Every Bridge. Every Power Plant. By Midnight Tomorrow. Also Gas Is Four Dollars.

He stood up in front of cameras and microphones — cameras and microphones that the whole world was watching — and said, out loud, in public, on the record: “Every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again.”

Every bridge. Every power plant. Burning. Exploding. By midnight. Tomorrow.

Now I’ve heard big talk in this diner. I’ve heard men say they’re going to fix the fence, clean the gutters, quit drinking, start running, apologize to their brother, go back to school. I have a lot of experience with the gap between what a man says at this counter and what he does when he gets home.

But most men don’t say it into a camera with the whole world watching and a war already going and a gas pump outside that just flipped to four dollars a gallon this week.

Four dollars. Average. Nationwide. And that’s with the Strait still contested and the bridges — apparently — not yet decimated, because it’s not midnight tomorrow yet. Just you wait, I guess.

Iran told him what he could do with the 45-day ceasefire, by the way. Rejected it. So we’ve got a rejection, a deadline, a promise of total infrastructure destruction, and a national gas price that is going to make every single person who pulls into this parking lot a little crankier than they were yesterday.

That last part is my problem, technically.

My regulars tip worse when gas is high. I’ve tracked it. It’s not a study, it’s just eleven years of observation, but it holds up.

I didn’t vote for four-dollar gas and I didn’t vote for midnight bridge deadlines and I didn’t vote for any of this. But here we are, and the coffee’s still hot, and some things in this world you can count on even when everything else is on fire.

Burning and exploding, as a man once said.

Holler if you need anything.