"Mario," the note — in all its rushed, profanity-laced, poorly spelled, grammatically incorrect glory — started. "I ... hate you. You said you had to work then whys your car HERE at HER place?? You're a ... LIAR. I hate you I ... hate you ... Amber."

Then, at the bottom of the scrap of paper, "PS Page me later."

The note still intrigues and inspires Davy Rothbart, the actual owner of the car. In the three years since finding the note, Rothbart has never met Amber or Mario. But he's thought about them.

At first, he felt sorry "for this poor guy ... who was probably at work anyway." But recently, Rothbart has been drifting toward another theory. Surely Amber "wouldn't have been so quick to jump to conclusions and make a mistake unless there was some history of infidelity there, or (of Mario) hanging around with his old girlfriend," said Rothbart.

Notes and photos that span the spectrum of human events are sent to Davy Rothbart daily for his Found magazine.

Rothbart paused, pondering the full — and possibly, forever unknown — story of Amber and Mario.

"There's so much you can read into a short little note."

This is a man who should know.

Rothbart is the creator of Found, an annual publication of lost or tossed-out scraps of handwritten notes, shopping lists, love letters, photos and other fascinating scrap-heap minutiae detailing the strange complexities of the human condition. Inspired by Amber's note to Mario, Rothbart and co-publisher Jason Bitner launched the self-published magazine in 2002 with just 800 copies and hoped others would be as fascinated by their finds.

They were.

Found's third issue, released last February, has sold more than 30,000 copies. A greatest-scraps collection, "Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, And Forgotten Items From Around The World" (Fireside, $14) was released in May and has become a bestseller.

A months-long 50-state, 140-city promotional tour finally brings Rothbart to The ARTS at Marks Garage Saturday for readings/performances of his collection, and a bit of audience show and tell.

"Found," the book, is a consistently fascinating document of our commonality as human beings. Skimming through its pages, for instance, one discovers that break-up letters and love letters share eerily similar expressions of sorrow, giddiness or confusion whether written in Los Angeles, Durham or a foreign language.

What Rothbart's collection does best, however, is play into our natural human curiosity about the lives of others.

A letter from Mary to Amos begs him to get over a "gross" and "kinky ... phase of yours" in the bedroom or risk sleeping alone. Amos' "phase," of course, goes tantalizingly unrevealed. A hand-scrawled list of goals on another page begins with "1) Go to church. Find God, than myself through him. Get baptised," and follows up with "2) Party a lot."

A grade-school child fond of cheery computer fonts and the business-like prose of bank statements composes a letter to "AJ" about a missing binder that will stay that way unless he leaves "a sum of $3.50 directly under the clock to the left of the door at precisely 1:15." The note goes on to warn, "Please do not inform any teacher of this transaction. If you mess this up you WILL regret it."

Several Found items are profoundly sad. A letter from a scared girl named Eliza to her mommy and daddy begging them not to bring "that stuff" into the house because "it makes a greater chance of us getting kicked out" is powerful because of its simple, child-written honesty.

Still other Found items stun with their strange existence at all. A lost shopping list reads, "roach spray, batteries, water mellon." Yet another windshield note reads: "Please do not put crab on my car. Just cut it out!!!"

Found's readership and visits to its Web site (www.foundmagazine.com) have grown so much in the last two years, Rothbart is no longer the magazine's main source of found stuff.

Letters and packages arrive at the Ann Arbor, Mich., home of Rothbart's parents at the rate of 15 pieces a day. All of it is stored in a huge stone-lined basement whose only other occupants are a washer/dryer and several bats.

An occasional item or two comes from Hawai'i. But Found receives more items from California than any other state.

Rothbart hasn't become jaded by any of it.

"Just when you think you've seen every variation on how one human can express themselves to another, something new and mind-blowing comes in," said Rothbart.

One recent find in this category was a note given to him at a Jackson, Miss., tour stop by a girl who had found it in her high school classroom.

"It was a note that another girl had written to a science teacher, basically confessing a crush on him," said Rothbart. "The writer didn't really show it at first. She'd talk around the point about this and that, and on the second page kind of blurts it out in a brave kind of way."

Like the best kind of Found items, it also left Rothbart playing out the before and after. How did the letter get on the floor? Who put it there — the science teacher or the girl? Was it ever delivered?

"That's the appeal of some of these things," said Rothbart. "It'll sometimes be the fragment of a story — maybe the ninth page of a letter. And you're left wondering what happens on the first eight pages."

Asked what makes something a perfect Found item versus, say, common trash, Rothbart identified "the human element."

"It's really about getting a really powerful sense of somebody that's a stranger to you," said Rothbart. "You have to imagine who these people are because you don't know everything about them.

"When you see the handwriting, you can almost feel them hunched over the paper writing it. Sometimes, if it's an angry note, you can feel the ridges in the paper as their pen dug into it."

The simple explanation?

"A Fritos bag is probably trash. But a love note has great value to me, even if it wasn't written to me."

Rothbart's Honolulu stop on his Slapdance Across America tour won't include his brother Peter, who accompanies readings on acoustic guitar and sometimes sets Found items to original music. Peter needs a rest after three months on the road with Davy in their eBay-bought 1999 Dodge Ram.

"It'll be something like a rowdy reading and music event," promised Rothbart, of his evening at ARTS at Marks. "Basically, I just get up there with a big stack of my favorite notes and letters that people have sent over the last couple of years, and on this trip. And I just kind of read them aloud.

"I try to read them with the energy and emotion that they might have been written with. The notes themselves are so incredible that it doesn't take much just to bring them to life a bit."

Peter's presence will be felt in Honolulu mainly by way of a four-page play he recently found.

"It's a very interesting, risqué play that's full of sexual innuendo," explained Rothbart.

It's also missing page three, which Peter never found.

"And that's what's great about it," said Rothbart, of the audience-participatory play. "It's like a lot of Found notes. What's not there is, sort of, the most interesting thing about it."

As with all of Rothbart's tour stops, Honolulu collectors will be invited to step up to the mike and share their own Found-worthy treasures. Rothbart calls this part of the reading a "show-and-tell for grownups."

The audience at Marks will also be the first-ever to get its hands on premiere copies of "Dirty Found." The title pretty much explains the strangely documented and even more strangely cast-off anonymous photos of private parts within. A CD collection of songs submitted by bands who, inspired by Peter, have set Found stuff to music should be out next year.

In the back of the Ram, while Peter cruised past Waco, Texas, en route to a Dallas tour stop, Davy was floored by a question from his inquisitor he'd never been asked before. If Amber had decided to take a bat to Mario's headlights or windshield, might Found never have been, uh, found?

"I've never thought of that, but you're so right," said Rothbart. "I probably wouldn't have been so excited to find the note. I would've been hitting an auto parts store instead of Kinko's."