Great Texts, Vol. 3

Take this clean, stylized image of barbecue sticks in a jar of spiced vinegar. Nice, right? Now imagine these sticks holding hacked-up tubes of intestine, whole chicken heads from the neck up, and some unidentified brown knobs. Imagine them on a tray, covered with a clear plastic tarp, with little ants scampering all over the place. That's what Katrina is working with.

Each time I get a great text, I think to myself, "no text will ever top this." And then the next day I get a better one. Well, this may in fact be the ultimate Great Text. It comes from Katrina, a charming young woman who sells barbecue most afternoons on a street corner in my neighborhood. She doesn't sell that wussy barbecue of marinated chunks of pork/beef/chicken on a stick. She cooks that hard stuff -- pork intestines (isaw), chicken heads (helmet, ulo, leeg), pork ears (tenga), and other miniature impaled organs that I'm still not sure about. If you look closely, you can see tiny ants running around on the sticks before she throws them on the grill, after which they burn up pretty quick. Anyway, I stop and chat with her most days when I'm walking by, and once in a while he texts me. I remember when I put my number into her phone that the keys were really jammed and hard to use. That might explain some of this text, and yes, her English is limited so she probably doesn't spell wonderfully even without the technological handicap, but the errors are so fortuitous in this case, a divine -- or demonic -- hand seems to have had a part in it. One day, I checked my phone and saw that I received this text: "HELL GOD APURTINO TO U." Translation: "Hello, good afternoon to you."