I picked up some old church cookbooks at a rummage sale last Saturday. Four of them peeked out of a box as I wandered by. They beckoned to me.

“How much?” I asked a grizzled churchwoman.

She sniffed. “A buck for all of ’em.” Deal. I took them home and leafed through them. I love amateur cookbooks.

Church and community cookbooks, like Rodney Dangerfield, don’t get no respect. And they deserve some. They were and are a venerable fundraising scheme for churches, charities, clubs, or other non-profits that want to raise a few bucks. Community cookbooks go back decades, to the advent of inexpensive printing technology. I’ve seen one from the 1880s.

The ladies of the congregation would all kick in a recipe or four. A volunteer typed them all up in manuscript form and mailed them to a distant cookbook printer in a low-wage area. The printer photographed the pages “as is” and made printing plates from them. You could pay for real typesetting if you wanted to be fancy. Most didn’t.

In a few weeks, the printer would return to sender a crate of cookbooks with clunky plastic spiral binding and whatever cover art was provided. Then the congregation would try to sell them.

These old cookbooks were not about fancy cuisine. The churchwomen weren’t concerned with farm-to-table ingredients or organic food. They aimed lower: easy-to-make survival recipes, from a time when the woman of the house had to turn out a big hot meal every day in an hour or less in a time of no microwave ovens. Some of the recipes originally came off the back of a box or a can but were tweaked over the years. Or, not.

And they used pre-packaged ingredients with wild abandon, sometimes two or three in the sam recipe: cream of mushroom soup; dry onion soup mix; Bisquick; Jello; Hormel Chili; Velveeta. Cheez Whiz. Miracle Whip. Canned Chinese noodles. Mayonnaise by the cup measure, sour cream by the pint.

And that’s why people laugh at church cookbooks. “How could anybody eat that stuff?” they giggle, amazed. Well, we did, and many do today. But I understand. The first time I picked up a church cookbook the page fell open to a salad recipe that proposed nearly inconceivable operations on innocent packs of Jello. I couldn’t believe it.

Home cooks in the time of the nuclear family were the hackers of their day. They all had tricks for getting the food on the table quick and easy; or a special recipe for molasses cake handed down from some venerable matriarch, or a fried pastry dish from the old country. And the neighbor women had eaten them all, and wanted to cook them, too. Information passed from kitchen to kitchen on notepaper, the backs of envelopes. And in church cookbooks.

And you might ask, why? Decades ago, most of the housewives who made these meals didn’t have to work. They stayed home and kept house. They had all day to cook, right? Why the need for a hasty meal of canned roast beef hash burritos?

A lot of women had jobs even then, frankly; and they had to work and field a full meal every day, most of them. For better or worse, it was expected. And even the women who had no jobs, worked plenty, thank you.

My mother’s generation of home makers did a lot beyond keeping house and raising brats; not that this wasn’t hard enough. They took care of their own parents, who usually lived nearby: took them to the doctor, worked the bureaucracy for them, shopped for them, even took them into their homes. My grandmother spent the last 30 years of her life boarding with one son or daughter or another. She never saw an old folks’ home.

Housewives made the churches go; they took hot dishes to neighbors and fellow church members who were having a bad patch: illness, death in the family, a new baby. Sometimes they even took over the house chores for awhile.

And they ran Cub Scout and Brownie and Girl Scout meetings, the PTA and all those spaghetti-dinner fundraisers, Halloween and Christmas celebrations at the elementary schools, and supported the Little Leagues. My wife Rhumba went to a public theater school where volunteer mothers sewed all the costumes for every production.

And somebody had to write church cookbooks, and otherwise raise money for causes that taxes didn’t take care of.

My mother, who never went to high school, got her GED and trained as a beautician while raising two children and working at least some of the time. She didn’t stay too long in the beauty shop; but for decades after she did free permanent waves for all female relatives within twenty miles — and there were a lot of them. The stink of permanent wave solution filled the house; I can still smell it.

And when you’ve got a schedule like that, on some days a fast one-dish meal recipe from a spiral-bound cookbook may be all you have time for. They may even be named “One Dish Meal” for convenience. And sometimes there will be a felicitous bit of poetry on the ingredient list: “1 pound ground round (browned).”

