His jobs since graduating have usually involved paper in some way — for a while he fixed laser printers, and he and Michele owned an arts magazine, "Local Muse," for a couple of years; now he works at a blueprint shop — so there have always been enough scraps and recycled paper around to make something with. There is often a paper cut or two on his hands. "Big troll hands," he calls them.

He's never met an object he couldn't figure out how to fold, he says, although it's taken years to solve the origami wasp problem. But there are plenty of things that he would choose not to make into origami, simply because they'd be too tedious. A lawn, he says, by way of example. Or the human genome. His default origami is a cicada, which he can fold effortlessly, without looking.

Because of his epilepsy, he walks instead of drives — a man in fedora and suspenders who spends a lot of time looking at the ground, noticing what the rest of us ignore.

It took him nine hours to turn a piece of paper into a centipede. It's an exact replica but not a perfect one — because Jones always tries to make some small imperfection in each piece he creates. Not a tear, of course, because the ethics of origami say no tearing, no cutting. Just some small blemish to convince him he needs to keep folding.

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com