USA. There is a white sauce here that the people pour upon everything, with the devotion of a sacred rite. I have become a believer.
I noticed it slowly. A bowl of it beside the vegetables. A cup of it beside the bread. Beside the meat. Beside the other sauce. Children dipped fruit in it. A grown man beside me poured it onto a slice of pizza that already had a sauce of its own, closed his eyes, and sighed like a man coming home.
I asked its name. They told me with a small reverence: ranch.
For it is written that every great people anoints its food with one sacred thing — a drop of gold pressed from olives, a paste of beans aged in cedar. This nation has chosen a cool white elixir, and it anoints not one dish but all dishes, holding nothing back. For to leave a single food unblessed would be the deeper impiety.
So I anointed. Everything. The vegetable, yes. But also the rice. The egg. The morning fish. I would not be the one barbarian who left his plate unblessed while a whole nation dipped in joy around me.
And here my heart rose, and I declared the thing a calmer man would not:
"I will pour this holy elixir upon every food beneath the heavens — the noble and the humble, the savory and the sweet — until I find the one dish it cannot improve. And on that day I will know I have reached the very edge of the world, for everything within it has been made better by ranch."
The teenager refilling the dip station watched me anoint a bowl of rice.
"...that's a lot of ranch, my guy."
"It is the correct amount," I told him, "for a god."
I have not yet found the dish it cannot improve. I have stopped looking. So I brought a great vat of it to the next gathering and set it at the center of the table, and the whole room descended upon it with cries of joy, and a woman I had never met looked at me and said, "okay — YOU get it."
I have never felt more accepted.
So tell me, America.
You call it ranch. A condiment. A thing on the side.
I call it the one sauce a whole nation agreed to love together —
and I dip, with all of you,
gladly.
USA. Summer. It is 95 degrees outside, and I am shivering inside a sandwich shop.
I have discovered how Americans forge strong souls.
Outside, the sun is trying to kill everyone. Inside this small restaurant, it is winter. My breath does not fog, but it is thinking about it. A man near me is eating a cold sandwich while wearing a jacket. In summer. Indoors.
In Japan we would simply turn it down. Americans do not turn it down. And now I understand them better than they understand themselves.
This cold is not an accident. This cold is a gift.
The owner has built, inside his shop, a second season. He invites you in from the brutal heat and hands you the one thing the sun has denied you all day: a reason to be cold. To endure it is to be tempered. You walk in soft and sweating. You walk out sharp and clear, a slightly stronger person than you were.
So I did not complain. I removed my outer layer and offered it to the woman at the next table, who was hugging herself. She said, "Oh, no, I'm fine, thank you." She was not fine. Her lips were blue. But she, too, understood the training. She would not break first. I respected her deeply.
The owner asked if everything was okay.
"It is perfect," I said, through my teeth, which were chattering. "Thank you for the winter."
He said, "...I can turn the AC down if you want?"
I told him no. A man does not ask the mountain to be shorter.
I stayed two hours. I ordered a hot coffee to survive. Then a second one, to hold. By the end I could no longer feel my hands, but my spirit had never been clearer.
So now, on the hottest days, I seek out the coldest rooms. I sit. I shiver. I sharpen.
And when I finally step back out into the summer heat, and it wraps around me like a warm bath, I feel it.
Reborn.
A man who has survived the winter, in August, indoors, for the price of a sandwich.
It’s just a personal anecdote, but I work at a factory with tons of immigrants from all over the world, and in my experience (because they’ll just straight up tell you) Africans almost exclusively view America as nothing more than a treasure trove to be looted
"Believe all women," she snarled as she made it all up. Audrey was my friends girlfriend, much to my dismay. About 5ft 8, skinny like a rail, manic panic hair dye stained on her hands once a month. She looked like she acted, tremendously annoying. Imagine the most talentless art school student imaginable.
You don't expect to like your friends girlfriends. For the most part, you just want them to be not obnoxious or crazy. You don't have to date them, so they aren't really your problem. That is of course, until they make themselves your problem. Audrey did just that.
I was in my 20s and it was her birthday. Like most girls in their 20s, at least this type of girl, she liked to drink. She especially loved Jack Daniels. I'm not the most creative gift giver, so I bought her a large bottle. We're all at my friend's apartment before her birthday party started. I handed her the bottle which I even went through the trouble of wrapping. You expect all kinds of reactions and varying degrees of excitement when you watch someone open a present you gave them. I admit, I didn't expect her reaction.
She placed the bottle on the table and shouted at me "Are you serious?!" I was so confused. I know the gift wasn't expensive, but I didn't particularly like her and we didn't know each other well. She then starts crying with no tears and storms out of the room. I'm ready to jump through the window and fall three stories.
My friend comes out of his bedroom where he was finding out what was going on. Tells me what happened. Suddenly, this girl who wore a cut up Jack Daniels t shirt a few months prior had PTSD associated with Jack Daniels. She had an elaborate story that a group of frat guys assaulted her with a bottle of it. An entire group of them she said.
She made it up. She started this huge drama between my friend and I. Months later she was ordered Jack at a bar and my friend lost his mind and called her on it. She said she never once said that.
The story is getting too long so ill end it abruptly. They got married and were separated seven months later. I only bring this up because he just texted me that she just got married for the fourth time and was laughing about it.
Believe all women? I'm gonna pass.