And there was the Recipe of a Thousand Names. It came from somewhere, probably off the back of a box, but millions of housewives gave it their own name and made it their own: chicken pieces on a bed of minute rice mixed with cream o’ mushroom and a pack of dry onion soup. One of my new cookbooks calls it Forgotten Chicken, because you dumped all the ingredients in a pan — literally — threw it in the over and forgot it for an hour while you cleaned the bathroom. A full dinner, with a piquant chemical tang from the dried onion soup. And foolproof: impossible to screw up. I even made it for myself when I went off on my own.

I must admit, church cookbook cookery wasn’t always wonderfully good. My mother’s favorite go-to emergency dishes were either spaghetti with meat sauce (welcome, because she’d make garlic bread, too) or the dreaded tamale pie with its huge, soggy chunks of bland, over-cooked corn meal. I’d hunt through them desperately for a string of cheese or the occasional olive; anything that had actual taste.

I don’t miss tamale pie. But I do miss community cookbooks; you don’t see many new ones anymore. Oh, the Junior Leagues and Symphony Societies still issue cookbooks. The pictures are color, the layout is impeccable. And the recipes are all gourmet, for a well-heeled audience who has time for those things.

But the down and dirty community cookbooks of yore are an endangered species. Everybody works; few people cook. And there’s the microwave and its attendant frozen entrees, or $11.99 “family dinners” from KFC, or cheap pizzas from Little Caesar’s. Or dinner out at (shudder) Applebee’s.

A rude surprise, wasn’t it: that in the ’70s women were finally fully accepted in the workplace. And within a few years, with the decline in blue collar work for men, they had no choice but to be there.

With women’s contributions, the household’s nominal income stayed even, for a while. But all the services that had been done at home, now how to be paid for. Nutrition has been outsourced. As has elder care, child care, transportation, youth groups and youth activities. Private industry does them now, and badly; and you pay, often through the nose

And I’ll say this: as appalling as some of those old recipes seem, we kids did okay on them. They raised a generation of children who largely weren’t obese, diabetic, or ill. And they were money-savers, many of them. That was always important, even in the supposedly fat ’60s.

And there were vegetables, because our parents came with a time when people were stunted by poor nutrition and their kids weren’t going back there, by God. Even if the vegetables were cabbage leaves coated with a strange Velveeta cheese mixture.

And now corporations provide the food, at high price, low nutrition with artificial ingredients, all marketed to our own worst instincts. And with full knowledge of its harmful effects. And once again, children are stunted by poor nutrition: not by insufficient food, but by too much, and of the wrong sort.

I’m not arguing for women to head back to the kitchen. Nobody should be trapped there by gender or for any other reason. What I do want is for the services for our private lives to be ripped from the hands of “investors” and handed back to us, the private citizens and our special creativity.

That would mean a guaranteed income. That would mean a fair division of the fruits of the economy to the point where all citizens have enough time and flexibility to fulfill the ultimate purpose of civilization: the endless enrichment of the lives of all its members, by all of its members. Long lives. Healthy lives. Lives full of richness and empty of fear.

And maybe even, some day, more church and community cookbooks. Anybody up for Chili-Ghetti Casserole?

University, the university I work for, lacks a center. It has no grand plaza full of cardboard signs and sunbathers, no student union where the crowds gather and the marching band stirs up school spirit. We don’t even have a marching band.

Students demonstrate and pass out literature by the student store; but while many walk that way, few linger to socialize after they’ve obtained their books or chips or condoms..

Students and staff are instead distributed evenly across campus among neighborhoods of classroom buildings and dorms well separated by trees, trails, slopes, hills, and actual canyons. To traverse the campus on foot requires good wind and a sense of direction. People don’t do it without good reason.

If you really want to catch the pulse of campus life, there is but one choice: the Global Village, the cafe in the Library’s cavernous lobby. The Global Village keeps library hours: opens too early, closes ‘way late.

Study groups and student clubs and cliques flock to the Global Village — intimate booths, tables both big and small, good espresso, exceptional pastry and Library; what’s not to like? Staff and faculty come, too, looking for high-quality food not dripping with grease or melted cheese. As well as a place to have a useful but private conversation.

