Mike Greer

If you don't have time to do it right when will you have time to do it over?-John Wooden yelling at neighborhood kid mowing his yard, probably. #Arsenal #MSU

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

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.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

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.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A stadium parking lot. I came to watch a battle, and found the army feasting three hours before it.

Hundreds of tents. Grills. Clan flags flying from trucks. Men in war paint handing food to strangers. I assumed the game had been cancelled and this was the consolation.

"When does the battle begin?" I asked a man tending an enormous grill.

"Kickoff's at one. We've been here since seven."

Seven. In my land, an army eats quietly before war, in case it is the last meal. Here, the meal IS the war. The enemy parking lot is doing the same thing forty yards away. Nobody is fighting. Everyone is grilling.

A man handed me a plate. I had not asked. I was not known to him. The plate held more meat than my ancestors saw in a winter.

"You with us or them?" he asked.

"I am with whoever fed me," I said. It is the oldest law.

"Good answer," he said, and gave me more.

Then I learned the terrible truth. The man at the grill — the general of this feast — was not going inside.

"You will not watch the battle?"

"Nah. I'll catch it on the radio. Somebody's gotta watch the grill."

He marches to the war. He feeds the army. He does not enter. In eight hundred years of my family's records, there is no rank for this man.

There should be.

I was full. I was confused. I was, somehow, home.

An army that eats together has already won. The game is a detail.

When the crowd roared inside the stadium, the grill man nodded once, and flipped a burger.

Next week I am bringing my own tent. He said I could park beside him. We are allies now.

The terms were ribs.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

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.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Giant pandas are officially no longer classified as "Endangered"

But it was nothing to do with them

[Defiant L’s @DefiantLs]

Sen. Kennedy: "We were told that if Congress clawed back the taxpayer money it was giving NPR and PBS, Western civilization would collapse."

"Well, here we are.. and both NPR and PBS are fine."

[Super 70s Sports @Super70sSports]

Sometimes this world wears you out and leaves you cynical … and then you see a moment like this and realize there will always be more good than bad.

[Gryphon @Gryph911]

To all my fellow Gen X out there

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

Christian worship singer Brandon Lake says he experienced the most holy moment in worship of his entire life during Charlie Kirk's memorial.

Lake says he still has goosebumps remembering when no one sang for 9 minutes and only the strings were playing.

"I never in a million years thought that He would bring about revival in this way. I always thought it would happen in the four walls of a church..."

"The church is happening, maybe even more so, outside of the four walls of where you attend on Sunday..."

Praise God.

[Mississippi State Baseball @HailStateBB]

A new era begins.

Welcome to Starkville, Coach O’Connor.

#HailState🐶

[McNeil @REFLOG18]

It’s Major League

[Mississippi State Baseball @HailStateBB]

The Voice of the Diamond Dawgs calls his first homer ⚡️

#HailState | @HailStateVoice

[Mike Greer @mlg99]

@Super70sSports Jim “Two Silhouettes on” Deshaies

[Alyssa Lang @AlyssaLang]

Timeless advice. Nerds clusters, still the elite of the elite. Happy Halloween, miss you coach ❤️🏴‍☠️

[Rob Friedman @PitchingNinja]

James McCann is a legend for this.

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

A young Muslim Israeli woman thanks the Israeli state for all the opportunities it has gifted her with and says that if not for Israel she would have been an illiterate woman enslaved by her husband right now.

Instead, she got an MA from Stanford.

🇺🇸🇮🇱

[Mike Greer @mlg99]

Hail State @nathaniel_lowe !

[Mississippi State Football @HailStateFB]

11.4.23 🔒

#HailState🐶

[Mike Greer @mlg99]

@janecoaston https://t.co/NhKEhTiAFm

[Mike Greer @mlg99]

#HailState #SwingYourSword

[Mississippi State Football @HailStateFB]

🏆 𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐈𝐀𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐁𝐎𝐖𝐋 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 🏆

#HailState🏴‍☠️