one about mexico

I've been trying to think of the right Mexico story.

One would be about an obese American who visits Todos Santos. His Spanish is perfunctory and poor by that standard, but his sense of dumb mission is unquestionably intact. He makes the trip alone or with his helpless family, and over a single night he makes it his goal to eat all the tacos in town, pot by steaming pot of goat, carne asada, fillet after fillet of fish, thousands of breaded shrimp.

The toppings can be left to the imagination, but the impression should be of a man determined to burn away entirely his memory through the effects of pepper on the tear ducts and mouth. In his quest, the man must confront the laws of gastrointestinal physics and (at a certain point nowhere close to achieving his goal) his heart or some other part or parts of his body best left imagined invariably give way.

The good people of Todos Santos leave a simple white marker at this gentleman's final stand or cart, and whether it's as a cautionary reminder or salute to the improbable, we'd better not speculate.

The guy's ghost wanders out into the desert, marking time with all the other dead things, marking the gray beauty of the Pacific, paying proper respect to Venus as it descends each night, plummeting into the sea on fire.