Is That Ringing In My Head or Is It The Taco Bells
I'm very unfamiliar with Taco Bell and also taking any action without overthinking it
Happy New Year! This was originally submitted to and has now been rejected by Taco Bell Quarterly, a very serious literary magazine with a great Twitter presence. It is definitely on the melodramatic side, but I still like it for the most part so I’m posting it here.
I have exactly one Taco Bell-related hill to die on, and it’s this: nobody should eat Taco Bell alone.
Senior year of college, every Tuesday night the texts would fly around or whatever verb texts prefer to verb, “Do you want Taco Bell” followed by “We’re in the drive through what do you want” followed by “We’re back in our room, door’s bolted come eat.”
In conventional American life, one of the only ready-made communities available is college. Taco Bell has managed to lodge itself in association with community without even launching an elaborate marketing scheme. I once genuinely asked, “Why do we say things are living in our minds rent-free, who’s paying rent in there?” and everyone turned and stared at me and someone said, “Anson, that’s literally what advertising is. They are paying millions of dollars to live in your head.” A housing market as competitive as New York in here, and I let Taco Bell live for free.
A bulk order of Taco Bell at 10pm by a group of college students is a far cry from an original concept. I could salaciously detail every Crunchwrap Supreme, offer an ethereal vision of every Baja Blast. But I am already the benevolent landlord for Taco Bell in my own mind; I draw the line at subsidizing its rent elsewhere.
Taco Bell should be considered less a place for food and more a replacement for the social functions that churches once served. Every American should feel called by a higher power (me) to find and establish their own Taco Bell community. You can be ethically non-monogamous too. Set a rough time, a day of the week, make a group chat. You don’t have to like everyone equally; in fact, to my chagrin, you cannot. A quorum should be established before an order is placed. You don’t have to eat inside of the Taco Bell. A select few who are particularly dedicated to the cause may take on the blessed role of ferrying the armfuls of chalupas from T-Bell to table. I can already hear the church (Taco) bells ringing.
What’s stopping you? It’s time to live más.
That’s a fair question… what’s stopping me? I could go on a long and justified rant about how there are very few free public spaces available, that few are open at night, that being forced to congregate at a Taco Bell feels at least a little depressing. The people who work at Taco Bell probably aren’t paid enough, and the pricing of Taco Bell makes me suspicious of the ingredients in their food.
And who do I invite to my Taco Bell-based pseudo-religious gatherings? I won’t lie, I’m intimidated by several of my neighbors, for reasons ranging from “they seem like NIMBYs who would call the police on a person sitting on the curb” to “their wide array of packages in the mail room suggest a taste more sophisticated than mine.”
My friends live far and wide, and even those in the same city as me are busy with their jobs and their significant others and other friends and family and the fact that if you have to transfer between two buses on a journey in Chicago you are sometimes taking a serious gamble.
Committing to a regular thing feels like I am giving something up, like it somehow impinges on my “freedom.” My freedom to… lie on my bed and lament my loneliness and scroll Twitter until I discover a literary magazine called Taco Bell Quarterly. Even net negative behaviors have the occasional silver lining. I am afraid to commit to things, even as small as a weekly Taco Bell trip, because I know everyone will be exhausted from dealing with their workplace’s special version of toxic culture. Because when I am most anxious I fear giving too much or taking too much from my friends and boil everything down to a very transactional reciprocity that I am always failing at. Because even walking past restaurants sometimes reminds me of all the people who have died or become severely ill in the pandemic because some people wanted this more than they cared about other peoples’ lives. Because I grew up in a society that runs on a politics of efficiency and capital rather than a politics of care and community.
As I enumerate my excuses, I can feel myself turning redder than fire sauce. Of course, nothing I said is false, but nothing I said is insurmountable either. We can do better than this.
To recognize the broader political, social, and historical context in which I am situated is never a wholly or inherently bad thing, but I’ve come to realize that I sometimes use it as an excuse; I am just one person with the ability to purchase a Black Bean Quesarito, how can I face the realities of centuries of capitalist bullshit? This is a weak argument—literally nobody asked me to do any of this and doing nothing certainly doesn’t help. All anyone is asking me to do is to go to Taco Bell. Actually, nobody is even asking me to do that, that is part of the problem. I am asking myself to go to Taco Bell, and to not violate my own rule that nobody should eat Taco Bell alone.
It’s “Live Más” not “Live Perfectly” or “Live in a way that somehow solves everything.” though if that were possible and Taco Bell supported it, I would be a fan. I’m sure the marketers at Taco Bell considered all of this when they were audience-testing their slogans. They say, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” I’m trying to say, “Don’t let fear masking as ideological purity be the enemy of chalupas and good conversation.”
Assigning You Reading
I’m fully convinced I could be besties with Jack Corbett, the NPR Planet Money TikTok guy, if we met. His Grub Street Diet reaffirmed it for me.
“By our attention we gain the world and the world becomes a home.”
There are a couple reasons I do not have faith in the NYTimes bestseller list, so it was interesting to learn more about the ambiguity.
The quality of everything is getting worse. Unsustainably in every sense of the word. I wish we could have nice things. The problem is not ‘nepo babies’ as much as it is ~wealth inequality~ and the people who are even richer than our celebrities.
I watched Tár and then read this Slate piece on the ending and I fully agree. Spookier vibes than I anticipated.
Vanity Fair had Colin Farrell and Emma Thompson have a chat, which is so fun to read (“Oh, God. That's a different Zoom, darling. Email me.”). Also, I would recommend both the films they were respectively in last year—The Banshees of Inisherin (about two feuding men on a tiny Irish island ) and Good Luck To You, Leo Grande (about a woman finally discovering sexual pleasure for herself with the help of a younger male escort).
Touring for musicians has never been easy and often barely been profitable, but it’s getting worse, and music is facing a mental health crisis.
This video went around Twitter last month and I finally watched it and enjoyed it a lot — on the iconic four-note Disney Channel theme that followed a Disney star introducing themselves and drawing the logo with a little glowstick.
this is the first i’m hearing of the planet money tiktok guy but I’m losing my mind over his linked article