Operation: Epic Burrito

One Man’s Heroic Mission to Make Dinner While the World Burns and Our President Sells Watches

War is Hell but a good burrito is a gift from God.

I was sitting on my parents’ couch watching Fox News with my father when Donald Trump appeared on the television to sell me a watch.

Not in person. I mean during a commercial break. The President of the United States, the man who approximately six hours earlier had announced “major combat operations” against a nation of 88 million people, the man who had just bombed Iran into rubble and then scheduled a million-dollar-a-plate candlelit dinner at his golf resort, was now on my father’s television repeating the phrase “it’s Trump Time” like a guy hawking commemorative coins at 3 AM.

Our president is an infomercial host.

Our president is a multi-level marketer.

Our president just killed the Supreme Leader of Iran and now wants me to buy a wristwatch.

I sat there staring at the screen. My father, who is in his sixties and recently retired and just had a heart attack last week (which is why I am stuck in this frozen wilderness of upstate New York keeping an eye on him while he recovers), did not seem to notice anything strange about this. He had been cheering at the war coverage all morning. Now he was watching a watch commercial. Same energy.

I did not vote for Billy Mays. I did not vote for the OxiClean guy. I voted for the man I thought was the sane option. Apparently I was wrong.

It was at this moment I realized I needed a drink.

But I am sober-ish now. My drinking days are behind me. Mostly. The bottles are not an option. The medicine cabinet is not an option. I needed something else. Something to do with my hands. Something to focus on that was not the President of the United States selling timepieces while Iranian schoolchildren were being pulled from rubble.

I needed a burrito.

And so began Operation: Epic Burrito.

This is my story.

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The Mission Parameters

The situation was dire.

My mother’s refrigerator contained nothing usable. She stocks it like someone who believes the apocalypse will consist entirely of condiments and expired yogurt. The nearest Whole Foods is approximately three thousand miles away because this is upstate New York, where the nearest neighbor is a cow and the local idea of “artisan” is a gas station that cleans its coffee pots.

I would have to go to Wegmans.

Wegmans is basically Whole Foods for people who live in places where hope goes to die. It has organic produce and craft beer and employees who seem genuinely happy, which is suspicious. I do not trust happy employees. Happy employees are either lying or on drugs. In upstate New York, both are equally possible.

I drove eleven miles through frozen countryside to reach the Wegmans. I passed three churches, two tractor dealerships, and a barn that had partially collapsed under the weight of its own despair. My father’s voice echoed in my head from earlier that morning.

“Told ya we were gonna get ‘em!”

He had pumped his fist at the television. He had cheered. He had been waiting for this for weeks, maybe months, maybe his whole Fox News viewing life. They bombed Iran and he was thrilled.

I pulled into the Wegmans parking lot and sat in the borrowed car for a full minute, staring at nothing.

Our president sells watches.

Our president throws million-dollar dinners while soldiers die.

I got out of the car.

I had a mission.

I was going to make a burrito.

Ingredient Selection

The produce section at Wegmans is designed to make you feel like a better person than you are. Everything is arranged in perfect pyramids. Gentle lighting makes the vegetables glow. Soft music plays, something acoustic and hopeful, probably recorded by musicians who now work at Wegmans.

I selected my ingredients with the precision of a military operation.

Organic black beans. Locally sourced cheddar. Cilantro that had not yet begun its inevitable journey toward becoming brown slime. Tomatoes that were red and firm, not the pale mealy sadness you find at lesser establishments. A white onion. Fresh garlic. Limes. Hot sauce (three kinds, because this is a serious mission). Tortillas that were actual tortillas, not the sad desiccated hockey pucks they sell at gas stations where men named Earl make life choices they will later regret.

I paid $11.47.

Somewhere in Iran, people were digging through rubble looking for their children.

I drove home with my groceries in the passenger seat.

Meanwhile, in the Actual News

Here is what was happening while I shopped for cilantro.

At approximately 9:00 AM local time (that’s Tehran time, not upstate New York time, though both feel equally distant from civilization), Israel and the United States launched a coordinated military assault on Iran. The Pentagon called it “Operation Epic Fury,” which is the kind of name you get when you pay defense contractors four hundred dollars an hour to brainstorm in a conference room with a motivational poster about teamwork.

Israel called their part “Operation Roaring Lion.” They are not subtle, the Israelis.

They hit Tehran. They hit the Supreme Leader’s compound. They hit sites in at least 20 of Iran’s 31 provinces. They killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had been running Iran since 1989. They killed approximately 40 other senior officials. They got the president too, according to Israeli military sources.

Iran shot back. They fired missiles at the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. They fired missiles at American bases in Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. They fired missiles at Dubai. One person died in Abu Dhabi. Explosions were reported across the Gulf.

At a girls’ school in Hormozgan Province in southern Iran, at least 57 students died when a strike hit the building.

Someone emailed me photos. A subscriber. I could not look at them for more than two seconds before I wanted to cry.

Fifty-seven girls. Dead. At school.

And our president was selling watches…

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The Preparation

I returned to my mother’s kitchen with my supplies.

My father was still in his recliner, still watching coverage, still occasionally making sounds of approval when something exploded on screen. He did not acknowledge my return. The television was more interesting. The television always is.

