Todd Terwilliger

Yesterday was the kind of day that people talk about when they say this was that kind of day. New Jersey disappeared early behind a bank of gray soup. I could only barely make out a few strong lights from the far side of the Hudson, beady Mothman eyes burning through the haze.

This is the kind of day that makes a feasible option out of the normally infeasible cafeteria. It was also taco day. The cafeteria management has the taco bar set up all askew, though maybe I shouldn’t complain- I’m in New York not Texas. However, it doesn’t take a culinary logician to see where the whole setup had gone horribly wrong.

These are not good tacos. They’re barely tacos at all, certainly not in the classical sense that anyone might reference when speaking one to another about the food in general conversation. They are tacos in only a technical sense: some ground mixture of brick-colored offal, served with a most meager selection of condiments, in something that resembles, only in passing, a taco shell. The line to get to these ersatz tacos was, as to be expected, immense.

The main problem with the taco bar setup is that it was all backwards. After the shells, instead of the meat (I use the term here loosely) there are the condiments, with the meat bringing up the rear. Thus, if you were to follow the order established by the cafeteria intelligentsia, the taco you would end up with would have the meat on top and the condiments on the bottom. In what sort of topsy-turvy world is this an acceptable taco?

Sure, you can be a rebel, buck the line and muscle your way to the meat and then, having scooped some of the crumbly stuff into the shell, muscle your way back, against the grain of traffic, to the condiments but you would be mucking with the natural order of the queue. The queue is inviolate. Disciplined line-walkers will look down upon you with looks both of rage and confusion. This simply is not done in polite societies, not even in savage societies. Our earliest art work runs in clean horizontal lines: the queue is manifest in our most basic fibers. It cannot be bucked and certainly not for something so trivial as a back-alley taco.

But there is nothing to be done. The outside world has vanished without a whimper behind a bank of gray fog and, if it is just fog and nothing more, it is too cold outside to test the truth of the encroaching Nothing. No, Gmork, I’m no sap. Besides, I don’t have a luck dragon to back me up.

I couldn’t buck the queue (it’s ingrained too deeply) and I couldn’t go outside so what choice did I have? There was no choice. I ate the taco, perversely inverted. Somewhere in the cosmos, I was just put on, made the butt of some monstrous joke, but the powers that are are the powers that are and I was hungry and reluctant to go out in the cold.

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