Engineering is up the hill, Arts are down the hill. Administration and Student Services lurk to either side. The grad students who teach labs and seminars and control access to student resources use the cafe as their office and conference room. Hang out in the Global Village long enough, and who knows who you’ll see?

Generally I take lunch back to my desk, but often I sit at the long counters and pick at a salad. I watch the students come and go, and give the big hello to former co-workers or fellow inmates of the two-hour interdepartmental confabs that are a University tradition.

Student conversations buzz around me, though I try not to listen. They are in the main trivial, or banal, or both. Why should things have changed in 40 years?

But light streams in the 30-foot-tall windows and casts an attractive glow over the kids as they line up to place their orders, or gaze at their mobiles, or stare fixedly at assignments that stubbornly refuse to do themselves. And their faces and stances and affectations of fashion or lack thereof, tell more than words ever could. I pass the time by writing descriptions of them in my head. Some are kind.

I had been indulging in this exercise the other day when a quiet voice said, “Excuse me.” It was a woman in a business suit, a few feet down the counter with her own half-eaten salad. “Are you a member of faculty?” Her manner was grave.

“No.”

“Are you a member of staff?”

“Yes.”

“What department do you work in?”

I told her.

“Are you the department head?” At this point the conversation veered into experimental theater.

“No, but I dress better than he does.” It’s true; polo shirts are the top of his wardrobe. “What are you trying to find out?”

“Newbie” was trying to find out how to ace the big job interview that she’d be reporting for in about 20 minutes. An admin had dropped her at the Village to fortify herself. Newbie was out for any useful dirt I could give her on University and was, understandably, a little shy about asking.

“So, Newbie, who are you interviewing with?”

She told me. My former department on campus, the one I transferred out of last year.

I told her all about it, and yes, I kept it professional. I avoided emotionally-satisfying words like “sweat shop,” and instead talked of the ‘challenging environment and workload.” I described certain people in management she inquired about as “intense and focused” rather than “obsessed and monomaniacal,” which is how it sometimes felt. And I told her that our conversation never took place.

Newbie understood discretion; but she was young-ish and earnest, and failed to pick up on my helpful euphemisms and cues. In fact, she grew more enthusiastic as conversation progressed . I was about to unfurl the plain talk when her minder, the admin, showed up.

“Hi, Barbie!” I said with artificial cheeriness. “It’s great to see you!”

“Great to see you too!” She looked at Newbie. She looked at me. “I see you’ve met Newbie! Have you been — telling her about the department?’

“Just telling her what a great place it is to work!” Her smile faded slightly; she didn’t believe me. I didn’t intend that she should. But Barbie and I go back a ways, and she let it pass as I knew she would. And the three of us chit-chatted on safe topics until she swept Newbie away. I liked Newbie; I really kind of hope that she doesn’t get the job.

The Global Village is many things; one of its names is Casablanca. I’m no Humphrey Bogart; but I could be Claude Rains, possibly Sydney Greenstreet. It’s a university, after all; nothing is ever quite what the course catalog says it is.

Later that afternoon I got an email from a friend in the old department who’d spotted an opening in my new group. She wanted the rundown — would this be a good move for her? Could I tell her what she’dt be getting into? Could we meet for coffee and some confidential chatter?

Of course. And you know where. All roads lead to the Global Village. At least, the interesting ones.

Here are yet more police blotter haiku, 17-syllable tales of human frailty and madness from America’s newspapers.

Just for your information: every haiku I’ve written lately came from the same newspaper.  It publishes a daily blotter of vast size, and every so often I pop a few bucks for a day pass through the pay wall and download several months worth of police blotter: thousands and thousands of individual items in one mighty file.  Then I pick through it for worthy items.  I’m only a third of the way through the last download, and it’s been two months!

So my question to you is: would you want to live in those parts?  And, how do you know that you don’t?

Enjoy.

Chased off, he returned:
to piss on the front door of
the house he’d burgled.

A small orange car
that resembles a toaster
blockades his driveway.

Someone sends webcasts
through the cameras in his eyes.
It’s been six months now.

Drunk, and convinced that
her husband and her brother
have a “thing” going.

