• Saturday, July 6 9:33 a.m. After injecting breakfast, an urban backpacker lolled on some 11th Street steps with the needle still hanging jauntily from his arm. He was moved along.

3:06 p.m. A woman dragged a couch into the middle of an H Street alley and, clad in a towel, had a troubled lie-down marked by a commerce-distracting self-argument.

3:24 p.m. The lowlifer loudies outside a Valley West preschool may have been blither-blathering at top volume to the annoyance of the staff and students, but at least they spread a lot of trash around.

6:04 p.m. The clattering cro-magnon confederacy outside the preschool continued to augment their garbage collection.

7:20 p.m. A man said that his girlfriend had been kidnapped while getting off a bus in Fortuna. After paying a ransom, he heard from her – she’s been “dumped off” somewhere in Arcata, but he didn’t know where. He was worried that her phone battery would die before the damsel rescue was complete.

• Sunday, July 7 4:32 a.m. A perv called a nice lady to inflict on her the sounds of his desperate self-stimulation.

12:55 p.m. A man made off with a bottle of booze and a chicken from a Valley West supermarket, and they were soon to be united, if briefly, in his amoral digestive system.

1:30 p.m. A woman more or less occupied the rear entrance of a Valley West laundromat, first heaping her possessions up there, then tearing posters off the walls and yelling at passersby.

6:17 p.m. A man who’d gone camping had told his mother, but she apparently forgot and reported him as missing.

7:24 p.m. At a Valley West filling station, a motorist topped off his gas tank with dino juice from the pump and his lungs with meth from a pipe, then, heart racing with excitement and more, zoomed off westbound toward the Giuntoli roundabout.

8:45 p.m. Add to Arcata’s list of unbearable annoyances the persistent circus music that made lives on K Street not worth living.

• Monday, July 8 2:11 a.m. A minstrel serenaded the Plaza, after a fashion, with guitar and all-too-audible vocal stylings until discouraged by a government representative.

7:21 a.m. A “transient appearing” (as though anyone is permanent) man wearing an earth-toned ensemble unleashed pieces of his home planet on someone at 11th and D streets, charging his hapless quarry and pelting him with rocks, and not for the first time.

8:19 a.m. Again the woman who begs for handouts with a small child at downtown parking lot entrance was reported.

10:26 a.m. A swarm of bees engulfed a tree in the median of Alliance Road near Benjamin Court.

11:21 a.m. A man who’d previously been removed from a bus settled the score by hurling his white bicycle at it.

11:58 a.m. A man and woman refused to move off the Community Park’s soccer field so that city workers could stripe it.

12:58 p.m. A flower child may be fetishizing the festive severed plant genitals to an excessive degree. Having made off with a bouquet from a Valley West supermarket and clad in red pants with white flowers, she scampered away toward a hamburger stand, refusing to relinquish the precious petals.

1:19 p.m. A person trying to fix a trampled fence on Giuntoli Lane got into an argy-bargy with some of the semi-feral shortcutters who helped screw it up in the first place. Words were exchanged, and not nurturing, unifying ones.

2:07 p.m. Another “transient” who ekes out a hardscrabble living on the fringes of Arcatopia was zonksprawled across the middle of a marsh trail. A city worker was confident that he was still breathing, although not even the close passage of a roaring riding motor bestirred him.

2:08 p.m. Alive with pleasure, barely, a smoker laid down on the sidewalk with a cigarette in hand in front of an Alliance Road school. The person was moved along.

6:19 p.m. About the four gladiators in a near-brawl in Valley West, all we really know is their shirt color choices. A man in a green shirt whipped out a blade with which to impress two other gentlemen in white shirts and one in black, then put it away.

9:18 p.m. A drone hobbyist in 27th Street turned his attentions away from his soaring quadbuzzer to more terrestrial pursuits, according to a victim. Specifically, stabbing the man and his dog in the neck.

9:24 p.m. A drone hobbyist on 27th Street reported dangerous distractions as he directed his sky robot hither and yon. Specifically, a loose pit bull attacking him and its owner attempting to fight him.

• Wednesday, July 10, 2019 7:32 a.m. A wave of low-grade madness broke out across the landscape, and so did a man’s indecently exposed gen-pack at the transit center.

8:23 a.m. A man on H Street went kinetically horizontal, flailing and “floundering his arms” before curling up into a denim-shirted fetal pose. He was arrested for something unspecified.

8:23 a.m. A man in a G Street alley grew weary of arguing with himself, and tried to conjure strife with Arcata’s psychically calloused innocent passersby.

10:16 a.m. A man outside an H Street bank screamed obscenities at himself.

11:19 a.m. Asphalt wallowing’s obvious appeal spread to L.K. Wood Boulevard, where a woman with a pink blanket rolled around in a bike lane.

11:21 a.m. A shoeless woman in a pink shirt and holding several bags stood unmoving in the street on L.K. Wood Boulevard.

1 p.m. The city’s commitment to keep Carlson Park from turning into a lawless, camper-dominated pit o’ squalor suffered a setback when a woman walking her dog there reported male campers harassing her.

1:55 p.m. A man and woman at Sixth and K streets used someone’s faucet to collect water, which they used to water the street. That lifestyle choice accomplished, they picked roses from a private yard.

2:03 p.m. A person who’d been presumed to be in jail walked into a West End Road business and delivered a long, nonsensical letter.

3:10 p.m. A man in a two-tone hoodie outside a Valley West Boulevard business was either besfestered with brain-bamboozling substances or inherently unwell, possibly both as is not uncommon. After drawing attention to himself with wacky antics, the green-sleeved porch sprite danced away from the building.

• Thursday, July 11 8:59 a.m. An unhappy backpacker dressed in brown stomped around cursing outside a Valley West restaurant.

10:27 a.m. More backpacker-in-brown frowniness as a man outside a Westwood Village shopping center yelled and screamed profanities.

11:37 a.m. A woman left her purse at the gates of a dumpster corral behind a Plaza restaurant, and when she went back for it, it wasn’t there.

3:32 p.m. A man was reported crawling about on all fours behind a weirdo-plaqued Valley West shopping center. At some point though, he got up and started walking to further lurk about the ass-end of a strip mall just like any nominally-evolved land mammal.















