It is important for me to maintain in my work as a hairy food fetishist, and in my life as a werewolf, to do my best to promote a positive, healthy lifestyle. Though I do respect past werewolf traditions I feel that I need to move beyond many of the perceptions of a werewolf being a violent, murderous beast. It is not always easy to be positive in this world, and as an artist the symbols I use in my work are very important, for it is through these symbols that my vision is cultivated and it is through the lens of these symbols that my outlook is forged. That is one of the reasons why I choose the TACO as my primary symbol of positive meditation. There are many things I have said and will say about the taco as a whole, but in this particular essay I want to quickly address three of the taco's primary ingredients: Cheese, Lettuce, and Tomatoes.
"Cheese, Lettuce, Tomato" has become like a mantra to me, a chant I say over and over again to myself during times when life is not going as I had planned. Whenever I become angry or distressed, depressed or disappointed in life I think of these three main taco ingredients. If possible, I eat them soon after I am upset about something. Ideally, I eat them as part of a taco, but in an emergency I can also eat them plain one after the other; or in a salad grouped together; or as toppings for a hamburger.
The cheese, it soothes me. The rich, creamy taste and the orange hue of sharp cheddar cheese reminds me of the sun on a warm, summer day. I bite into the flakes of the shredded cheese upon my taco, slightly melted from the heat of the meat upon which it rests inside the shell. This slight melting is important to me because it serves as a metaphor for what I am currently going through in life. It is the rich, good taste of life-- but slightly melted, slightly bent of shape. Someone has turned up the heat on and they are trying to make me angry! The melted parts of the cheese tell me life is not perfect but it is the preponderance of the cheese, the vast majority that is unharmed and golden as ever--which is still unscathed by the heavy, greasy meat-- that I know is the true reality, that is the cheese I truly know. This comforts me as I let the cheese rest upon my tongue and slide down my throat.
The lettuce, it delights me! It is so crisp and slightly cold, so soothing to feel inside my belly after I've been angry over something. Followed by, or mixed in with cheese within a taco, I think of it as being alot like love. "Lettuce is the love that binds us." I've said this many times when relating all the various colors and hues within a taco to the different-colored skin tones of all the people of the world. There is cheese, there is tomato, and then there is the LETTUCE. There is usually more lettuce than anything else because it is cheaper. This is especially true within a salad where lettuce serves as the main body, the overbearing symbol, because our natural tendency to want to eat something such as salad intuitively sees lettuce as love in the deepest sense, as the oceanic, turbulent body of oblivion from which we all came and from which we get just a little taste of in our relationships and in our eating of LETTUCE. Just sit somewhere by yourself sometime, preferably on a park bench on a nice sunny day. Bite into the lettuce and feel the water wet your tongue and that ever so slight but potent flavor smear your palate. It is bringing back a memory, see, an ever faint memory lettuce brings that reminds you of the time when were all one, when we were all together, and the lettuce inside a taco further pronounces the taco's ability, as a whole and more than the sum of all of its ingredients, to serve as a symbol of unity. You bite into a taco and hear that crunch. To the unenlightened, this is the louder crunch of the taco's shell, but if you train your ears, and when you open up your heart to the subtleties of taco mysticism, you can make it so you are only hearing the soft, sweet crunch of the LETTUCE, my friend, oh yes, and what a beautiful song this little lettuce bird sings!
Then there are tomatoes, the most beautiful part of this trinity of Cheese, Lettuce, Tomato. Is it any wonder that the tomato cannot truly be classified? Is it a fruit or is it a vegetable? Does it have a double meaning? The tomato to me is sacred because it represents the blood that goes through my veins. It is its symbolic function as the blood that gives me life that always presents me with an opportunity to go against more traditional ideas of the violent, murderous werewolf, especially the ones portrayed in werewolf movies where blood is splattered EVERYWHERE by virtue of the sharp claws and dripping red teeth. Why does blood in so many cases in our media have to represent death? Why, when in paintings, drawings or movies, when a person is covered in blood does this have to be deemed disgusting? The way I work around this, see, is by first giving blood a poetic transformation. Firstly, blood is the life; and tomatoes, to me, in my taco lexicon, are representative of blood; so with tomatoes-- being a primary ingredient of HOT SAUCE, a liquid similar in appearance to blood-- I can portray people covered in HOT SAUCE instead of blood, and it has the same magnetic effect upon a person when they look at it. So when a person is typically said to be transfixed with death if they have a fixation with gory imagery, see, the truth of the matter is that they are obsessed with LIFE, life that is ideologically saturated within the symbol of a tomato and further refined within the structure of more complex substance, hot sauce. And it is here, once again, that the mysterious occult tomato rears its awesome, majestic double-headed meaning. Is is a fruit or a vegetable? Is it life or death? And to take this observation even further, isn't it interesting that the tomato appears TWICE within the best-tasting tacos as a tomato and once again in HOT SAUCE? Think about that. The next time you bite into a taco and feel that delicious, spicy and sweetly luscious flavor of the tomatoes mixing with the hot sauce, ask yourself, "Am I perhaps eating just a little bit more than my LUNCH?
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