Zeitgeist

Because even I am not immune, I pulled into Taco Bell for a burrito.

The building sat nondescript and unassuming like a small box promising something valuable or important inside. The concrete curbs and sidewalks gleamed white and unstained in the full summer sun as if they’d just arrived yesterday from a warehouse in Mexico.

This was farm country, just a couple of miles from the interstate. I hunted rabbits near here as a boy, near where I was now ordering food from a machine and speaking to nobody, paying someone or something with the kind of technology my dad had warned me about. Everyone working here was soft and lumpy and work clothing that was supposed to be baggy, but wasn’t. A boy only a couple of years older than I had been when I hunted out this way brought me my burrito and an empty cup. He said my name. I said thanks.

I filled my cup and sat by a window. “Bodhisattva” by Steely Dan was playing on the sound system as I began tearing hot sauce packets. An interesting choice for a Taco Bell in rural Alabama in 2026, I thought. I wondered how the kids felt about it.

“Bodhisattva, I’m gonna sell my house in town.”

It struck me that Donald Fagen always sings in a tone of voice as though he’s trying to be more ironic than you as though to head your skepticism off at the pass before you figure out, he’s not cool. He’s just a nerd who probably would not be comfortable in rural Alabama. But the bodhisattva would. Maybe.

I was about finished with my burrito about the same time Steely Dan was finished. I sip my tea and thought surely something new and unrecognizable would come on, but no. Steely Dan was followed by Cliff Richard singing the theme from Summer Holiday, a movie that was made back before I was even born.

I had, in fact, gone my entire life without ever hearing that song. I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I tromped through tall brown grass out here as a kid hearing nothing but wind shaking pine needles, and the gray sounds of snowflakes falling on snowflakes, rain on leaves. I have gone to college and graduate school in the big city one hundred miles away, traveled for work thousands of miles away without ever hearing this song.

And then one day I stopped for a bite of crap food at a corporate outpost smaller than the barn that used to sit in this swampy depression decades ago, not far from the interstate that I took when leaving town for college, as if the whole point was to hear this crap throwaway song from some dumb movie nobody has seen since 1964 unless they were up late and bored to tears or desperate or incarcerated. Maybe.

The song that’s still running through my head as I write this on a device about the same size as a box of 12 gauge shotgun shells full of rabbit shot from a prefab squat building in the middle of nowhere full of people who barely speak to each other, sharing this odd mix of memories and immediacy which I will send through the air to a box to be displayed before, at most, dozen people who will read this. Maybe.

People who didn’t hunt rabbits with me out here as a thirteen year old boy wondering what life someday as an adult could possibly even be.

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