9 october

With satisfaction

in anticipation of

an argument to come,

my friend Andrew will tell you—

declare, really—that ketchup

is his favorite food.

The pounce will come when you—

fool that you most happily are—

mistakenly challenge the validity of ketchup

as a food.

This aside, it was altogether fitting I should meet Andrew in Ukraine. In a land without peanut butter, Dr. Pepper, or sprinkle cheese, ketchup was in plentiful and varied abundance—whole shelves dedicated to it, most of them ready to be offered up to forest-grilled shaslyk, barbequed kebabs, and sausages sliced on trains and served with similarly sliced hardboiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, and bread, dipped and mayonnaised, long into the whistling night. If I were to list the varieties of ketchup here, you’d be distracted and rather thrown off, I’d imagine, and we’d never get on with the rest of the story.