"A treeless, desolate waste of uninhabitable solitude, which has always been and must continue uninhabited forever.”
-General Randolph Marcy, describing where I grew up.
Of course this is about gambling. But at a deeper level, it's about the internet/smartphones. Vice is always tempting. But digital vices are extraordinarily hard to resist. Many believe they are hopelessly addicted to a "vice" when really they are addicted to a device.
ACNA legislative news: Bp Chip Edgar (South Carolina), joined by Bp Chris Warner (Mid-Atlantic), withdrew the diocese's 2 resolutions seeking the release of the Ruch trial transcripts & the eventual third-party report on the Ruch investigation. 🧵
War goals over time:
1. We’re liberating the people Iran!
2. We’re ending a theocratic nuclear regime!
3. We’re making the Middle East/Israel safe for generations!
[time elapses]
4. We’re restoring the antebellum price of crude!
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck said that choice is what makes man great. However, he failed to consider that most people’s choices are really dumb. In this essay, I will…
FYI for anyone visiting Texas....
If they charge for Chips and Salsa, they are NOT a legitimate Mexican restaraunt.
Do not eat there.
Leave immediately.
Call the police and report fraud.
The ACNA's Provincial Council will consider 2 resolutions submitted by its Diocese of South Carolina related to the trial of Bp Stewart Ruch. 🧵
The first - "Calling upon the Court for the Trial of a Bishop to release a full transcript of all of its actions in the Ruch matter":
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'm a Ken Burns stan but every Shelby Foote moment is like "a CONFEDERATE briiide once said that her huuuusband was one of the finest men to ever grace the halls of powah but he preferred to till the soil with his hands -- and that man was Stonewall Jackson"