- Feb 03, 2019 Finally, Some Good News by Delicious Tacos Delicious Tacos is arguably the most important American intellectual alive: He’s the most gifted novelist since Gore Vidal; the most acidic satirist and cultural critic since H. Mencken; America’s poor, unfortunate and late answer to Michel Houellebecq and the most accomplished ornithologist since Arthur Cleveland Bent.
- For the first time in months, I woke up on a Monday to good—nay, fantastic news! In early July it was reported that The Great British Baking Show—the televised bastion of sugar and civility humankind needs now more than ever before—had resumed production, coronavirus be damned. As the internet’s foremost recap artist of the world’s most beloved show, I refused to get my hopes up as.
Apr 12, 2020 Finally, Some Good News Delicious Tacos. 4.6 out of 5 stars 131. Usually ships within 5 days. Masculinity Amidst Madness Ryan Landry. 4.6 out of 5 stars 24. Usually ships within 2 to 3 days. No Colours or Crest. Finally, Some Good News Delicious Tacos. 4.6 out of 5 stars 133. Usually ships within 5 days. Bronze Age Mindset Bronze Age Pervert. 4.5 out of 5 stars 546. Usually ships within 5 days. Masculinity Amidst Madness Ryan Landry. May 25, 2019 DELICIOUS TACOS: Pulling it off would be making a living from it. But I’d use Lulu or some other printer. Or give out a free PDF and ask people to donate. Once rich guy could easily pay a lifetime of book royalties. Writing is the least economically valued work in the world. Finally, Some Good News is a pretty tight, heavily plotted.
Previously:
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The Sherman Oaks Outdoorsman
The gun shop door was open but half the ceiling had collapsed. The Sherman Oaks Outdoorsman. Here too hissing sprinklers, shrieking alarms. He had to press his fingertip into his left ear and still the back of his head rang with the sound of cicadas. Shelves fallen into each other. Tile floor covered with flashlights and Rambo knives, spreadeagled Guns & Ammo magazines. Soldier of Fortune open to honeypot ads in the back for hit men, all sopping wet. Marcy still catatonic in the ’79 Mercedes outside, in the handicapped space. He’d wrapped her in his picnic blanket. Strapped her in like a baby. Eased the seat all the way back so her head wouldn’t stick up. He’d thought about taking another car, a 4-wheel drive. But the hallway floor tilted in and the first burned corpse he checked for keys groaned when he tried its pockets.
FUCKING GET DOWN GET DOWN GET DOWN a man was screaming. A boom went off loud enough that the fire alarm seemed like nothing. Florescent light bulb glass and shredded foam ceiling tile fluttered down on his face.
All right! All right! I’m not–
WHAT DO YOU WANT
He was out of adrenaline. The question was insulting. Guns, he said.
Hey man– is that you?
Another insulting question. Yeah I’m me, he thought. Behind the back counter by the deli number dispenser the top of a red head inched up. Dirty white drowned corpse face, cut up. Dusty had on a tactical hunting jacket with the tags still hanging off. He’d dragged the beef jerky display behind a cash register and half emptied it into a black duffel bag. Also with tags. There was a crunch somewhere and the walls shook and the alarm squealed and stopped. In the distance many others. But no sirens. Fancy meeting you here, said Dusty. His hands were bloody.
Dusty– are you going to kill me, he said.
No man. I thought you might be them.
Who?
I don’t fuckin know.
May I uh,
Yeah, help yourself man. But I’m takin the food. And I’m takin the floor model. He put down his black shotgun, straight out of Terminator 2. Reached up where the mass shooter Bushmaster AR-15 hung. Plucked it off its hook, peeled off the sign that said DUE TO HIGH DEMAND, OUT OF STOCK UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Not too much fuckin ammo for it though.
What do you think I should take.
What do you want to accomplish.
I don’t know. Shoot people.
Well get a bag and go nuts man, but your issue is gonna be ammo. This place was always understocked. Even before that fuckin AARP guy went ISIS.
He’d read the guy was government, but why argue. Either was plausible.
In the end Dusty helped him. Mostly. He got a nice nickelplated Smith and Wesson .357 revolver. A rifle, a .45 with magazine as recommended. Dusty showed him how they worked. Bows, arrows made to slice wild boars’ arteries. A .22 because Dusty was jealous over the other ammo. Got to leave me some, he said. Nice enough smile but his hand back on the gun. 22 won’t do much, said Dusty, but he remembered Speed Racer killing a moose with one in a movie. Based on a true story. When his bag was almost too heavy he made to leave. Where you gonna go, said Dusty.
