I'm an asshole, and I'm here for a good time, not a long time. I don't do original, I work 12 hour days and troll replies for fun. Muted if you make jokes unfun
The system is designed to break you down and make you miserable. Find joy. Even in depression, find joy. It breaks them. Slowly. Because they cannot feel joy. It is not something they can't comprehend. Joy requires one to go beyond the moment to moment and look further than
USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
@NotABotBlonde My best graded paper in college was something I busted out in under two hours the morning it was due. I only remember it because my roommate and I had the same class and he asked me about it the morning of. Only got 5 points of it taken off because it was off topic. Lol
"Twitch streamer who was caught cheating with her cousin through a camera in her cat's litter box has responded"
tv show writers would get fired for something this ridiculous lmao
@Johnneh_80 Both times it was a female who handed me the ticket and suddenly forgot we existed. The second time I didn't pay anything except the penny, told the manager I had been waiting to pay for over 20 minutes, and walked out before giving him a chance to respond.
@Johnneh_80 My base is 15% with decent upward mobility. I have legit, in the last 6 months, gone old-school and left a single penny on the table twice.