My favorite things about the Minnesota State Fair.
State Fair Despair
It can happen to anybody. It’s late in the day. You’re tired of walking. All you want to do is sit down. And you do. And once you do, you can’t bring yourself to stand back up again. You’re permanently planted to the curb on Dan Patch Ave across from the Hawaiian Ice booth. You’ll remain there for the rest of the fair, maybe you’ll be there through next year’s fair as well! But you can’t bear the thought. You’ve eaten enough funnel cake on the Midway. You’ve seen enough of the witty t-shirts that the teenagers wear. You’ve seen the K9 Police dog demonstration at the Pet Barn. And all you want to do is go home! But home is so far away. You’ll have to walk to the park and ride, ride on the park and ride, find the car in the gigantic shopping center parking lot, THEN drive home. This all goes through you’re mind as you sit on the curb on Dan Patch Ave, and you just don’t know what to do.
The Sublime Porcine
You want to see it again. You can do it. You saw it last year. That giant round mound of flesh. But there’s always something that holds you back, just a little bit. Is it the way his ears cover his eyes like fuzzy pink blinders? Or is it knowing that those same ears will be a welcome gift to the family dog someday? Perhaps it’s the fact that in all the years you’ve gone to the fair you’ve never once seen him/her standing?a Always laying there in the sawdust as if the simple laws of physics and motion prevented the auto-locomotion of an animal of such impressive size. Staring there at that animal you remember back to the freshman art history class you had in college. You remember Heironymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” You remember Salvidor Dali, “The Persistence of Memory.” Like the hog, it’s all highly vivid in detail, but it just doesn’t seem to make sense. And deep, deep down, it terrifies you.
Commerce and Trade, From Memory
It’s in the Merchandise Mart. You can’t think of it’s name. It’s something like “Kitchen Widget” or something like that. Whatever it’s called you know for certain you don’t need one. But it’s not the device that disturbs you. It’s the man hawking it. He rubs the device on a head of cabbage and thread like shavings fall like snow upon the cutting board. You stop and listen to his hypnotic spiel. He recites again the dishwasher-safeness of his gizmo and you regard him as a caricature, a life size cut-out of an actual human being. But this pains you. This man, his life. As he expertly slices his 3rd tomato you think “There must be more to this man.” Suddenly you want to know him. What is his life like? Does he have a family? Where does he sleep at night? But his rant begins to dissolve as you listen to it. The rhythmic delivery and lack of inflection begins to erode the meaning of the words and you are left with only the soft, gooey, and artificial sounds of the man’s voice. It’s then that you remember you want mini-donuts.
I haven’t been able to decide what my fourth item in my State Fair Four should be.
