Devan Williams

Inprocessing at my new battalion.

Laundry, cleaning up my destroyed house

Finally getting to bed.

made dinner, watchin scrubs.

Loves the free dental.

This commercial is pure fire. A bunch of little kids looking dead serious into the camera: “When I grow up I want to work for a woke company… I want to weaponize my pronouns… I want to be hired for how I look, not what I can do…” Then the punchline hits and it’s over. Corporate America got so drunk on this nonsense that even the kids in the ad sound more sane than half the HR departments out there. People are finally opening their eyes. The spell is breaking. Watch it. Share it. youtube.com/watch?v=wct_yb… Credit where it’s due — RedBalloon.work

@japan_nobunaga Well said, congrats on the duck. Although, you can do much better than Cracker Barrel. Be sure to find a Waffle House before you leave, shouldn’t be too hard, they are everywhere, and our country uses them to assess when areas have become habitable again after natural disasters.

I stopped at Cracker Barrel for breakfast. This was my first mistake. I believed the front porch was decoration. There were rocking chairs. Many rocking chairs. Old men rocked in them with the authority of judges who had already ruled. I nodded. They nodded. The case was closed. Then I entered what I thought was the restaurant. It was not the restaurant. It was a gift shop the size of a moral test. Candles. Peg games. Fake antiques. A wooden duck that made eye contact. I came for eggs. The duck knew this and did not care. Fifteen minutes later I was still in the maze, holding a jar of apple butter I did not remember picking up. A woman named June appeared like a lighthouse. "Food's that way, sugar." I thanked her with the intensity of a man rescued from retail wilderness. The breakfast was excellent. Biscuits. Gravy. Eggs that understood their job. I ate like a person who had earned calories through navigation. On the way out I had to pass the gift shop again. The duck was waiting. I bought it. I will not explain myself. In the car I set the wooden duck on the passenger seat and said, out loud, "We came for eggs." The duck said nothing. It had already won. America did not trick me. America invited me onto a porch, through a gift-shop labyrinth, into gravy, and then sold me a bird on the way out. I am fine. The duck is fine. And somehow I am more excited about this country than I was before breakfast.

"A guy looked at my airplane the other day and said I wonder how many people I could have fed for the price of that airplane... I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families at the Dassault factory where it was built. I’m sure it fed a bunch of families that rolled the aluminum at the Alcoa factory. It surely fed a lot of people at the Honeywell factory where the experts built the turbines. It fed a whole company for a few weeks when I had them build me a new interior. It feeds the families of the linemen that fuel it. That’s the difference between capitalism and a welfare mentality. When you buy something, you put money in people's pockets, and give them dignity for their skills. When you give someone something for nothing, you rob them of their dignity and self worth. Capitalism is freely giving your money in exchange for something of value. Socialism is taking your money against your will and shoving something down your throat that you never asked for."

@japan_nobunaga I don’t know if this dude is really from Japan, but his little anecdotes rip.

In Georgia I entered a Chick-fil-A drive-thru line of forty cars. I turned off my engine. I prepared to wait the way my ancestors waited out a siege. Six minutes later I was holding chicken. I do not know what happened to the other thirty-nine cars. The line moved like water that had somewhere to be. A young woman walked between the cars taking orders on a small tablet, on foot, in the sun, smiling like the sun was her idea. I said thank you. She said, "My pleasure." I did not think about it then. I should have. At the window I thanked the young man for the food. "My pleasure." I thanked him for the sauce. "My pleasure." I thanked him for thanking me— "My pleasure." I want to be clear about what was happening. This was a duel. In Japan I trained in courtesy for forty years. Bowing angles. Seasonal greetings. The correct depth of apology for seventeen distinct situations. I was a white belt in that drive-thru. I escalated. I used my most formal English. I thanked him on behalf of my entire family line. He said, "My pleasure," and gave me extra sauce. Extra sauce. Unprovoked. A counterattack. I returned the next day to reclaim my honor. It was Sunday. The restaurant was closed. All of them were closed. In the entire country. They close every Sunday, and they have closed every Sunday since the beginning, because the founder made a promise, and the promise did not expire when he did. I stood in the empty parking lot and understood I had lost twice. Once to a teenager with sauce. Once to a man I will never meet, who kept his word so long it became a building. In my country we say a samurai's word is his life. I had never seen a restaurant say it back. I returned Monday. I ordered. And this time I said it first, before she could. "My pleasure." She smiled and said, "It sure is." America, I surrender. It was my pleasure.

In America I ordered a milkshake and the young man turned it upside down over my head. I did not move. A samurai does not flinch, even when the ice cream is above him and gravity is the law. Nothing fell. The cup hung there, upside down, defying the sky, and the boy held it over me with the calm of a man who has done this ten thousand times and buried his fear long ago. This is the Blizzard. This is Dairy Queen. If it falls, they told me, you get it free. I understood at once. This was not dessert. This was an ordeal. The boy was not showing off. He was swearing an oath, with his own arm, that he had made the thing thick enough to hang against the earth, and he was betting the price of it on his honor. The flip is not a trick. It is a vow. In my land a smith proved his blade by cutting. Here a boy of seventeen proves his by turning it over a stranger's head and looking him in the eye while the whole line waits to see if he lied. He did not lie. He set it upright, handed it to me, and said "there you go, man," then turned to the next customer as if he had not just gambled his good name across a counter. I tipped him everything in my pocket. He tried to give it back. He said it was just a Blizzard. I told him it was not just a Blizzard. I could not explain the rest in English, and there was a line, and he was busy. So I bowed instead. He said, "You too, man." That answered nothing I had said. It answered everything I had felt.