Don’t know.
Anyone else in that building make it?
… just me.
Well good luck out there homie, said Dusty, and they hung quiet for a second like they should add each other on Facebook.
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Marcy was still in the car, thank God. He had to smash the Flame Broiler Teriyaki Bowl’s glass sliding door with a jack handle. The gas main had ruptured and the customers and cashiers burned alive, still smoking along with the griddle top beef and broccoli. A little blue flame still whispering on the end of the metal hose by the stove. In the pantry past the restroom where EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS were 5 gallon buckets of vegetable oil, as he’d hoped. He made one last trip for a jar of fortune cookies, the only nonrefrigerated food. The first aid kit under the manager’s desk. When he got back in the driver’s seat she was conscious.
Where are you taking me, she said.
Out of LA. He started the car.
What happened in there.
They’re dead. Can you trust me for a minute and keep your head down please, he said.
Why–
Just for a minute he said, and pulled out. OK you can sit up. Let me help you.
Up the street he stopped next to a fire hydrant; water oozing out around the bolts in the cracked concrete, already black. Around them trees on fire. Houses collapsed, smoking. The wind picked up; a burning LA X-Press hooker paper blew onto the windshield with a 2 page color spread of SUCCULENT CHRISTINA. She was fat, looked 50. He had to reach around out the window to peel her off. To the south and east, smoke columns churning dark and swarming with lightning. No cars on the road but half the phone poles were down, wires snaking onto the asphalt. How to get out. He reached across her waist and cranked the plastic dial forward to raise up her seat back.
I’m sorry to be weird but I don’t think we can let people see you, he said. Whatever men are left will want a car and a girl. He turned on the radio. For a full minute the Emergency Broadcast System tone played, indicating an emergency. No shit. He turned it off.
What happened, she said again. He said: nuclear holocaust.
I have to find my parents–
Where are they?
El Cerrito.
They’re probably dead. She gasped and he said, oh my god—I’m sorry. Now she was crying. He made a mental note to behave like a human being. She didn’t know. Nobody knew. He held her hand. She didn’t move. It’s a coordinated attack, he said. It’ll be all over. We’re lucky to be alive.
And where are you taking me, she said again.
We have to get to the country. Somewhere where there’s water–
Well if it’s everywhere what’s the point–
It will only be cities, he said.
How do you know?
Because I almost made it happen.
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Delicious Tacos Books
Power Achiever
The Monday before Halloween there were vegetables in the break room. Broccoli and baby carrots.
It was a sign. The merger had closed. The company had therefore switched insurance providers. The new insurance emphasized preventive care to cut claims. A new poster in a black frame outlined the benefits of healthy eating for productivity. Be a Power Achiever, it said. A smiling woman climbed Western-looking rocks next to a lens flare.
Larry, from Wisconsin, Vice President, Global Sales, was helping himself to a free Activia. The yogurt, a client, was playfully marketed to women as a stool loosener. Larry was 6′ 3”, Norwood 6.5. Strawberry.
Happy Monday, Larry said. You still driving that old beater Benz?
How wouldn’t I be, he thought. You saw me leave in it Friday. He said yes.
What kind of mileage you get with that thing?
About 30.
No way.
Yeah, the diesels are underpowered. Keeps ’em out of trouble.
It was true. The 1979 Mercedes 300SD got excellent fuel mileage. Its 5 cylinder in-line diesel engine produced only 111 horsepower. It required a more cautious driving style. But the OEM 917.51 engine was well known among enthusiasts: the most reliable engine ever built.
Delicious Tacos Writer
Ever think about getting the one of the biodiesel conversions? See a lot of those around.
If it’s hot enough you can run it on vegetable oil as is.
That so?
Yeah. Biodiesel you have to swap the hoses out. As is it’ll run veg, kerosene, jet fuel– anything but gas.
Well you should get one of those stickers. I bet the girls melt.
![Damn Damn](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125691374/305481390.jpg)
I would get 0.0 more pussy advertising my car’s fuel flexibility, he thought. A woman who cares about biodiesel has her own interior design business. Her dog is her boyfriend. Meanwhile I had anal sex on the first date with an au pair in that car, Larry. Low sulfur #2 diesel notwithstanding. Back when girls liked me. Maybe I will, he said.
