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I wonder if I could take a few moments out of your day to talk with you about Taco Bell.

Let me explain it: eating at Taco Bell is an experience that can't be recreated at any other restaurant.



You go in and you're excited because all the goopy sauce crap they have back in the kitchen in plastic bottles that mount into little metal squirt guns smells so good. And you get overwhelmed by the incredible amount of variety that the menu seems to offer, even though you know damn well that they've got a total of about eight ingredients and five different sauce squirt guns and the number of menu items is just a result of some inevitable combinatorics.

So you pick whatever menu items you like best, and you really believe that you've made the best choices, and all other choices are inferior, even though you know damn well that everybody else with you is getting the same Grade F ground beef and the same tomatoes that the FDA is going to recall in a few days, just prepared in a marginally different way and branded with a different Spanish noun. And you sure as sheep order yourself a Mountain Dew Baja Blast because you can't get that stuff anywhere but Taco Bell and you're not going to miss this chance.

And then you're hovering around the counter with your drink filled up waiting for them to call your
number because you think that it's a fast food place, right, they have to be making your food quickly enough that it would be a waste of time to even bother sitting down because your food is about to be ready, only it's not, and it takes like ten minutes, and you're all just standing there surrounded by like six other strangers who also believe that surely they're making my food right now and all these other poor saps should be sitting down waiting patiently for their numbers to be called after they call mine in just a second and just when you decide you're going to sit down and settle in and wait for your number they finally call it and you look like a total idiot because you just sat down ten seconds ago after standing there for ten minutes and here you are getting up again.

But it doesn't matter, because your low-quality ingredients are assembled in little wrappers identifying themselves as distinct, precious and unique creations and they're finally in front of you on a tray. And you spare a brief moment to laugh at the little captions on the Fire sauce packages as you personalize your meal with the same Fire sauce that everybody is using to personalize their meals. And then you dig in, and it tastes unbelievably good even though you know it's not worth even half the money you paid for it, and you're in heaven, and then three minutes later it's all gone.

And you're left with two-thirds of your obscenely oversized Baja Blast, and you don't want to waste it, so you and everybody else heads out to the car slurping on down a week's worth of soda and it's all gone by the time you pull out of the parking lot and there's a bunch of empty plastic soda cups littering the floor of the car.

And you're coming down off the high, and you know it's only a matter of minutes before the low-level diabetic shock kicks in and everybody starts feeling gross and jittery, and that the horrible farting will come soon after, and the bowel-rending movements will come soon after that, and pretty soon everyone in the car will be silently praying for the car trip to just end so they each can ride it out in solitude. But for now, for these brief moments, you're on top of the world.

That's Taco Bell.

The Modern Drunkard aka Jenkins67