A tree crossed the road
and fell to the other side
Then a car hit it.

An unknown driver.
A long row of mailboxes.
A twitch of the wheel.

The next apartment
keeps a deer carcass for their
flesh-eating beetles.

The drunken caller
is sure that when her cat dies,
she’ll die with it.

Don’t give your car keys
to the cute hitch-hiker who
you went drinking with.

She said he hit her.
And he said that she knocked him
down two flights of stairs.

The hours pass and yet
still he stands before their house
in the evening rain.

(thud)(hop)(thud)(hop)(thud)
Her upstairs neighbors cannot
stand flat on the floor.

Santa, with an axe.
Banging it on a stop sign.
Friday night in Hell.

Wonders await her
in the the neighbors’ mailboxes.
She combs them daily.

Shoeless wanderer.
She speaks of the dead people
who ride her shoulders.

His pit bulls got loose
and attacked her cows and then
someone heard shotguns.

The banquet room was
filled with people who hadn’t
come in the front door.

I like almost everything about the fitness center at University. I like the stylish two-story building: something like an Art Moderne airplane hangar. I like the stupendous view of the bay from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor. I like the weights and equipment, and that everything’s clean and in good shape.

I even like the students who work out alongside me. Many are athletes, so they’re serious about training and hardly ever whip out an iPhone between sets. And I really like the price and availability: twenty bucks a month, and I can walk over from the office on my lunch hour.

What I don’t like? It’s too small, half the size it should be for a campus of 17,000. I have to step over and around grunting, wiggling bodies to even get a dumbbell much less find a free bench-press or squat station. I took the pictures in this post at 5 pm this evening. How busy is your gym at 5 pm on a Saturday night?

I’m old: just fighting a rear-guard action against the mercilesss insults of time. So, given the crowds, I just do whatever kind of workout I can manage: grab a pair of dumbbells and do some impromptu shoulder presses in an empty patch of floor. Or, do progressive lunges down the center aisle while the kids stream past me in search of workout stations or cardio machines.

The fitness center wasn’t big enough when it was built, 15 years ago. Since then, enrollment grew 50 percent. The administration hoped money for expansion would appear. Never happened. It’s been a rough 15 years in California.

And a rough 15 years to work for University, what with budget cuts and staff cuts and ever-increasing work. I’ve been there for nine; feels like 20.

This was on my mind as I stumbled back to my office from a noon workout last week. My route took me through Quarry Plaza, which was a circus of political advocates and frat boys and student clubs, all handing out leaflets or seeking recruits.

A couple of brash young anti-abortion advocates had come up from town with a six-foot color poster of an aborted fetus. It was meant to be shocking; it looked like a barbecued chicken. I pushed my way through the swirl of argument and commotion that they’d made. It was hot. I was tired. I’d just got free when somebody shoved a clipboard in my face .”Sign this. It’s for the kids.”

“Which ones?” I asked wearily. His partner showed me some literature. It was an petition to float a ballot initiative for school construction bonds. Three billion for the public schools, two billion for the universities, another chunk for the community colleges. Something for everybody. At a cost to the general fund of a mere $500 million a year for a very, very long time. But hey: University might get a better fitness center out of it. Win-win, right?

Forty years ago I would have thought so. Now, I see the problems.

Ballot initiatives used to be a sort of grass-roots legislation, where citizens could vote something into law that the legislature refused to deal with. But now special interests just use it as a way to bypass the governing process. If you’ve got the money you can take your proposition straight to the people without all those pesky hearings and debates and newspaper analyses.

And so initiatives are big business. The man and woman with the petition were professional signature gatherers. They get one buck, two bucks, even four bucks a signature to qualify a proposition for the ballot. I’ve asked; petition gatherers are common on campus right now. Idealistic young college students like to help others, especially if it’s easy. That’s how I used to feel.

And then you learn more. It turns out that Governor Brown has said he’d veto money in the state budget for new school construction; he doesn’t want the state to take on more debt. He thinks the cities and counties should fund their own construction. So the education lobbies are going around him to the voters by funding the ballot initiative. They know that people like to vote for school construction initiatives, and will.

