This is that stupid rumour again. Watch the movie I Love Boosters and see what the movie is about. If I was trying to persuade people to be Boosters, that'd be low goals. There's way more to do. Also, illegal business comes from material necessity, not culture.
USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen.
I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify.
In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather.
"Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully.
"Honey, that's what it looks like."
The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it."
I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it.
I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South.
It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent.
"Well?" the waitress asked.
"I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed."
"Everybody does, hon."
Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it.
Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating.
I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden.
It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.
I come back to my hometown twice a year and I notice when they’ve chopped down huge trees my childhood was built under. It feels like a scar on a family member.
SERIOUS QUESTION: Does anyone else get sad and confused when trees get chopped down in residential areas that literally aren’t even bothering anyone ??
Rich kids being able to do art for a living may be a reflection of their privilege but it seems to me like a reflection of the fact that a human that doesn't have to worry about money will often choose art. everyone is an artist until rent is due. i wish we all had that right
I hope people didn't memoryhole the fact that Los Angeles was the very first city Donald Trump subjected to ICE terror almos exactly a year ago, and guess what community was hit hardest
I need the Knicks to win because it feels like New York is the only state in the US having fun right now and I wanna see what happens when they overdose on joy and whimsy
Glenn Powell and Betty Gilpin should do a romcom. Unfortunately it won’t happen because they are about the same age and she is alive behind the eyes but I bet they would be great
Loneliness, when experienced by women, is treated like a joke. The stereotypical image of the crazy cat lady has been mocked for centuries. Warning other women not to be too selective or too0 demanding, or else you'll end up like her. But when men are "lonely" (when women refuse to engage with certain men) suddenly it's an epidemic and a crisis requiring analysis by psychologists and hundreds of articles telling why these poor men are so lonely.
Capitalism has invented something called "cost of living" where your very existence is an ever-inflating expense that you must overcome to survive. Think about that.