I sent a photo of this sign to my wife. It made me laugh. Yet, the longer I thought about it, the more it felt wrong. Everything it claims is false.
The missing product is neither Mexican nor is it Pizza. To be fair, apart from copy+pasting Spanish-sounding ingredients and wrapping them in a tortilla-like thing, there is little about Taco Bell that is attributably Mexican. As John Green notes, “Taco Bell as a company is not and never has been interested in Mexican food except for what could be efficiently appropriated from it.”
As for being Pizza, Tik Tok informs me there is a thriving oeuvre of prank videos in which an American trolls their Italian significant other by making Italian cuisine in a non-Italian way: breaking raw spaghetti noodles etc. I am assuming a non-tortilla smothered in cheap bean paste would also fail to qualify in any Italian sense as Pizza. Yet, while volunteering on an archeology dig in a small town in southern Italy I was once served what the locals termed an “American Pizza” which featured, among other things, hot dogs and soggy french fries as toppings. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose.
Is it true that Love is All-Consuming? Nah. When first kindled, of course, love can consume thoughts and emotions in a great conflagration of excess. But if it truly consumed All, then both of the lovers would cease to exist, transmogrified into burnt sacrifices to their passion. Perhaps the closest approximation to this kind of all-consuming love was described by Joan Didion after the death of her husband, “I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.” But Didion, after writing those words, did not commit the act she had so recently come to understand. She reserved some portion of herself for continuing on.
There was certainly a time when I experienced love for my wife as All-Consuming. Yet, I was not consumed, and neither was she. Some of us remains, like the building that continues to stand in the center of a blast radius. Perhaps two people are welded together by this initial heat and light.
Addictions are All-Consuming, as are stalkers and serial killers. Cancer, left unchecked, will consume all tissue until the person is no more. Pain, too. Someone experiencing acute pain is aware of nothing else. They are pain.
Love is not like this. Love maintains the uniqueness of each individual and enlivens them. It does not consume. It creates. Brightens. Grows.
Is it possible to Underestimate Your Love? Of course. Grief is a manifestation of this. Love sends down roots, digging into the permafrost of our souls and constricting our deep inwardness in ways we don’t realize until it is too late.
Love màs.
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About Joshua Rigsby
Joshua Rigsby runs an independent bookstore in a small southern town. His writing has been featured on Thrillist, Atlas Obscura, Southern California Public Radio, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Atlantic.
