Messages From Beyond

When an offender has written a note to send to a staff member or another inmate, it's called a "kite".

I have no idea why.

We see lots of these every day. They send them on cadillacs to each other. The inmate workers pass them back and forth, even though they are not supposed to. They'll get written up or even locked up if they are caught, but they do it anyway when they think we're not looking.

Some of the kites get lost in transit and end up just laying on the wing floor for anyone to pick up. I always pick them up when I see them. I've seen some amazingly funny/ ridiculous/ disgusting/ incriminating stuff written down. The love notes are the best. They give me the willies, sometimes.

And I get handed some of the most ridiculous incomprehensible hogwash sometimes. I know that some of them are illiterate. I don't mock them for that. I don't like it and I don't understand it, but that's because my world revolves around words and their use. I don't make fun of the illiterate. I pity them because their world must seem so confusing.

But for those who can read and write, they hand out some of the most confusing garbage I have ever seen in my life. I've had notes with fifty words in which I could read three or four. The note above for example:

1. Pickled eggs made (something)
2. Hold out we can make christmas(?)
3. (something) an (something) (something) got me back my (something).
4. (something) are farted(?) (something) (something)

It goes on like that a bit. Both sides. There's one line that seems to say "Fil (feel?) like I'm the navy." Huh? OK, I'll have to admit, I've never felt like I'm the navy. Too many chances for crude jokes there. And there's another line on the other side that seems to read: "cake shake quakes sakes make". Well..... who doesn't? About eleven, I think.

And of course the big question is, who was this note going to, what does it mean, who could possibly understand it and why in gawds name did it end up in my hands?

As much as I enjoy the strangeness that goes on here, I fear one of these days one of these notes is going to give me a brain aneurism. I'll try to hard to get my brain wrapped around it and something deep inside is going to go "pop" and that will be all she wrote for the Revster.

Not the way I had planned on going out. I have always hoped it would be piled up in the sack with half a dozen japanese chicks, not on the concrete floor of a cell block. Ah, well.

I'll try to keep that from being my demise. But I'll still pick the damn things up off the floor and read them. Think I'll just try not so hard to understand.

And like Vinnie says: "Don't let 'em get you!"