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.
🔴🟡🔵 BIG WALK 🔴🟡🔵
Our new game about walking and talking comes out August 4 on Steam, Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5.
Hang out and get lost with close friends in a big world.
Portland’s budget is 8.5 billion compared to Nashville’s budget of 3.8 billion despite Nashville having like 50k more people
How on Earth are you spending that much and you can’t find anything else to cut before getting rid of a neighborhood’s only fire truck?
5 minutes before Trump’s announcement:
* $1.5B notional worth of S&P500 (ES) futures are bought in a single clip.
* $192M notional of oil futures (CL) sold.
More than 4x-6x any other trade size during the market close.
Insiders profited from his lies in broad daylight!
This is corruption.
Everyone knows this is corruption.
And the Republicans who spent years questioning every move that Hunter Biden made are absolutely silent about the shameless corruption happening out in the open.
beer is awful for you, especially IPAs.
it has glyphosate, loads of chemical cleaning agents, foam stabilizers and also phytoestrogens that tank your testosterone.
it's very hard on the gut and liver too.
avoid.