But You Have to Time it Just Right
because if you go too early you're having tacos for breakfast which will never work; because you want to get it over with before the football game; because you want to use the whole hour; because you want to be able to order more tacos at your leisure and once the lunch rush shows up that's shot to shit; because you have a lot of stuff going on right now yeah I'm keeping busy unemployment hasn't stopped me one bit; because you're going it alone and want to minimize the potential audience; because if you go too late you'll have to choke your way through the nice dinner your parents planned later, and that's a waste of a nice dinner.
So You Punch "Taco Bell" Into The GPS
and you discover, having never needed directions to Taco Bell before, that there is a ring of Taco Bells that are all seven miles away from you. You can go in any direction and hit a Taco Bell. You live in the middle of nowhere; it makes perfect sense that at the edge of nowhere, there's a Taco Bell.
You choose South.
You're At The Taco Bell Now
and you ask the cashier if this Taco Bell has WiFi. We just got it, actually. Life is perfect. She's customer service excited and you can't help but try to reciprocate that tone of voice and facial expression combo meal that tells everyone around that (1) you know where you are and (2) you wouldn't have it any other way. However, it's hard to convey that particular combination of sanity and contentment when you're also explaining (unnecessarily) that you are ordering Too Many Tacos for an internet dorito taco contest that is not even associated with their company, and you may start crying in the restaurant because, hey, you don't know you won't, best give some heads up.
You actually say "DoLos" when you order them, and she of course asks you to explain that one. Taco Bell employees aren't used to people giving their products pet names.
You Wish to Stream Your Little Taco Adventure
into the ether, and if anyone wants to watch you eat tacos and distract you from the inevitable pain that Too Many Tacos causes to your weak little body, so you set up a little workstation at the Taco Bell - WORK STATION AT THE TACO BELL, YEP YEP YEP, BROUGHT M'COMPUTER IN A LEATHER BRIEFCASE, I'M DOING IMPORTANT WORK HERE AT THIS HERE TACO BELL THIS SATURDAY MORNING - to do so. Your laptop has a sticker from a much, much better taco place on it; you don't worry about management or an employee doing anything about it (because that's silly) but you do worry about the spirit of Taco Bell getting mad at you for some reason (because that's not silly).
The cashier brings you your tacos (what?) just in time for you to learn that Taco Bell's WiFi blocks all video streaming sites. That's stupid, but not half as stupid as the five minutes you spend trying to get around Taco Bell's firewall so you can send video of you eating Too Many Tacos to the world, until you realize that this problem is worth none of your time, none at all, and you get to work at - waiting for the second hand to strike :00 - exactly 11:33am CDT.
You Have A Tray With Five Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Tacos®
You eat your first taco
and it's nice. You were hungry, obviously. But beyond that, food scientists have been spending years trying to perfect the Taco Bell Taco, and (much more notably) the Nacho Cheese Dorito. So you're eating a food thing that was designed to give you maximal pleasure, in a state that made you predisposed to getting pleasure from food, and it's great, it's just great, scientists are great, the world makes sense again.
You eat your second taco
and it's now 11:35am CDT, or, wait, 11:36am CDT, but dude, says the optimist/idiot, these are nothing, it doesn't hurt, what'd that guy do last year, 20? You're gonna do 30. Or 60!
You're not going to eat sixty tacos. The first two went down easy, but you know from last year that the tacos are hustling you.
You are eating your third taco
when halfway through you regain control of your body. You ate two and a half tacos without a thought. The food scientists aren't employed for your pleasure, you realize in horror. You tweet as a mile marker and promise yourself that if the lucid moments spread themselves too far out you'll stop eating immediately.
You eat your fourth taco
with a bit worse technique than the first three, resulting in a glob of Taco Bell Meat on the wrapper. For your effort today to be good faith, you must eat that glob, so you eat that glob. It tasted globby.
At the fifth taco,
you get your first Taco Symptom. #DoLoThroDo participants have been known to get the Taco Sweats, Hot Taco Flashes, Taco Brain, Taco Vertigo, etc.; it's a range as wide as Wind Turbine Syndrome, except, like, real. Your first Taco Symptom is a common one: the Taco Shakes. Disappointed, you hope for Taco Sartre next.
