On Taco Friday; On Its Mission and Modes

Taco Friday has been a social staple of a small group of people for what has been nearly seven years. It has undergone massive shifts in identity, culture, and focus; volume, sanity, and magnitude of physical violence; location, culinary skill, and epistemological tone. Clothed in the trappings of an ostensibly taco-themed gathering of young to no-longer-qualified-by-an-adjective adults, it is a spiritual birthing place. Look barely beneath the surface and see an environment meant to encourage individual expression and exploration. If I have not been a complete failure, you, the participant/celebrant of Taco Friday will agree that it has been a time of joyful, honest expression and freedom from fear.

By freedom from fear, I mean destroying old walls and pointless mores, archaic modes of thought that would have otherwise have been brought from cradle to grave. Spoke Zarathustra,

“You shall love your children’s lands: let this love be your new nobility - the undiscovered land in the furthest sea! … You shall make amends to your children for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past!”

Since I am a college graduate, as are most of my friends, I can assume that most attendees of Taco Friday have stared inward with at least a small amount of self-criticism. Beliefs questioned and, when found to be beleaguered, let loose or reformulated in a manner more consistent. It is a drastic failure, however, when this evaluation is a singular process that occurs once per lifetime and not with every new day. Listen: ontological clarity occurs neither at sixteen years of age, when we are filled with a molten hatred for authority and clamor for revolution, nor when we are twenty-one and descend from the mountaintop, laws in hand. It does not occur on your mother’s deathbed or your father’s or your own.

Does anything set our views and morals apart from the Cro-Magnons of decades past except for the intervening years? Of course not; the last generation’s modalities (and those of the generation prior, etc.) seem increasingly quaint and parochial precisely because they belong to the last generation. We are not of the generation that has finally, god damnit, gotten it right.

If we wish to avoid this fate -- becoming living artifacts -- and if we wish to avoid stagnation, the solution is continuous identification of one’s failures and perpetual rectification of one’s faults. This does not mean that we are lost in the fog, always wrong and the light just out of reach. Instead, it means that we readily acknowledge the necessary imperfections that come with being an alive piece of meat. We are not condemned to a sad and cruel life of self-flagellation. We are not victims of the machinery of Samsāra.

I do not come to bury Taco Friday, nor to praise it (HAHA, JOKE: I AM HERE TO PRAISE IT). There have been times of substantial shuffling in the past, either when I have moved or when dear friends have moved on. Indeed, there have been at least five generations of Taco Friday (Of the Generations Of Taco Friday, to follow), but something different is happening now. My recent return to Somerville comes at a time of a personal sea change that is fundamentally incompatible with the old tenets. I previously asserted that eternal vigilance is required to avoid moral and epistemological stasis; however, if this is one’s only imperative, one becomes intellectually poor. To maintain the nautical metaphor: if you build too close to the tideline, all you have to show for it are your sandcastles.

Coming soon, a history lesson: On The Generations Of Taco Friday.