Tampa and The Origin of Species
Two months ago I was A) one month behind updating this blog and B) confident in my good intentions to get all caught up. Unfortunately for this blog but quite fortunately for me I was also C) having a really great time in Europe. Thus my attempts to narrow the gap between real time and blog time were short lived and soon replaced with attempts to drink free beer and hang out with great people. I’m happy to say that I succeed as much at the latter as I failed at the former.
I regret nothing.
But so now two months after being one month behind I’m three months behind and but the beer isn’t free anymore and then some stuff happened that’ll be on Punknews.org at some point soon and so it’s time to get back to blogging.
Good sentence? Great sentence!
Let’s pick up way back on the 10th of August in a quaint little city located on the western shaft of America’s wang, Tampa, home of the much lauded Taco Bus.
There was a time in my life when I would have told you that the cochinita pibil burrito here was my favorite burrito in all of America, but times change, people change, burritos change, and on this trip, 2/3 of those changes were observed. So while the burrito itself has remained constant, I, its subjective eater, have downgraded it to an unhyperbolic, pretty good but what’s the point? i.e. I’m hungry for a delicious Tiktaalik.
Why? I, unsurprisingly, have a somewhat convoluted theory. The first time I ate at the Taco Bus I was just far enough removed from my previous 23 year residency of California to have accepted that a great burrito could exist in another state and in an altered form, but not far enough removed to believe that the burrito wasn’t the ultimate expression of the Mexican culinary landscape. My quest to find the best burrito remained steadfast while my definition of an acceptable burrito was no longer rigidly defined by the style common to California, particularly San Francisco’s Mission District. In fact, when I first encountered the Taco Bus burrito, whose insides of cabbage and pico de gallo had more in common with tacos than the giant, bean, rice, and sour cream stuffed California burritos, I embraced the way the minimal fillings allowed the meat to really stand out. I loved the simplicity and the bright, crisp flavor so much that I was soon claiming it as my favorite burrito.
Fast forward a few years and I’m holding this burrito I had loved for so long and all can do is look over at the tacos that Jon ordered…
…and it hits me that the Taco Bus burrito isn’t actually the best burrito in America, and it never was! Rather, it’s a transitional step towards an appreciation of what I now consider the superior Mexican food product: the taco. Turns out, what I wanted all along was the taco, and it took a burrito with taco fillings to make me realize it.
Sitting outside in the humid heat of a Tampa afternoon, I recognized that like the half fish, half mammals that first crawled from the seas millions of years ago, the burrito I was holding no longer served a purpose. This half burrito/half taco is the webbed fingers of the food world, kinda awesome at first but ultimately ill-suited as a specific thing.
Taking the last bites of my burrito I was grateful for my history with this missing link, but won’t miss it when the next time I find myself in Tampa and I, naturally, select tacos.
