Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.
The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.
The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.
Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.
"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.
It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.
"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.
I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.
In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.
And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.
You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.
The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.
I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.
Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.
"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.
Discipline is a journey.
There’s some quirk in physics where, if there’s a small hole in a bag of mulch it will leak all over your vehicle.
But if you rip a giant hole in the bag and try to dump it out into your landscaping, almost none will fall out.
HBD to the great Sonny Rollins. I love the story about how he heard "Waiting On A Friend" by the Rolling Stones once at the grocery store and loved the sax solo. And then he remembered that he was the one who played it. https://t.co/LjH2W4Dq4N
“I’ll be 10 min late sorry!!!”
-ashamed
-fragile
-unreliable
“A thousand apologies. The relentless slog of time has overtaken my faculties.”
-powerful
-commanding
-honest
@United_Africana Time Under Tension combined with good technique. “Numbers are an abstraction, especially to muscles. Your body doesn’t know the absolute weight of what you lift; it only recognizes how heavy it feels. The secret is to make lighter weights feel heavier.” -Frank Zane
I talked a dad who told me he spent $10k a year on travel baseball between tourneys, travel, and gear for his son. He got a partial scholarship to D-2 school. If he had put the $10k in a mutual fund each year, he would have had about $190,000. The scholarship was $5k a year.
If Pizza Hut can return, then we can resurrect Blockbuster.
And we should.
While Netflix made things more “convenient” we lost something irreplaceable:
The ritual of going to a place with your family or friends to choose a story together.
That experience was special.