You Order Another Tray of Five Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Tacos®
with the confidence of an experienced drunk getting his third round at 10pm - the bartender knows your face and your game now. You're in a groove. You mention "internet taco contest" again in small talk form, and another cashier perks up - oh, that's what you're doing! They're watching you sort of! Be excited, it's probably not easy to be interesting eating Taco Bell.
You unwrap your sixth taco
and a divine being - the spirit of the Taco Bell, maybe - makes its presence known with an under-stuffed taco. To request that would of course be cheating, but the hand of providence can do whatever it wants. As you chew - slower, no longer close to the 60 TPH clip from earlier - you notice a kid from another table staring at you. You wonder if he comprehends the insanity of your task, or has at least understood the quantity of food you've eaten so far. Probably not. At least his weird little half t-shirt, half basketball-jersey top has BE THE BEST! written on it bold letters. That's a spirit booster, alright.
You eat your seventh taco
to equal your middling PR from last year. That was a casual attempt. At the time, you thought you could compete with the big boys with a serious attempt. Now you know that to be false.
Elsewhere in the restaurant, the lunch rush arrives. You're probably not gonna bother ordering more after this.
You unwrap the eighth taco
and because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, this one has all the stuffing #6 lacked. Taco Bell Spirit Ghost Entity must've known your specs, and spoke silently to you through the taco: here, you wanted a challenge? You wanted to be more taco than last year? Here you go, buddy.
You bite the top: why does the cheese now remind you of straw, a mouthful of cut grass melting in your mouth? Does Taco Bell use a strange, uncanny valley cheese? Or are you too far gone to pass judgment? You bite the bottom: it's Big Boy Snack. You try to bite both to balance, but that requires a level of body coordination you don't really want to allocate the energy to achieve. In retrospect, sauce may have helped.
As the ninth taco happens to you
you make some sort of claim about how you'll never taco but the whole thing's kind of a blur. At 12:00pm CDT (twenty-seven minutes after starting) you polish it off; Now you're at your stomach's brick wall.
The Tenth Taco Now Sits Across The Table From You
and it probably doesn't think well of you, either, so you don't mind making a woozy pledge to kill it. You try to relax and let your body clear space for this last demon. You try to check twitter for reports from elsewhere, but no one else has really gotten going yet except the fella who did breakfast tacos and he's long done. Your fingertips hit the keys strange because of accumulated taco dust. Instinctively, you lick it off.
Get the hell out of there, right? Get to a hospital before it hardens or fuses with your skin, right? Don't become a statistic or an example, right? No, man, not while #10 still lives. Get yourself hyped to the point that you can be within a foot of it. Do some social media shit to clear your mind.
Taco Number Ten
doesn't go down gloriously, swept away in a last rally of willpower. No, the last one - and this is always true of the last one, be it number ten, five, or twenty-seven, so long as it's last - can only die from a thousand cuts. It's self-fulfilling; you're going to stop because of how torturous the process is of eating that taco. Like, you'll make it through that one but you're not doing that again today.
You have fifteen minutes on the clock but it's just not going to happen. Ten is weak on the competitive scale but you still get to sit in the leader's chair for an hour because you got a waiver to start early.
You Drive Home.
You feel terrible, this feels terrible. You feel terrible. You feel awful. You feel terrible, this feels terrible. This is awful. This is just, this is terrible. This is awful, you can't I'm not thinking, straight I'm not thinking straight terrible, this feels terrible, this is I am going to go home and shake terrible, awful, awful, this is not what humans do, this is not what terrible, awful, I'm not thinking straight terrible, you... fuck....
After The Obvious,
after your body tells you exactly what it was hinting at for an hour and the drive home, the comedown is surprising: you're not hungry, you're not tired, you simply are for about six hours. You're apathetic to all, but it's a comfy uselessness. After all, your life has to be alright if you're spending an afternoon - a Saturday afternoon - eating too many tacos for twitter and for sport.