Arcata, California is a special place

Me, JB, and two other people spent an afternoon in Arcata on a west coast voyage once. Our plan was to drive from LA to Vancouver, BC, but we only got as far north as Portland before we had to turn around.

We flew into the LBC, but things were easy for us because none of us were Snoop D-o-double-g. We did in fact go to the City of Compton, but we just went there to rent a car. There may or may not have been a bitch named Sadie. Unfortunately Dr. Dre didn't show up with any Tanqueray or fatass j's. Which brings me to Arcata. I'll spare you the details, but let's just say we chose Arcata as a stop on our journey because of its, um, reputation.

The reason I bring up Arcata tonight is because I have insomnia, and nothing entertains late at night like the Arcata Police Log. Sorry for the no paragraph breaks, but this is how it was published.

Tuesday, December 27 12:22 a.m. An I Street sculptor took a megadose of Xanax, with unhappy results. "Report of subject screaming for help. House broken into," reads the report. An ambulance was summoned and the victim taken to a Eureka mental health facility. The downer-drenched odyssey had begun two hours earlier, when, after chugging enough pills to becalm, if not sedate a small army, the artist formerly known as merely weird descended into pure hallucinatory madness which he described from the patient phone at the crazy house: After a brief post-ingestion lie-down, the man awoke to find his home surrounded by people in vintage headwear. "There were all these people looking in my windows, wearing Civil War-era hats," he said. One of the peepers was woman with a Dutch-boy hairdo, he said, and she was shaking what appeared to be a baby, or maybe a doll while another person taped the proceedings with a video camera. "Finally I decided that I'm gonna get up and close the door," the victim said. But on doing so, he found that his living room was littered with a large amount of human waste - enough to fill a wheelbarrow, he estimated - and broken glass from smashed bottles. Meanwhile, the surrounding crowd outside entertained itself by "hanging out and eating chips and throwing garbage in my front door." Disoriented because his furniture had been rearranged, the victim tried and failed to clamber into his wheelchair, and dragged himself down the hallway to his bedroom where he found two young men. One wore round, mirrored glasses and had a large bottle with a fuse hanging from it. Several half-gallon containers of some flammable liquid sat nearby, and the hallway was "soaked" with the fluid. "Hey, who are you in my house?" asked the resident, but the two men in his bedroom were mute. At some point in the resident managed to barricade his bedroom door with a "piece of metal," but the flammable liquid flowed under the door toward him, so he crawled back to the living room. "I'm pulling my body around," he said. "My feet are all torn up." Meanwhile, the crowd out front continued to munch potato chips and throw garbage in through the front door, and had somehow smashed the resident's cell phone, home phone and bed control. "I was really, really scared," said the victim. At this point, things took a somewhat bizarre turn with the appearance of scattered cocktail weenies littering the floor along with large marijuana buds which were "poisoned in some fashion." The victim tried to stay calm, but couldn't help thinking that "today's the day I die." As he lay among the cocktail weenies and poisoned pot, the victim decided he had nothing left to lose and confronted his tormentors. "I'm pointing at them, saying 'You want to go to jail for the rest of your lives?'" But this elicited little response. "They just grunted back," said the victim, who noted that the crowdmembers had changed into black, Nazi-style shirts. He started screaming, and eventually police appeared, called an ambulance and trundled the man off to the hospital. For days he clung to the gonzo narrative as a memory rather than a hallucination, but after a competency hearing, release and a return to routine, he came to understand that the whole thing - the civil war hats, the weenies, the toxic nugs - it was all a crazy, Xanax-induced dream. Now he's returned to sanity and routine, immersed in a project which involves gluing mussel shells to disfigured doll torsos.

That's an especially hilarious entry, but it's all pretty much like that.