In Louisiana, a man I had known for four hours invited me to eat at his home. In Japan, this would require two years of restaurant dinners and a formal discussion about scheduling. He drove me to his backyard. There was no table set. There were no plates. There was a folding table covered in newspaper. I assumed the dishes were still inside. I waited politely by the door. He walked past me carrying a pot the size of a bathtub, tilted it over the table, and poured. What came out was a red mountain. Crawfish, hundreds of them, tumbling across the newspaper with corn and potatoes and sausage and a spice so strong my eyes watered from six feet away. I looked around for forks. Nobody else was looking for forks. A woman reached in with her bare hand. She picked up a crawfish, twisted off its head with one clean motion, and sucked the inside of it. I need you to understand something. She was not performing. She was not being dared. This was Tuesday. Everyone was doing it. Grandmothers. Children. A man in a dress shirt who had come straight from church and had not changed because the boil would not wait for a man to change. He twisted. He sucked. He reached for the next one without pausing his sentence. I have held a sword. I have trained to show nothing on my face. I picked one up. The spice burned my fingers. I twisted the head. Something inside it looked back at me. I sucked it anyway. The flavor hit my whole mouth at once, and it was so good I forgot I was horrified. I ate thirty. Then forty. The spice destroyed my lips by the tenth one and I kept going because the man next to me was still reaching and I refused to be the first to stop. Then I noticed the boy across the table. He was five. Maybe six. He had a pile of empty shells in front of him twice the size of mine. He was not concentrating. He was peeling crawfish the way other children breathe. Without effort. Without looking down. A child was beating me at dinner in front of his entire family. His grandmother saw my face. She said, "You doin' just fine, baby." She handed me a beer. I understood the beer was not a reward. It was medical. By the end I was sitting in a plastic chair with newspaper ink on my elbows and spice under my fingernails. I had no plate. I had no fork. I had not used a single utensil in two hours. In Japan, a formal meal takes fourteen steps. The angle of the chopsticks. The order of the courses. A bow before the first bite. A bow after the last. In Louisiana, the instructions are: boil it, pour it on the news, stand around it with the people you love. I have eaten kaiseki prepared by a man who trained for thirty years. He never once served it on a newspaper. He never once served it this well. I asked the man when they do this again. He said Saturday. I asked which Saturday. He said every Saturday.

In Texas they told me to stop at Buc-ee's for gas. I have been to shrines. I have stood in temples that took two hundred years to build. I was not prepared for the gas station. There were one hundred and twenty fuel pumps. I counted them because I did not believe them. A man beside me was filling a truck the size of my first apartment, and he was not filling it because it was empty. He was filling it because he was here, and here is where a man fills things. Inside was a hall so vast I lost the horizon. A wall of jerky. A wall of fudge I did not know the country produced. A brisket sandwich handed to me by a man in a beaver costume. And I want to be clear, the beaver is not a mascot. The beaver is a saint. The people speak of him the way my grandmother spoke of the mountain behind her house. And the bathrooms. I had been warned about the bathrooms and I had dismissed the warning as the pride of a loud people. I was wrong to dismiss it. The bathrooms are famous across the whole state and they have earned it. I have slept in worse hotels. I nearly bowed upon entering. A janitor was polishing the floor with the devotion of a man tending a garden he loved, and when I thanked him he said "welcome in," which I have since learned is what Texas says instead of hello, and also instead of I am glad you exist. I went in for gas. I was inside for ninety minutes. I came out with fudge, a shirt printed with a joke I do not fully understand, forty dollars of jerky, and a feeling I can only describe as having been to church. I did not need any of it. I needed all of it. I have walked through the great cathedrals of the old world. I lit no candle there. I lit no candle at Buc-ee's either. But I did fill the truck. And I understand now that in Texas, this is the same thing.

@Jeremiah_hicks hey bro! Saw you on Tim’s show last night, good job putting up with Brian. Be blessed!

Watch… And listen…. As people reveal… Exactly who they are.

@SonofHas Obviously disgusting. The nuance here is that for a non-commissioned officer (enlisted), they really are much less common. If PH was a company CO, it would be common to see a bronze star as a deployment award. Getting one through for an NCO takes quite a bit of work from a leader

.@WaPo is seriously arguing “Actually, Hegseth earning two bronze stars in Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t that impressive”

@elonmusk Has anybody said airline industry after deregulation? I think I read that in a book. Still, it was making a choice to STOP interfering with something, but hey, credit where it’s due.

🤔

@ElonMNews A!!!!!!! USA! USA! USA!!!!!

My twitter got hacked 12 years ago and no one said anything. lol.

Had a strange dream about going door to door plugging monsters. going to the field for 3 weeks.