Does your newspaper have a police blotter? It's a column of short stories about minor crimes and disturbances. In the blotter you find tales of normal people with normal lives who have, for some reason, gone off the rails. Aflame with anger,
he set fire to the carport
of her new lover.
The police blotter is funny, ugly, absurd, sad: in short, very human. And it lends itself to haiku: a brief, structured verse form that cuts through routine facts to the heart of the matter. A woman's young son comes home smelling of marijuana? The haiku reads:
The end of childhood.
She smelled it as pot smoke
on her twelve-year-old son.
What's the appeal? It's the knowledge that any of us could end up in the blotter. We're all human. If the right temptation catches us in the wrong state of mind, who knows what might happen?
Open this book, and see. Within you'll find over 250 tales of the human condition taken from newspapers across America - and over 100 illustrations.
Who knows? Maybe you're in there already.
About the Author: Jim Jones is the author of the children's novels "Evil Shoes" and "The Adventures of the Clean Plate Ranger," and the essay collection "Tales from the Coast," all available on Amazon.com
His interests lie in finding the extraordinary within the ordinary, which can involve staring at people in restaurants or following interesting strangers down the street at a discrete distance to see what they'll do next. Jones is a long-time blogger based in Santa Cruz, California, a coastal college town of some reputation which rarely lacks for something to write about. He has worked in high tech, insurance, primary education, civil service, and lately for a public university whose mascot is a yellow gastropod.
