County Fairs and the Wages of Fun
By Summer Block

Every summer I make a point of going to exactly one county fair. These annual pilgrimages impart profound if merciless lessons. Make no mistake—the county fair is our nation's most puritanically rigorous form of moral instruction. Like a father forcing his child to smoke an entire pack of pilfered cigarettes to ensure he never takes a puff again, the county fair offers you every possible type of enjoyment while sneering, "Here, you want fun? Well, here you go, here's fun for you—and I hope you choke on it."

Of course, the fun is of a family variety: no sex, no drugs beyond the occasional watery, overpriced beer. A fair is fun as conceived of by a grasping and giddy child, face smeared sticky with cotton candy—not the dark allure of vice but the wild, hedonistic excess of a four-year-old doped up on pixie sticks and sleeplessness. The fair speaks directly to our basest and most primal urges towards consumption.

First, there is the food: outsized, outlandish, monstrous. Deep-fried Twinkies, deep-fried candy bars, deep-fried zucchini. Everything is branded "giant," from the whole barbequed turkey legs to the baked potatoes rupturing sour cream and bacon. Some are even "Texas-sized." Everything is portable. This is no accident—this is not food to savor slowly, even were such a thing possible in a dusty field with inadequate seating, where the weak and elderly slowly roast alive at white plastic picnic tables covered in ketchup splatters and alive with bees. The able-bodied charge on, cheesecake-on-a-stick in hand, to see more, to devour more.

County fairs have rides, rickety affairs that are built to collapse, unfolded and allen-wrenched together countless times across the nation by leering, meth-addled carnies. There are prizes to be won, grotesque stuffed bears and inflatable novelty hammers that trumpet their uselessness—you will begin to grow tired of their charms even in the moment you win them, a foretaste of the closet clutter they will become. There are thousands of items for purchase, from paring knives to cell phone covers, and many available for personalization—the sin of vanity as registered on a wooden nameplate or airbrushed T-shirt. There is entertainment, crippled nostalgia acts, their famous frontrunners long departed, doggedly sending that one radio hit out into the empty bleachers. There are domestic animals, their meek comportment a testament to patience strained almost past endurance by a thousand children's prodding fingers.

It's not until evening settles in, an evening as hot and stifling as the day, that you have your epiphany. Your skin is coated in a filthy mask of sand, sweat, and hay. Swinging high above the blaring lights and barking salesmen in a fragile rollercoaster manned by a lunatic; nauseous, sunburned, dizzy, third-rate rock and roll ringing in your ears like thunder, you suddenly know:

You never want to have fun again as long as you live.

——

Summer Block would drive two hundred miles to see a pig race. And she has.

This piece first appeared in DYSKE magazine.

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