Sleepless in Santa Rosa

My insomnia started about an hour earlier tonight because I'm in the mountain time zone.

I just had what may be the worst ever "Mexican food" in the whole world in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. The fajitas were made with ground beef. The tortillas were cold & stale. The beans were dry and the rice was a runny. Seriously, runny.

The sopapillas were basically rectangular-shaped breakfast biscuits with a side of dipping honey. But at least the sopapillas were complimentary. I had to actually pay for that thing they called fajitas. I couldn't even stiff them on the tip, because the waitress was kind of nice. Clueless, but nice.

New Mexico otherwise seems like a much nicer place than Texas. Why can they not get their Mexican food right? Lord knows they've had Mexicans there for about 100 years longer than Texas has.

I'm reminded of that Orson Welles soliloquy from the Third Man:

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Today, at Joseph's Route 66 Diner, I ate cuckoo clocks.

A friend on facebook suggested the mediocrity of Mexican food correlates to population density. Had I stopped in a bigger town, I would not have been to hamburger-based "fajitas". I accept this trade off. The fajita was invented by impoverished people utilizing an unexplored facet of the cow, the skirt-cut, which was long considered an inferior cut, something a butcher tossed aside for his poorer customers. Mother necessity, or rather Madre Necesario, took this castaway, spiced it right, and created a delicate staple. So I have to wonder if it is maybe economic prosperity that results in shitty recipes.

A comparable accomplishment to the fajita is the Scottish Enlightenment. Economics and Moral Philosophy are essentially the fajitas of Scotland. And this is on my mind lately. Had it not been for the devastating poverty, political oppression, and widespread starvation in the mid 1700s, there probably wouldn't have been a David Hume questioning the nature of humanity, bringing the "experimental method of reasoning" to the "science of man" he sought to create. People literally starving to death in the streets during his childhood is largely what motivated Adam Smith to attack the Mercantilist policies of England and the corporate fat cats who profited by Scotland's poverty.

So next time you get a bright idea for a poem or painting or an ethical solution for a moral quandary, be sure and thank a dictator.