Finally back from the road again. This was my last time for a very long while, as the contract requiring me to give train in the various corners of the province ends on Monday. I’m a little sad in a way, since I do like to travel, but it’s nice to be home and not have to worry about things like how low my gas tank was reading, locating the people who were supposed to be unlocking facilities for me, and trying to find decent places to eat.
Okay, I’ll admit it: I am a very big fan of nachos. Nachos done right, that is. Crisp homestyle corn tortilla chips, lots of aged cheddar and monterey jack cheese, cumin-spiced meat, piles of fresh tomatoes, japepenos, green peppers and onions, and then there’s the homemade hot salsa and just-whipped sour cream on the side. My mouth waters just thinking about it.
But… my time on the road has taught me a very important rule of thumb. The population density is inversely proportational to the likelihood that:
- The torilla chips are stale, no-name Doritos coated with salt and MSG-laden “flavour dust”;
- The “cheese” is a watered-down Cheez Whiz knock-off that glows in the dark and smells vaguely like my Jeep’s transmission;
- The veggies (if there are any) are the remains of a salad that someone couldn’t finish last week;
- The salsa has the flavour, consistency and spice of two-year-old ketchup (but not the good Heinz stuff); and
- The meat (if there is any) is only slightly softer than road gravel, but with less taste.
Such is my insomnia that I spent a full night staring at the ceiling and trying to create a mathematical equation to describe the above rule, complete with multipliers based upon the longitudinal and latitudinal distance from the Texas-Mexican border. I actually did get some numbers down, but the light of day –and a very cold shower– made it seem rather… uh… silly. However, at the time it seemed quite an important theorem I had stumbled across, and I wondered why nobody else had yet discovered it.
