What a Fool Believes

In a commercial for Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos, people for whom the night will forever be young are shown, wind in hair, limbs lithe, smiling and joyous and free, not so much stopping, but pausing to smell the nacho cheese, while Twitter posts pop up to amplify the genius bit of scrumptious fusion that is this product. One of these Twitter posts boldly proclaims, “Like kissing a unicorn!” and this got me ta thinkin’.

Imagine, if you will, you’re going about your day. Perhaps you’re walking through a park or meeting a friend for lunch or going in to the office or doing your laundry or hosing down strangers with a Super Soaker or feeding upon human flesh because Bath Salts told you to, and there before you, radiating with a soft-white glow, is a unicorn. And you’re like, Holy shit this exists and I’ve been granted a personal experience with this mythical beast so, like, I need to do something!, right? This is Fate and whatnot. You ponder it and then decide, I’ll kiss this fantastical creature! ‘Cause why not? Maybe it has magical skin and some of that magic will be absorbed by your lips? I don’t know what you think. So you kiss this unicorn and what does the spiral-horned marvel taste like? Well like a Taco Bell taco with a shell made out of nacho cheese-flavored Doritos.

And that could be. I wouldn’t know. I have not kissed a unicorn or eaten Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos. I had the opportunity to do the latter when, a few months back, I went to South Carolina for a friend’s wedding. We flew into Myrtle Beach and the friends I came in with were starved. They decided the Taco Bell a mile or so from the airport was the place to satiate. The first thing I saw inside this Taco Bell was a woman getting up from her seat, the crumpled remains of her lunch piled high on the teal tray, in a fluorescent-yellow bikini, parts of her body cascading over others like pink lava cooled to a halt on the side of a volcano. My friends quickly ordered as I reconstructed my concept of Reality, all of them throwing a Doritos Locos Taco into the mix just to try the damned thing. We sat down and they ate and I did not because I’m a snob and/or interested in self-preservation, deciding instead to watch a couple in the back, sucking down soda refills together on the same side of the booth, mesmerized by the laptop running on the free Wi-Fi. My friends all had non-reactions to the Locos.

Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos, like Jason in the Friday the 13th franchise, will not die. What does this say about kissing a unicorn? It says, unicorns are an amazing amalgamation but they’re dead—Hell, they never even existed. It says, leave your myth-kissing at Subway for the legendary fucking Jared. It says, some creations are fantastic and they are real. It says, Live Más! or Die because The Unicorn Is Penned and we’re burning down The Cloisters.