All The World Is A Taco Bell

 

“Every deep thought moves into another. There is no cut off from one thought to the next. One idea from another. Everything is connected. It is a blessing and a curse to realize this. A blessing to see how everything is related and understand on a new level; a curse because it makes it all feel dull.”

That was the summary I put into my Trello board that I keep for this blog when the thought occurred to me a year or so ago. I was in a funk, a depression, and was very much in tune with, if not stuck in the dullest and most persistent drone of life’s great symphony. The vibration of it so strong, it has at times been literally audible to me. Sometimes it’s interesting to go back to my ideas months or years after I’ve made notes about them. I’m usually in a different head space than I was when the thought occurred to me and it gives me a different perspective. This time, I can recall exactly where I was at in my head and where those thoughts continued to go, although I cannot conjure the actual feeling of it. For the latter, I’m glad.

Maybe it’s just me but it seems like a lot of people have riffed on Taco Bell’s menu being about 75 items made of the same handful of ingredients. If you order more than two items, you’re basically getting all the same food in two to three different configurations. I remember when the Meximelt, which happened to be one of my favorites, was removed from the menu. For a while, there were a few noble and righteous employees who would charge you for a cheesy roll–up and a couple extra items and make one for you.  But those blessed souls gradually disappeared from the Bell and left us without a means to the Meximelt. It was and is still absurd. All of the ingredients still reside on the menu but Taco Ding-Ding refuses to allow them to come together again.  

Apologies for the digression. If you’ve ever been depressed, you may relate with the feeling that everything has been done and seen before and that there is nothing new or exciting left to discover. I have felt it in bouts of depression or after a serotonin dump when I was much younger. It’s the inclination that eventually every fractal collapses into quantum foam and that shit can smell like chocolate because in the end, everything is made up of the same few ingredients. In short, it’s a real bummer and nobody really wants to hang out with you when you’re in it. Usually not even you.

Back to present day and mind, I can understand this place, but I don’t feel it anymore. I’m unburdened of the weight of it, and I can see that my finite self has not experienced a millionth of what the universe has to offer. I can see how shit and chocolate are very different. To be fair, even when depressed I assumed they did not taste the same. I remember that Taco Bell should bring back the GD Meximelt because even though it’s made up of five of the 10 or so total ingredients, that specific combination was special and didn’t taste exactly like a soft taco without lettuce.

I still find it hard to separate topics when I think or write because so many themes and ideas are related and integral to each other, but I no longer find that to be a dead-end. Instead, it is a string of infinite possibilities and a thousand different ways to see something new. A million different solutions to a problem.