People like to do it because, they think it’s free. Sure, the state’s on the hook for another half-billion a year, but good things happen and their taxes don’t go up. (Their local taxes would indeed have to go up if local districts had to fund their own construction.)

The same goes for money for state parks and other public works, plus guarantees that certain programs will get X percentage of the state budget “no matter what.” There’s no immediate cost to the voters. So, they ask themselves on some level, why worry?

But when California ran out of money a few years ago, government could do very little to shuffle money around because so much of it was tied up in mandatory bond payments and unalterable funding formulas that were mandated by the voters. But which were created and sold to the voters by small groups of people with lots of money and influence.

If it were up to me, I’d definitely have more school construction. And more help for the poor, more public works, better roads, and on and on. But you don’t get that by saying “make it so” on your ballot, like some starship captain. You do it by getting more money in the door. You do it by raising taxes on those who should be paying more.

In California’s case, you also do it by closing tax loopholes and exceptions that are a mile wide. I won’t go into details — if you live here, you know them — but I will say that, thanks to California’s famous Proposition 13 and some aggressive lawyering, commercial property owners have reduced their share of state-wide property tax receipts from roughly half down to a third or less in the last few decades. We need that money back.

In California it’s very easy to spend money and very hard to raise taxes.  Proposition 13 limited the ability of politicians to raise taxes, and made it much harder for voters to increase local taxes in their towns and counties. But it didn’t stop voters from spending unlimited “free money” by voting for expensive propositions that the state — not their town — had to pay for. This has to stop, one way or the other.

But we do not need more sales taxes for the poor to pay. We do need to get money out of the people who’ve wangled themselves a soft, cushy tax break that we can no longer afford to let them have.

Jerry Brown got Californians to blink a couple of years back when he said, “You will vote in a temporary tax increase, or I must make massive cuts to everything.” No governor had said that to Californians in decades. The pols always found a temporary trick to keep the money flowing without raising taxes, and carried on until the next crisis. And citizens reviled the “spend-thrift politicians.” But nobody can call Jerry Brown a spendthrift. No, they believed him when he said he’d cut massively. And they caved.

That was a one-time burst of sanity — or fear. Sometimes the two go together. But my fellow Californians are going to have to wise up permanently, or overcrowded university gyms will be the least of it. Actually, they are the least of it. The students and I can always get a workout somehow. University is built on hills; even walking to lunch can get you your daily cardio.

And I think they will wise up, or soon enough find themselves back where they were ten years ago. And not able to tell themselves, this time, that “spendthrift politicians” deserve all the blame.

Okay, not magic, but I got your attention.

Or maybe it is magic; somewhere in a little town 20 miles off the interstate somebody gets drunk and does something unwise and perhaps unbelievable. And because it’s not a major crime it’s relegated to the Police Blotter column of the Daily Blat, where I find it and make it into a seventeen-syllable haiku for reasons of zen and personal challenge.

Here then are ten haiku from middle America, a strange and moody land if there ever was one. You should know; you probably live there.

Enjoy.

He jumped on the hood
and claimed her car had hit him.
Then he asked for beer.

Two men throw punches.
And when he sought to stop them
they threw some at him.

What is this “amuck”
that the young boys were running?
Just fun, the cops say.

He enters the bar
and the staff throws him out, and
He enters the bar…

Something large, chewing.
In the dark beneath the house.
Care to take a look?

Old, alone and drunk.
With only a landlord to,
reluctantly, care.

Her heartless tenants
harry her with taser guns!
She can take no more!

It takes a stout heart
to call Dispatch and confess
that you rammed a cow.

911 could, at least,
listen as he tried to name
his nameless terror.

Gunshot? Transformer?
Hard to say, in a town where
things explode hourly.

Oh yes, I’ve published a book of the best. With actual pictures. Take a look.

As one of its many duties, my department at University publishes the course catalog.  The faculty turns in its course descriptions, and the publications crew enters them into the big database that makes the catalog.

In theory.  In practice, this would be unwise.  One of the crew passed me an instructor’s course description for a foreign-language class. It began:

“Structure review will be contextualized to support the principal focus of the course, which is vocabulary building…”

But it was put into the catalog as, “(The course) focuses on vocabulary building.”

