I have been using the moniker "Nightmare Taco" since the beginnings of the XBOX Live service. To put it another way, I've had the name since before Facebook even existed. Frightening to think about, isn't it? Before people were able to post their current status at one moment and count their number of friends in the next, mass murders and public beatings were commonplace. In this age of constant panic and terror, I needed to create a clever name tag. I was (and continue to be) a huge Jhonen Vasquez fan (Invader Zim, JTHM), so I started there. I did not want to take a character's name outright, so I thought about the most likely word to appear in a Vasquez world. The first thing I thought of was GIR constantly requesting taquitos. "Taquito" is too hard to spell, so I went with "taco." After spending days on end with no sleep, pounding my head against the huge brick that was my Xbox, I thought of the word "nightmare." The word isn't extremely likely to be uttered in any Vasquez episode or strip, but the word can be used to describe many of the worlds he creates. The first episode of Invader Zim is even titled, "The Nightmare Begins," but I like to think of my favorite Zim episode, the "Halloween Spectacular of Spooky Doom." In the episode, one character is constantly appearing inside a nightmare monster world; like the real world, but with more teeth, tentacles, and spooky voices. It feels like Vasquez working in his element; no one can create a nightmare world quite like he can.
So, after spending days in my very scientific lab, I was able to mush the two chosen words together, and placed the newly created name next to the dozens of other internet nicknames I'd created. In my mind, it was a homage to Vasquez, but to other players, it probably just conjured up an image of a very scary looking taco.
What exactly is a Nightmare Taco, then? A realistic interpretation might just be the worst taco imaginable. Strolling into a nameless taco restaurant in the middle of a desert, hungry as a dog, only to be served a nightmare of a taco. It was scooped up from the grimy kitchen floor, had nearly no meat in it (the horror!), the veggies and shell were months old, and it had too much hot sauce (if there is such a thing). Of course, I like to go a step further and imagine it growing teeth and a thirst for blood.
Or, maybe it's me that is the Nightmare Taco. I imagine I am a terrible monster that lures innocent passersby with a delicious looking taco that is attached to me via a long tentacle, like an angler fish. Once they get close enough to the taco to realize that it's attached to a horrendous beast with three rows of teeth, it's already too late. I'll release a powerful toxin that can paralyze any human for hours. Unfortunately for my prey, I will not eat them. A fate much worse awaits them. For hours on end, I will talk to them about whatever I want! There they will sit, frozen in place, while I sputter on about how the video game industry needs to be run by the visionary designers instead of the number punching analysts, why massively multiplayer game creators need to stop doing everything they've been doing, or just how important taquitos are to the health of the economy. Anyway, that's the story. Now you know what a Nightmare Taco is.
