Taco Vampires

I just stopped by the El Primo taco trailer* at 1st and Live Oak, one of my favorite places to get breakfast tacos for lunch in Austin. Today I went with bean, egg and cheese as well as migas, ham, egg and cheese with a ton of hot sauce...well, not literally 2,000 pounds of hot sauce, but, you know, a lot of it...because it is really good.

One of the great things about El Primo, besides its friendly owner, low prices and delicious authentic taco goodness, is that it sits in front of Once Over, which is one of my favorite (and one of the best) coffee shops in south Austin or anywhere. The 78704 area of south Austin is particularly blessed with an abundance of pretty good-to-good local coffee joints (which will be the subject of another post later on in 2011).

Prior to my stop at El Primo I went into Once Over to score some of their epic** coffee. While standing in line in front of me, a couple*** was ordering coffee and having an entertaining conversation with the usual afternoon barista dude, who's name escapes me at the moment because I'm kind of a jerk about remembering the names of people that I've talked to more than a dozen times.

While I was standing there, the cool barista dude**** mentioned that he was on his sixth shot of espresso for the day, which prompted the person filling the guy in front of me to remark that on the seventh shot of espresso, half of a person's blood stream turns into coffee*****. To which, the barista replied that he'd had some tacos that morning, which likely evening things out. He then continued this purely rational thought by stating that the same thing probably happens upon consuming three tacos in one sitting, that half of your blood stream turns into tacos. I laughed, but then my mood sobered when I realized a frightening ramification of this: What if there are taco vampires, who would wait around a tex-mex restaurant or taco truck trailer until they see them eat three or more tacos, then ambush them and consume their delicious taco blood.

Now, I have to preface this by saying that I have only a limited interest in the paranormal and virtually no interest in the vampire/werewolf/whatever genre of novels and films based on said novels that are so popular with a large percentage of the younger female population (and the guys who feign interest in order to make-out with them, etc.). I'm not in any way what you could describe as "goth" and my interest in Robert Smith is limited to "the three-or-so Cure songs that aren't depressing". As far as Twilight goes (I can't believe I'm writing about this) I usually refer to my friend Justin Dent, who once summed up his reservations with: "You know what happened the last time a Mormon wrote a book about a dream they had". However, the greater question remains. How can we be so sure that we're not vulnerable to this? Can taco werewolves vampires be detected by those new TSA body scanners? These are the questions that need to be answered.

If taco vampires are real, is eating more than two tacos at Torchy's, Tacodeli, Maria's Taco Xpress or another Austin purveyor of tacos worth risking a potential taco-vampircal assault? There is only one possible answer: of course it is. Tacos are delicious.

Thanks for reading, and keep Austin whatever,

- Jordan

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Notes:

*Food trucks in Austin are typically called "trailers", which represents an irony-based level of affinity for the redneck culture that most people move to Austin to get away from. See also: Uncle Billy's

**The word "epic" has apparently been banned by (probably) the same people who led to the cancellation of Arrested Development because they didn't get it, or refused to watch it.

***I assumed they were a couple because they were one male human and one female human of roughly the same age standing next to each other, which is about as close to dating someone as I tend to get much of the time

****No sarcasm here, this dude really is an epic cool person.

*****It's science