As the late, great iconoclast Travus T. Hipp used to say: “Sometimes I wonder… and sometimes, I know.”

Taxes are a great goad to creativity: you can be creative, or you can give up and do your taxes. Creativity wins every time. Except perhaps on April 14.

As always, these haiku are taken from police blotter items in the nation’s newspapers. I’ve written them for years, and there’s a book of the best. Enjoy.

Good-natured screaming
isn’t appreciated
after 1 am.

He was on cocaine.
And on his cell phone, trying
to buy more cocaine.

A good caregiver
won’t order pay-per-view on
the patient’s TV.

Their son, they complain,
sneaks off with his girlfriend
to attend her church.

Filth is his weapon.
Nameless, he wields it by phone.
But he knows her name.

She’s been acting strange
for the past six hours and just now
someone called it in.

They like their guns, but
automatic weapons fire
lights up the switchboard

A pant-less young man,
outside, on their toddler swing.
He seems to be stuck.

Santa Cruz’ East Side draws little attention. Lackluster commercial strips bisect sleepy old neighborhoods of big trees. It’s pleasant enough; but unless you live on the East Side, it’s just a place to drive through on your way to the big-box stories outside the city limits.

But the East Side does have its quiet attractions. At the very least, there is the Street of Inscrutable Enterprise. It stands unique in my six decades of experience on this planet.

The Street of Inscrutable Enterprise is a single block long. It connects two busy streets in an inconvenient sort of way; few cars enter it. When they do, their passengers see a street of mismatched commercial buildings and drab apartment houses. There’s no reason to stop.

Unless you have a keen eye, and a taste for unanswered questions.

On the Street of Inscrutable Enterprise you will find a battleship-grey frame building that houses a chiropractor’s office. The chiropractor’s name is painted on the side of the building in letters a foot high. But the doctor does not appear to practice. The blinds stay perpetually shut; the windows emit no light. No cars park in front. And yet, someone’s in there. One SUV parks in the back. It comes and goes. I have seen the front door open once, briefly, and quickly close.

Lest you think this the least bit odd, walk down the block to the Unnamed Church. The neighbors know that it’s a church. But it has no sign. It posts no name or regular hours of service. It may not have either one; I’ve seen it empty on Easter day.

The Unnamed Church seals itself tight behind tall steel fences. Weeds grow in the parking lot. Occasionally someone unlocks the lot, and a car or two appears. Once, on a Sunday, someone actually opened the church’s front door. Piano music drifted from inside; a single voice sang accompaniment. Sadly, the open door still lay behind a locked iron gate. I could have circled around through the parking lot, but didn’t bother. They didn’t seem to need visitors.

I looked up the church’s address online. It’s used by two corporations which translate bible study tracts into Chinese.

A glass-and-steel storefront down the block exposes two rooms to the street. One room, the one accessed through the front door, houses nothing but a velour-draped table and several high-backed chairs. Sometimes the table is set with artificial flowers; sometimes, pumpkins; sometimes, both. The other room stands empty save for six or seven identical wooden doors that lead — somewhere. They’re all perpetually shut.

On occasion, the postman shoves mail through the slot in the front door. It lies on the floor and accumulates for a time, then vanishes.

Another storefront bears a man’s name on the door and no other label or identification. Beyond the plate glass can be seen a comfortable office with its own mini-kitchen, an impressive desk, and a variety of plaques and magazines that cannot be read from the sidewalk. Much of the time, the office is empty. Occasionally a well-kept older man drives up in a well-kept older German automobile and sits behind the desk for a time. Then he leaves.

There are other things to discuss about the Street of Inscrutable Enterprise, but chief among them is the Darco Printing and Paper Store, a retail business that actually keeps regular hours. At Darco, only the hours are regular.

Darco prints business forms, business cards, and other print-worthy materials: “Since 1972,” shouts a fading sign. Two old folks lurk in the back; an extravagantly bored young woman of college age stands at the counter. We rarely see more than one other person in the place.

Darco sells varieties and colors of printer/copier paper that you can’t get at other stationers in these parts. In that sense it’s a valuable resource, albeit one that’s only open from 8 to 5:30 Monday through Friday. Originally Darco closed at 5, but added 30 minutes to their workday a couple of years a back. They made the slightest possible compromise with modern times. And never did that again.

