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.
In an undercover video produced by Accuracy in Media, a staff member at the University of North Texas brags about how the institution has kept left-wing advocacy materials in its course content despite a bevy of new state laws.
A middle-aged @usairforce colonel went through a shoot down and a parachute drop, was severely injured, treated his own wounds, ran five miles in enemy territory, climbed a 7,000-foot mountain, radioed the proclamation, "God is good," and then holed up in a crevice in near-freezing temperatures for two days while his brothers and sisters came to rescue him. That's America; that's the American military; that's the United States Air Force.
In case you weren't aware, the NYPD and FDNY play an annual charity hockey game against each other.
The cops got a gritty 3-2 win over the firefighters and what followed was a truly incredible, three-minute long bench clearing brawl.
I’m receiving reports this morning regarding two successful campaigns that occurred over the weekend.
1. No Kings. As of this morning, there are (still) no kings in the United States of America.
2. No Dukes. As of this morning, there are no Dukes in the NCAA tournament.
If you are willing to give Cornyn 6 more years of destroying our country, in exchange for the SAVE Act, good for you. Not me. He should have wanted to pass it because it’s the right thing to do. Don’t negotiate with terrorists. End their careers.