The Taste of the Universal Taco Bell
This time I have a handful of gray hairs that have moved in with the brown – the recession bad for follicles, too, who find themselves subletting out headspace even to the undesirable grays, just to maintain maximum occupancy.
Then, I turned the pages and took in the words not by choice but by the decree of a college professor. Fourth Genre is the title of the memoir and essay compilation from Spring of 1999.
What is the fourth genre, anyway? Essays and memoirs were still hit or miss for me. A genre I found myself warming up to when done right, but not one that I found myself comfortable writing. Which is funny, considering it became the genre to define a generation. After all, isn’t this what blogging is? The self-publishing and promoting of ones essays and memoirs? Blogging, tweeting, it all is a form of the fourth genre.
Who’d have known that, then?
This collection was assigned reading as one of my writing courses a couple of years later in the spring of ’01. I turn the pages now, a decade later, revisiting the underlines and notes of my two months shy of graduating self. I remember sitting in the campus cafeteria, in the back behind the fireplace. The remnants of empty taco bell wrappers next to my JanSport backpack as I underlined powerful sentences from the opening paragraph and scribbled “grabs interest” in the margin, as though raising my hand and telling the author I see what you’re doing, why, and that it works.
Though now with the same collection opened in front of me, I sit on my couch with a sleeping cat next to me and the tandem sounds of the clothes dryer running and the pops & hisses of an old country album on vinyl, type-scribbling notes onto a laptop where I tell my former self, instead, that I know what he was doing, why and that it works.
That younger guy was trying to develop his own craft, amongst the noise and styles of his influences, while at the same time, having to then prove to his professors that in the immediacy of this class he was doing the readings assigned, by pointing out the tricks of the trade that he noticed here and there. No matter how elementary it may sometimes have felt. It’s understandable. College professors can’t grade you five years later after they’ve finally learned whether you really did take something from the readings, fine-tuned said-skill, and actually used it. They need the “now” of knowing you at least did the reading, even if it sometimes is at the expense of you then being able to actually be productive with that new knowledge due to said-busy work.
I skip ahead in the compilation and take notice of another entry I highlighted.
“For instance, when we consider the hypothetical example of the ‘first apple’ — whether or not we can remember biting an apple for hte first time and whether it was soft, mushy, crisp, tangy, sharp – it seems that ‘first apple’ just may be a compilation of all the apples ever bitten. Instead of one particular apple in our memories, we have the generic experience of apple: the taste of the universal apple.”
By highlighting it, this entry must have meant something to my college self. I have to chuckle reading it now, as 30-something me who has just written about his experience a decade ago in the cafeteria with this same book. Was college Bruce leaving a note for future Bruce, somehow knowing that he would come back some day and should he do so and decide to write about it, that he remember this possibility?
Maybe this fireplace session didn’t happen after all, with this book? This could be a First Apple situation – or more appropriately, First Taco Bell, as it’s just a compilation of all of the reading and note sessions ever experienced over my cafeteria visits. Which is ok. Because this did happen. Maybe not over this book. It could’ve been another book. During a different semester. But it still opened the flood of memories, regardless.
And defeated the almighty blank page and blinking cursor.
This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My blog is my best friend.
