FAIR IS FOUL, AND FOUL IS FAIR:HOVER THROUGH THE FOG AND FILTHY AIR.

I am simultaneously afraid of and infatuated with county fairs – actually, state fairs as well. It is a subtle balance that some internal mechanism of my mind has developed that manifests itself as a careful construction of desire. It is a relationship that does not draw me to chase county fairs across the region, but instead brings me to one, and only one, each year for a self-conscious embrace of back-lot carnival rides – the cast-offs from more legitimate amusement parks – paper plates full of anything breaded, fried, or drenched in cheese, and the glorious, senseless destruction of junkers amateurly decorated for their one-night-only orgy of demolition.

Each time I go to a fair I have to remind myself to flip that mental switch that allows me to tolerate these things: the people, the touching of things, the wafting odors, the hair, the fashion, the giant hunks of flesh – both those being sold at makeshift counters and those protruding from amidst the all-too-skimpy articles of clothing Americans feel compelled to wear to the county fair.

I am not even sure where this switch came from, but every time, as the wife and I drive up to the parking area adjacent to whichever fair we are attending, I am glad it is there. It allows me to somehow put aside all of my normal anxieties – many of which have been carefully cultivated over the past few decades – and indulge myself in that uniquely pitiable excess of the fair, though by the end of the day those same concerns – headlined by the desire for quiet, sanitary conditions – return once again, leaving that switch inoperable for another year.

While there, I revel in the absurdity of the event, of being a thirty-three year old man gleefully smashing onto others from within the confines of my bumper car, of racing my wife to the bottom of a forty foot tall slide, each of us seated upon an old burlap sack, of actually touching vegetables so profoundly deep-fried that there aren’t napkins enough at the fairgrounds to blot up all the grease, of sitting, packed in with several thousand strangers, to watch one van actually pop another van’s radiator in a head-on collision that spews steaming coolant ten yards in every direction.

But, once nighttime falls, the glory dulls and the draw of a shower and clean clothing seems irresistible, the guilty pleasure, satisfied, seems now mostly sad. And, as I drove home Sunday night, I was left with the more somber reflections of the day, this time with an odd inclination to give personification to the spectacle, an endeavor that led me to wonder what it must be like to be a demolition derby automobile.

Have I never mentioned this tendency I have to personify things, to regard the objects around me as though they were sentient? It is a practice that has been with me since childhood; it was this, I believe, that led me, when I was small, to wish to grow up to be a fire truck – though perhaps it was the other way round, and the wish led to the inclination to personify.

But, anyway, the life of a demolition derby car seems a rather sad life to me, for a brief period exhilarating, though filled with the knowledge that you were considered unworthy for anything other than a suicide mission. I feel bad for these cars, for the lives they must have once led but have been stripped of for our amusement, for the thrill-seeking pleasure of their drivers. In fact, it is this pathos that seems to be the core of the county fair, that not quite significant quality of everything there, the flimsy show at being valuable like the paint job on those derby cars that in advance anticipates its imminent demise.

Hence, as I washed off the day’s worth of grime from our day at the fair, the usual post-indulgence sadness washed over me. Perhaps it was all the empty calories consumed while walking up and down the alleys of cheap carnival games, or the memory of how easily the gutted cars crumpled in on themselves that left me feeling uncertain, awkward, both thankful that that is not my world, my life, and at the same time feeling guilty for the condescension.

That is the guilty pleasure of the county fair for me, to dip my toe in another world to allow myself to feel all the more elevated for not being part of the unwashed many, to hold intact for another year that boundary between the shiny fire truck and those ill-decorated automobiles relegated to the demolition derby.