A confession.

[cosmolinguist]

I really like the Minnesota State Fair. And I will miss it.

It's more or less the same every year. That's one of the reasons I wonder why I like it. I already know how it all will go, so I don't know why I bother missing it.

My mom goes for the food. The fried green tomatoes, footlong hot dogs, mini doughnuts, chocolate-covered frozen bananas, the french fries ... all kinds of nonsense like that. Okay, so the french fries are really good. I'm not usually a big fan of fries, but those are hot and fresh, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle, they're perfect. Though my favorite fair food is cheese curds, and the state fair seems to do those better than any place else. And of course we have to go to what my dad always calls "the dairy barn" and get milkshakes; that's a favorite of my dad's, actually, because he really likes the strawberry ones.

My dad also likes to look at the tractors and snowmobiles and things like that. And animals. He does this at all fairs, but there are so many at the state fair, and of so many different kinds, that it seems when I go with my parents we spend most of the day looking at farm animals and getting my mom food.

See why I'm confused as to why this sounds good?

Of course, the last few years, I've gone with assorted friends, and that's much cooler. Last year comradexavier helped out at the exhibit of the company he was interning for that summer, which seemed to involve pulling Legos out of water. mllesarah gets all excited about the 4-H stuff, which makes her even more fun to be around than usual. greenflower and josh8e were made to go because they hadn't been there before; silly North Dakotans. We have county fairs better than their state fair. For some reason, all of Minnesota seems to get really excited about this fair thing. Our state fair is the second-biggest in the country, after one of those gigantic states like Texas, I think. Our state fair is mentioned in a song by Alabama, a famous country band. It's crazy.

Maybe it's just the familiarity I like. Because, cheese curds and Sweet Martha's cookies aside, I know it's silly. It's dorky to have the heads of the "Princess Kay of the Milky Way" candidates sculpted out of butter and displayed in the building where we get the milkshakes. No, really, here's a picture. (After the fair, the girls keep the butter.) It's dorky to marvel over the biggest tomato or pumpkin or whatever ... but why not sneak a peek, as long as you're in that building anyway? It's dorky to listen to radio and TV annoucers from all the Twin Cities stations, of which there are rougly one zillion, broadcast live from the fair. It's dorky to eat all your food from a stick—you can get anything on a stick at the state fair: waffles, deep-fried candy bars, pork chops, macaroni and cheese (a ball of it, held together because it's also deep-fried). But this is the sort of dorkiness I revel in, unashamed, at least this once every year.

Comments

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

You've made me want to go :)

angry ferret says no!

[sporksoma.livejournal.com]

Why is it that northern country is just so much cooler than down here in the south?

I mean, sure we have the ocean, but we also have the hideously deformed rednecks and such. Not to mention kudzu.

[hilker.livejournal.com]

Have you read David Foster Wallace’s essay on the Illinois state fair, “Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Away From It All”? The original version, from Harper’s, is here, (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1111/is_n1730_v289/ai_15533054) but I think the version published in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again may have been revised and expanded.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh, that food ...

I think one of the best things about this article is the Google ads along the side, which end up saying "Low Carb Pork Rinds!" and "All About Pygmy Goats" ... from them you'd never tell that this is written by someone who's scared of chickens and midway rides and doesn't even like the fair. :-)

[dawgdays.livejournal.com]

I went once, almost 25 years ago. We were in Hudson, WI for a friend's wedding, and we went over to the fair. It was my first experience with elephant ears.

Deep-fried mac and cheese? It's clogging my arteries just thinking about it.

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

My job last year also involved putting the legos in the water. And pressing a button. The kids were building wave abatement barriers to protect the Lego guys on the "beach."

This year, they get to build crash barriers, which we test by firing a spring-loaded car down a track at them, and then record the peak deceleration, and grade them with one of four levels (from good to bad):

• Call your insurance agent.
• Call a tow truck.
• Call an ambulance.
• Call the morgue.

[cosmolinguist]

That sounds fun. :-) Something else I would like to see, if I were there. And I had a good time hanging out with you there last year.

[paninogirl.livejournal.com]

Dude, that sounds like it'll be super fun to see. Considering I haven't been to the state fair in probably 7-8 years, it'll be interesting to venture back...

I'll eat some unhealthy food for you, Holly. :)

[angel-thane.livejournal.com]

I feel the same about the CNE.

Oh lordy.

[mwittier.livejournal.com]

Fond as I am of you (and others who love it) I hate the fair. Largely, I think, because it's prime ragweed allergy season for me, so it amounts to being surrounded by the swirling freakshow that is The State Fair while either A) sneezing violenty and so often that someone has to drag me around by the hand so that I don't walk into anyone, or B) in the velvety throes of an antihistimine-induced stupor, where all the colors're shurepurty and whirly and the sand on the paths is fascinating, so much so that I am content to just stare down and grin.

Not fun. To me the Fair is a mixture of horrifying smells: B.O., poop, fried donuts, more B.O., and beer belch. It's too many morbidly obese people in reeeally skimpy, gruesomely-colored clothes that reveal terrifying hair and lumps that are better off confined to back yards and bubble baths. It's 80% beer exhale, and 20% cheese fart. It's pet food on a stick, and paying to see deformed people watching deformed people. It's carnies swearing under their breath at suburban couples who mutter about the gangs of teens who scope each other out for possible pimply sex in the massive parking lots. It's oddly amplified screams from slides, and catapults, and from housewives trying to recapture girlish self-conscious screechiness. All alongside macho apewalking by outstate high school boys and wannabe pimps, and the husbands of the screechy housewives, pinching their special ladies' asses because it feels dangerous under the yellow buglights where everybody can see.

It's warm milk and farm animals being born behind spotty plexiglass, and a whole exposition building jammed full of products that you'd flip hurriedly past when they're on QVC, sold by people nowhere near as slick or pleasantly-scented as their TV counterparts. It's the sound of race cars in your right ear while you're trying to eat, drink, and simultaneously walk, only in your left ear is a similar noise: three suicidal wasps that found their way from a trash can full of half-eaten corn dogs and dirty diapers to your personal space. It's a Skyride that reeks of pee once you're too far gone to clamber back out, and halter tops beneath rounded, sweaty shoulders everywhere you try not to look.

I used to like the sheep building, the 4H kids all safely ensconced in the dorms up above, and the honey/sunflower seed ice cream in the very WPA Agriculture Building, and maybe the first few thousand times, the seed art. But now I prefer to think about how all of it is making someone else really happy, and I don't have to go ever again if I don't want to. I like that it's there, and mostly that its there.

Having said that:

[mwittier.livejournal.com]

[cosmolinguist]

My brother used to have a Jeff Foxworthy CD and listen to it endlessly, so I remember that one of the bits was about how one goes to fairs to feel normal, to think No man with a back that hairy should wear a tank top ... oh, it's a woman! and such like. And everybody knows that fairs are havens of morbid obesity often coupled with distressingly skimpy clothes, of heart-attack inducing food, of livestock excrement, of vomit on the midway, of all kinds of ugly things perhaps left avoided.

This is exactly why I'm so ocnfused as to how I can like the fair. I'm not usually that optimistic. And any attempt to describe it more specifically than "well ... I like it, I guess" threatens to sound overly romanticized, post-modern, sentimental, superior, or other bad things that I'd rather not sound like. So I guess I'll just shrug and say you're right ... but I still miss the fair.