But what you will notice when you walk in the door, besides regular stationery supplies, are the envelopes and pads of paper. Would you like a bundle of jet-black envelopes? How about an 8.5 by 5-inch pad of black paper?

At Darco you can get a paper pad or envelope of any color in any size, and sometimes in any stock. Does the name “Astrobright” mean anything to you? It’s the god they worship at Darco. Want an 8 by 14 pad of pink card-stock? Right this way, sir.

I’ve not seen such an inventory in the largest big city stationers. You can even get single pads in multiple colors: oranges, greens, yellows, pinks make separate layers down the side of the pads. They gleam like jewels. And it’s all — frankly — cheap.

The old gentleman in the back and I have talked on occasion. He likes to make glued pads of paper; he has the machinery to do it, and he does it. He does it so much that he uses the word “pad” as a verb. If a paper’s worth having, it’s worth having pads of it in one of several convenient sizes, that’s his view. He even takes paper scrap and pads it up as tiny “doodle pads” for as little as 3 cent apiece (for the ugly colors).

Three cents! I don’t think he sells many. He just believes that paper shouldn’t go to waste, and someday, you never know…

Rhumba goes to Darco for the drawing pads in different sizes and colors; after all, drawing on dark blue paper makes sense if you use white ink. But we both come back, again and again, for the screaming yellow business envelopes.

If you want to ensure that someone reads your letter, mail it in a screaming yellow envelope. It floats to the top of any pile. The recipient will always read it — if only to learn just what kind of person uses screaming yellow envelopes. Yellow envelopes work well on journalists, believe me. We also mail checks and money in them; tell people that their money’s coming in a bright yellow envelope, and they’ll watch the mail like hawks.

You can buy ’em at Darco by the bundle; lately, I’ve branched out into scrreaming orange, too. It’s the new hot color.

On that note we will leave the Street of Inscrutable Enterprise, that street of those people who do business — if you want to call it that — their way, with no concern for modern corporate practices. These are people who don’t’ worry about annual sales per square foot of space, or about signage, or even whether passers-by have these slightest idea of what’s going on behind those blinds and fences and blank storefronts.

They must be crazy, right? Or are they instead simply very, very lucky?

From the street, it can be hard to tell the difference. And sometimes, there isn’t one.

Here are a few more police blotter haiku.  Now I’m going to bed.  Just be glad you don’t live on a street with an eco-system based on pit bulls. Enjoy: and remember, there’s a book of them you can buy. (If you haven’t already, thankyouthankyouthankyou.)

A car struck a bear
They say ‘no injuries,’ but
no one asked the bear.

She loved her new pants.
She wore them even to the
store she’d swiped them from.

What would “two nude teens”
do in the back of a car
besides “intercourse?”

When you track people
through a rifle scope, young lads,
They WILL call the cops.

They wouldn’t tell him,
and he didn’t know, why they
beat him with fence posts

Broken shop window.
A face appears in the hole
and rambles strangely.

People they don’t know
roam their street asking questions
that they cannot fathom.

She bags her garbage
and throws it on the road where
the pit bulls eat it.

This week I couldn’t write a good haiku to save my life.  Honest to God, I thought I’d run dry.  But tonight, things went went well.  I had the Gregorian chant channel running on YouTube; perhaps it centered me.

Here’s tonight’s batch: as always, seventeen-syllable haiku based on crime stories from the police blotter columns of the nation’s newspapers.  Tonight’s come from the California Gold Country, where life is — colorful.  That’s it.  Colorful.  Enjoy.

“Dog bites man,” they knew,
and “man bites dog,” but nothing
of “dog bites your car.”

They weren’t aware of
what alcohol made him do
till he’d had three drinks.

His home-made bullwhip!
The power made puberty
seem almost worthwhile.

He thought it safe to
abuse a homeless women.
Sadly, he was right.

For three days she spoke
a long, soft soliloquy
in front of his shop.

He threw a punch at
the car that almost hit him.
It missed, he missed… peace.

Piss in a storm drain…
His urge could not be constrained.
But someone complained