Goo-Droozling Hippie Van Fouls Creek On Flimsy Premise, Man – December 21, 2011
• Monday, November 7 12:15 a.m. A man on Ninth Street said his girlfriend had beaten him up. She said he had punched her in the leg and thrown her against a wall. He was arrested for excessive boozery.
12:27 a.m. A man and woman on Union Street battled, to complexion-degrading effect.
1:32 a.m. Drunks fought it out on G Street in Arcata Heights, with two arrested.
1:36 a.m. Just for variety, a man was deemed drunk at Eighth and G streets.
1:48 a.m. Two drunks on the Plaza’s south side fought and fought until arrested.
1:38 a.m. Occupy Arcata protesters joined forces with some guest occupiers from the Eureka protest and vanquished financial inequity in annoying fashion on a Plaza storehouse’s ground floor.
2:29 p.m. Occupy Arcata/Eureka protesters migrated north to an Arcata Heights bank, where they clumped up on the sidewalk outside for a brief sit-in.
3:20 p.m. More high-volume, low-consequence brouhaha at the Occupy Arcata camp.
3:49 p.m. Injected with fresh, short-lived fervor by the Eureka hardcores, some of the somnolent stoners of Occupy Arcata again left the comfort of their cozy tents and enteric disease-hazard kitchen to bother customers at the bank across the street.
• Wednesday, November 9 8:52 a.m. A kitty cat was reported stuck way high in a tree on 10th Street, but no public safety resources were available to rescue it.
10:24 a.m. The gradual and entirely predictable decline of an abandoned Valley West motel is proceeding apace, with nocturnal scrounge lizards peeling off the protective plywood, entering and enjoying destructo-frolics.
10:28 a.m. At a recently-robbed Valley West credit union, in walked a slumpy subject clad in baggies and baseball cap. Apart from his humble habiliments, the mid-20s male began his visit with a lengthy loiter in the lobby, then wandered around looking at things and showed no signs of having any legitimate business there. When an employee came out of the break room and said “Hello,” the man’s response only compounded suspicions: he said nothing, was mute and unresponsive. During his inspection of the business, the baggy-panted bozo eventually “caught on” that the manager was watching him, skedaddled out the door and hopped in a silver four-door Toyota pickup truck. The sketchy slouchabout, suddenly energized, revved the engine and attempted to prevent a witness from getting his license plate number, which started with 8U5. Anyway, his menacing meanderings were videotaped and shared with authorities.
12:52 p.m. A man reported seeing three traveler-types peeing upon a table used by a food truck at the Old Creamery a few days previous. He asked them to leave, but this day they were back and damaging the truck in some unspecified way. When he told them he was calling the cops, they ran off. But now he reported that he just saw the truckbusting trio on the Plaza.

“FIND US IN TOWN” reads a sign in the window of the leaky van, its operator no doubt researching oil containment options. KLH | Eye
2:37 p.m. The annals of sleazery gained another chapter when a man knocked on the door of an Ernest Way residence. The woman there said she wasn’t interested in whatever he had to offer and he left. But when she left her house a bit later, the man and two other guys were still there in a bluish older van that didn’t have license plates, just a dealer insert. After she drove away, she became suspicious, turned around and went back home to find the man who had knocked on her door walking up to her house again. He said something about being there to clean her carpets, which may be a modern euphemism for ripping off her treasured possessions. He was about five feet, seven inches tall, black hair, brown eyes, wore a red shirt and black pants and had a mole on his chin with hair growing out of it, ick.
3:31 p.m. A woman walking her leashed Walker hound at the Marsh came upon a man with two pit bulls, one of which he let off its leash. It attacked her dog, severely injuring it. He apologized, and as she left for a Sunny Brae veterinary clinic, she told him to meet her there but after a while, he still hadn’t shown up.
3:36 p.m. A man was reported walking toward the Plaza carrying a knife with a six-inch blade. He was located and told that this was inadvisable.
7:27 p.m. A one-man evangelical conniption stood outside a Uniontown variety store in a yellow ski jacket and black beanie, his voice raised to the skies over matters godly. He further inflicted his religio-rantage on people in cars outside, then wandered away.
• Thursday. November 10 10:44 a.m. A Lewis Avenue resident reported problems with a neighbor over drug busts on the neighborhood. Now the guy was flipping him off.
1:45 p.m. A man called a crisis line five times in 30 minutes demanding medication. Told he had a therapy appointment next week, he flew into a rage and said he was going to go kill some hippies on the Plaza. At this point co-workers provided support, and when police interviewed him, he had been medicated.
2:21 p.m. A high school student reportedly held a bottle of Axe Cologne up in someone’s face and lit it on fire. This resulted in burns to the other student’s face.
3:25 p.m. A caller said a truck dropped a four-year-old and a 10-year-old off in front of a Plaza bank and then drove eastward on Seventh Street at a high rate of speed. The kids seemed to have “puzzled” looks on their faces. Police couldn’t locate them.
• Friday, November 11 1:47 p.m. An officer interviewed someone who had left a baby unattended in a car with the doors left open in Valley West.
9:11 p.m. A white bicycle – not the early Steve Howe song of the same name, but an actual white bicycle – was left rusted out and abandoned behind an Arcata Heights bank. It was disposed of at the Corp Yard.
11:16 p.m. People were heard screaming in the Community Forest, their possibly anguished cries reaching Fickle Hill Road. An officer found four people leaving the park who had erupted into yelping at the sight of a raccoon.
11:59 p.m. A 10th Street parking lot owner complained of freewheeling peeing, the urine donors becoming feisty when confronted over their hydrological promiscuity.
• Saturday, November 12 2:54 a.m. A drunk in a black hat was not to be meddled with outside a Uniontown variety store which attracts all manner of nocturnal wildlife. This particular specimen didn’t take well to suggestions that he depart, pelting employees with a fusillade of verbal abuse, spittle and the abundant litter that is perpetually strewn about the outside of the ill-maintained emporium. He was arrested on a public drunkenness charge.
7:17 a.m. An old, collarless German shepherd had apparently served its purpose and was let loose on its own at the Farmers’ Market. It was taken to the shelter.
10 a.m. Urban travelers parked their broken-down, oil-leaking POS green VW van on 11th Street about 15 feet from a storm drain that empties into Jolly Giant Creek. Asked to move it by an Environmental Services worker, the travs responded with the usual self-serving hippie-dippy reasoning, to the effect that a nearby business (which isn’t open Saturdays) had granted them “permission” to squat there. The ES guy and in short order, a police officer told them that the business doesn’t own the public street nor have any authority to position environment-degrading vehicles there and that they would have to move the Wrecks-on Van-sleaze away from the creek.
10:04 a.m. A dogwood tree behind a Plaza business was torn asunder.
9:35–10:49 p.m. Police took various drunk drivers off the streets.
• Sunday, November 13 2:10 a.m. Another drunk driver, this one packing bonus drugs of some sort, was so very arrested at Samoa Boulevard and H Street.
12:38 a.m. A freestyling urinator didn’t take the news very well that he shouldn’t oughtta whiz upon a taco truck’s 10th Street parking lot, with a verbal form of excreta erupting from still another one of his foul orifices.
1:20 a.m. Occupy Arcata protesters chugged the holy herb in the designated Sacrament Tent (yes, that’s what it was called), unencumbered by Prop 215 pot-smoking licenses.
3:50 a.m. There being not much else for a drunk to do in the 900 block of 11th Street, a man started hitting his head on some “plastic glass” with sufficient ferocity to rouse area residents. When an officer found the hammer-headed drunk, he didn’t take kindly to intervention and was arrested on charges of public drunkenness and resisting arrest.