I laid out my ingredients on the counter. I washed the produce. I diced the onion and tomatoes. I minced the garlic. I chopped the cilantro, which always smells like hope for approximately thirty seconds before it starts smelling like a salad that has given up on life.

This is the thing about cooking. It requires focus. It requires attention. It requires you to be present in a way that scrolling through news about atrocities does not. When you are mincing garlic, you cannot be thinking about dead children. If you think about dead children while mincing garlic, you will cut yourself. The garlic demands respect.

I heated the black beans with cumin and chili powder. I grated the cheese. I warmed the tortilla to optimal pliability, which is the key to structural integrity. A cold tortilla will crack when you fold it. A properly warmed tortilla will embrace its contents like a mother holding a child.

I did not think about mothers holding children. I focused on the tortilla.

The Assembly

A properly constructed burrito is a miracle of engineering.

You must distribute your ingredients evenly across the tortilla surface, leaving adequate margin on all sides for the fold. Too much filling in the center creates structural weakness. Too little filling creates disappointment. The goal is balance. The goal is harmony. The goal is a cylinder of perfect proportions that will not fall apart in your hands and dump beans on your shirt.

I placed the beans first. Then cheese (so it would melt against the warm beans). Then tomatoes. Then onion. Then a squeeze of lime. Then hot sauce (the good kind, not the novelty stuff with names like “Satan’s Diarrhea” that exists only to punish frat boys). Then cilantro, applied last so it would retain its freshness.

I folded.

Left side in. Right side in. Bottom up. Roll forward.

It was perfect.

I wish I could say I felt something. Pride, maybe. Satisfaction. But I just felt tired. I had constructed a perfect burrito while my country was destroying a nation on the other side of the planet, and the man who ordered it was going to eat dinner tonight at a table where each seat cost more than most Americans make in a decade.

I took my burrito to the kitchen table. I sat down. I opened my phone.

I began to eat.

The Burrito Was Good

I need to say this because it is the only thing today that was good.

The burrito was exceptional.

The beans were perfectly seasoned. The cheese had melted to that exact consistency where it binds everything together without becoming a rubber sheet. The tortilla held. The lime added brightness. The hot sauce added heat without overwhelming. The cilantro was fresh, green, alive.

I ate it slowly, one bite at a time, reading about the world ending.

Each bite was good. Each headline was worse than the last.

Trump told the Iranian people to “take over your government” once the bombing stopped. “It will be yours to take,” he said. “This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”

Then he went back to planning his dinner.

My Father’s Review

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” my father shouted at the television.

I had finished my burrito. I was sitting at the table with an empty plate, staring at my phone, reading about missiles hitting Dubai.

My father did not ask about my burrito. He did not notice I had been gone. He had not moved from his recliner in three hours. His heart attack was last week and he is supposed to be resting and eating healthy and not getting excited, and here he is cheering at explosions like his team just won the Super Bowl.

“Told ya we were gonna hammer on them sons-a-bitches until they’re all dead!”

He has been saying we needed to kick Iran’s ass for weeks. Every day. The television taught him this opinion and he has been repeating it ever since, waiting for it to come true.

Now it has come true. His president delivered. His sons-a-bitches are being hammered.

He does not know about the fifty-seven girls. He does not know their names. He does not know that they were sitting at desks this morning, probably bored, probably thinking about lunch or their friends or whatever teenage girls in Iran think about, and then they were dead.

He knows we are winning.

That is all he knows.

The Theology of Burritos

War is futile. War is killing. There are no enemies, only misunderstandings.

I learned this from a man who died two thousand years ago because the people in power found him inconvenient. They killed him and thought that would be the end of it. It was not the end of it. Ideas are harder to kill than girls in schoolrooms.

Our president claims to be a Christian. He holds up Bibles. He courts evangelical voters. He puts God on his campaign materials like God is a sponsor, like the Almighty is endorsing this season’s candidate the way athletes endorse sneakers.

Then he dances at galas and sells watches and throws million-dollar dinners while children die.

This is not Christianity. This is something else wearing Christianity like a rented suit.

I made a burrito today. It was good. It hurt no one. It required me to kill nothing, to bomb nothing, to profit from nothing.

I wish I could say the same for my country.

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My father is still watching television. Still cheering. Still waiting for the next explosion to celebrate.

I am going back to my room. I am going to lie on the bed I slept in when I was seventeen, in the house I could not wait to escape, in the town that time forgot.

Tomorrow I will make another burrito. It will also be epic. It will also hurt no one.

That is going to have to be enough.

Because I cannot stop the bombs. I cannot save the children. I cannot unwatch my president selling watches while the world burns.

All I can do is make a burrito.

And write about it.

And hope someone reads this and feels less alone.

Grace and Peace,

Wise Wolf out.

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The Wise Wolf could have had a career selling watches, probably. Instead I am writing about burritos and war crimes from my childhood bedroom in upstate New York while my father yells at a television that will never hear him. If this kind of journalism matters to you, a paid subscription keeps Lily in school without student loans and keeps me stocked with organic black beans and the will to continue. My father thinks I threw my life away. Looking at the news today, I think everyone threw everything away. But my burrito was good. That has to count for something. Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

PS: Lily thank you for editing this. You are incredible.