so that you have two legs in the same hole — and start to list to the side and collapse on your bed because your right hip has given out and your dog winces and cowers as you scream out in agony and grit your teeth in frustration. Read More …

Surrounded by acres of rolling vineyards, this Victorian-style home is the ultimate wine country dream, currently on the market for $2,495,000. Read More …

I’m sitting on a bench in the shade at the San Luis Obispo airport as the blast furnace of Santa Ana winds tries to set an October record of 105 degrees at noon. A few passengers moving in and out pause to observe my cab as it continues to run in gasps and wheezes, and move on; then glance at me in my brown polyester slacks and yellow polyester shirt soaked through with sweat so that I resemble some soggy creature that slithered out of a swamp. Read More …

The other morning, the four most elderly charter members of the wall gang, myself included, were engaged in a conversation so toxic and negative that the professor, trying to get a word in among us, blurted, “Do you realize people are going to great lengths to skirt us? We’re like a nuclear fallout dump.” Read More …

Early on as a cabby in San Luis Obispo, I was warned about Merle Davis, who drank in McCarthy’s, the oldest bar in town, along with a crew of weathered ranch and farm hands and railroad men and scabrous retirees. Merle was a local legend—decorated war hero as a teenager, owned a ranch out in the California Valley, rodeo guy, champion hunter, notorious roughneck and redneck who went on three-week benders sandwiched between two-month periods of working hard and drying out on his ranch. Read More …

There is pleasure in reporting that “Happily Homeless Dave,” whom I wrote about early on in my byline for CalCoastNews, is no longer homeless. Read More …

I was hanging out the other morning at the seawall off the pier with the usual suspects–and our dogs–when a very friendly lady and her dog and an older couple approached us, and she said, “Mom, Dad, this is the wall gang. They’re here just about every morning.” Read More …

I was in my car in the south lot listening to John Coltrane on a very late blustery Saturday afternoon across from Ruddell’s Smokehouse in Cayucos, watching the people and savoring the music, and this fellow around 35 who struck me as middle eastern was walking around on the edge of the lot holding onto a blue paperback book that I surmised was a novel. Read More …

We have the most reasonable and underrated thrift store in the county, and maybe in the state. Just about anything you need can be found in the Cayucos thrift store, a nonprofit and senior center operated by longtime citizens past retirement age; little old ladies who have been around Cayucos for decades (and have had successful professional careers), are dedicated to getting things done, and have become the backbone of the community. Always in good cheer, they volunteer their time to work shifts mornings and afternoons. Read More …