Top 10 Jack-In-The-Box Tacos

Top 10 Jack-In-The-Box Tacos
The traveling Crumpet Collection goes golden brown in San Diego.

Jack-In-The-Box taco #1: Order tacos in even increments for the two-for-99-cents deal at Jack-In-The-Box—16 should do—for loved ones suffering a three-year hiatus from the Westwardly-prevalent fast-food chain out of reach for most residents of the South. The aunt or uncle who willingly and shamelessly orders 16 tacos at the drive through, while also producing a wallet-full of free taco vouchers distributed at Padres games, is definitely deserving of a taco . . . or two.

JITB taco #2: Upon bodysurfing amid a swarm of young professionals deceivingly resembling lifeguards with their “official” red foam “LIFEGUARD” tubes, one should not be lulled into a false sense of rip tide security. These apparent lifeguards bobbing around aimlessly are merely “junior lifeguards” getting their elementary school feet wet in the life-saving industry.

JITB taco #3: The alcohol beach ban, which prohibits drinking ON the beach, may be circumvented by engaging in “Float-opia” parties at sea. BYOBAR al mar: bring your own booze and raft whilst boozing it up at sea.

JITB taco #4: One may read every informative storyboard about San Diego history in the museum-haven of Balboa Park (if one does this, visit the art museum first, not last, to avoid nodding off in the sterile, immaculate quiet of an art forum) and still remain at a loss for why the international border barely sneaks San Diego in as part of the U.S. There is no geographic difference to suggest a natural topographic border; on a clear day, one can stand atop any high point and see Tijuana, and on a light traffic day for the “5,” the border is a mere 17 minutes away, the traffic alerts report.

JITB taco #5: Seaweed. That horrid marine vegetation of the deep that slinks between toes and snakes around the legs resulting in the bunny hop bodysurf technique, I am happy to say, has been reigned in to an extent thanks to the prodigious advent of the public works occupation of the seaweed-bulldozer. How positively cheery it must be spending one’s entire day at the helm of a beachcombing monster vehicle weaving in between sandcastles and beach towels shoveling vegetative clumps into monstrous heaps left to bake and fester in concentrated gnat-swarms.

JITB taco #6: Sea World, formerly a welcome alternative to the scarring amusement park neighbor Disneyland, home to Space Mountain, has since developed competing amusements of its own with a deceivingly-timed climactic roller coaster and a jolting airlift to the “Arctic.” However, the Busch-run enterprise’s ability to brainwash impressionable minds to seek the marine biologist career whilst revealing the positive environmental impact of beer sales, is, for better or for worse, unchanged.

JITB taco #7: Assembling the entire Swikard family , give or take a photo-shopped absentee or two, in coordinating white shirts and jeans for one photo on the beach is a production rivaling a Broadway production of “The Sound of Music” (complete with exponential generations of von Trapps); however, this particular performance was not near as mono-nationalistic given the range of representative Irish, German, Romanian, and Latino nationalities present and perhaps not near as harmonious given the rolling eyes, the inadvertent inappropriate pelvic placements, the Grim Reaper grins, the far-off gaze toward the enrapturing hotel architecture, if indeed the appearance of rapture at all, captured ever-so-candidly by a photographer whose rumored specialty was photographing wild animals and dogs.

JITB taco #8: A visit to southern California is incomplete without experiencing the sound of an approaching semi-truck dieseling through one’s basement door whilst the computer monitor renders electronic text unstable, reducing it to undulating hieroglyphic squiggles as Grandmother’s 217-plus bell collection rattles and rings, heralding the passing of a 5.7 trifle of an earthquake.

JITB #9: Even after 22 years of sitting in the passenger seat watching San Diego’s ostentatious freeway mileage (being so far at the end of the road, so to speak, border town that it is, to have so much excess freeway) overlap in both tangled and unraveling coils that suddenly terminate in rattlesnake-tailed east counties, one should never trust such passenger “experience” to actually reliably arrive at a destination when that passenger finds herself behind the wheel.

JITB #10: While my dear grandmother has always warned us of the perils of entering her “shrine room,” her own forbidden West Wing of sorts, dutiful granddaughter that I am, I never thought to question what exactly was in the shrine room until this recent visit, when she gravely requested, “Now, I’m going into my shrine room. If I don’t resurface in, oh, about ten minutes, send someone in after me!” During those ten minutes I tried to imagine why my Catholic grandmother would have a room dedicated to a little gold Buddha with Tibetan gongs and such. However the mystique of the shrine room still remains, as in the brief glimpse I got I could not confirm the existence of a little Buddha but for the piles of Christmas wrapping and bows, similar to what Santa’s workshop must look like, minus the elves. Or perhaps instead of elves, there may be Buddhas.


Most Wanted List: sweet (sweeeeeet) tea

To save time in our race against the clock to complete San Diego Nostalgic Must-Eats Bingo, I am appending the checklist here for future expediency and efficiency: Jack-In-The-Box tacos, Lido’s spaghetti and meatballs, Gaetano’s pizza, Rubio’s baja chicken burrito, Santana’s enchilada combo #5, Aunt Sayde’s chilaquiles, Welldeck sandwiches, the entire El Indio smorgasbord, Bon-Bons, Miss Donut’s chocolate covered old fashions, breakfast at Coco’s, frosted animal circus cookies, and the chocolate Shamu cookie indigenous only to Sea World.