Believe me, they love it. My daughter loves environmental stuff, said Larry. Even people just ten years older still thought you could speak to women.
Now he’d forgot what he came in the breakroom for. Diet coke maybe. One cold one left. He took it, dutifully put four more from the cardboard flat of warm cans into the fridge. That left one half empty flat of Diet next to 3 full flats of Regular. 95% of all soda consumed in this office, in every office, was Diet Coke. Corporate ordered the same amount of everything. Maybe the merger would change that too.
Back at his desk. He typed passwords. Spreadsheets blinked open. Two monitors angled ergonomically. Top 5,000 advertisers in consumer packaged goods by annual spend. Key in-house and/ or agency decision makers for QSR mobile coupons, keyword: Hispanic. Later he’d make phone calls. I’d like to speak with you about data driven solutions for market leading brands.
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He dreamed about his grandmother with the hose, mist hissing in the grass in the summertime. She turned the cool spray from the lawn to the rhododendrons and the cold water hit his bare chest and he laughed, and she laughed too. The flowers were impossibly big and bright, the bushes fifty feet tall, a hundred feet wide. Someone was touching him. A huge warm wet palm slithering up his knee, his thigh. Rough like a workman’s hand. A gargling voice sniffling help me… help me…
Two hands on him now in the dark and a ghoul with a slimy bald head coated in red and black dust. No face. Throaty voice slurring: I need help, I need help.
The sprinklers were going. The front of him was soaking wet. He slid back and hit his head on the lip of the printer table. His Hewlett Packard printer/ fax combo slid down the slick slanted pressboard and into his skull with a crack. He was awake. The fax handset flopped off but mercifully emitted no howler tone. It was Larry. The ghoul was Vice President, Global Sales. The back of his bald head looked intact but he’d dragged a blood smear fifty feet up the nylon carpet behind him. Black trail through a maze of collapsed cubicle dividers.
Larry. Relax, man, he said.
Please… helppp. Larry looked up. Where his eyes had been two oozing dark holes glimmered with specks of safety glass. His lips half hanging off, jiggling like nightcrawlers. Helllbbb me, he snuffled.
OK man. Relax. Take a deep breath.
The sprinkler water smelled like the men’s room at Fenway Park. They kept it in separate tanks, he remembered. It had sat untouched since the building was built. Larry, turn over, he said. Helllbbb meee snuffled Larry.
He grabbed Larry around the collarbones and got him halfway on his side. The front of Larry was gone. His black sport jacket and his broadcloth checked Oxford and his skin and his flesh– gone. What was left was bones. Red lumps. More safety glass, little cubes like diamonds, shot into the meat like cannonfire. He was scabbing over. It must have been a while. Helllbbbbb mmmmeee. The voice of the dead.
I’ll help you, he said. I’ll help you. Stay right here.
He had to uncrimp Larry’s bleeding hands from his shirt to stand up. He looked out the holes where the windows were. The sky red and lightning teasing dark clouds. Buildings skeletal and black and every alarm in the Valley shrieking like a tree full of sparrows. The sprinklers hissing, the water dirty and cold. I’ll help you Larry, he said.
Across from his cubicle wall where the poster urging DETERMINATION once hung, a fire extinguisher sat askew in its red box. He picked it up, held it, stepped back. Larry’s hands grabbed for his legs again. And he said: sorry man. He swung his hips like splitting wood, brought it down on the temple again and again until the skull broke.
**********
He found her in the break room. After the the fifth office with a flayed corpse or twitching burned thing in agony he’d stopped looking. He was at the fridge dumping cartons of Activia into a PWW promotional tote bag. The corpses of the women had shit themselves. Activia had worked one last time.
Water, he thought. I should take water. The flats of Evian, a client, were kept in a closet in back of the break room. Co-branding efforts with Angelina Jolie’s humanitarian work had dovetailed into an Ellen advertorial campaign. For the first time, Evian was placed in 7-11 stores worldwide. He preferred the tap. He’d heard the plastic made you lactate.
When he swung the closet door open she was huddled by the mop bucket. Cold, wet, shaking, hugging her knees. Marcy Pendergrass.
Get up, he said. We gotta go.
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