Due to liability concerns, "hot metal in the sun" no longer an option.

The county fair was once the highlight of the summer, and my county's was no different. As recently as 20 years ago, which was about the last time I went, the fair was vibrant, sticky, filled with a cornucopia of odors (cotton candy and cow poop), and, by and large, fun. At least as I remember it, anyway. Maybe time colors my memories in sepia, but I can't help but think that something is lost whenever your county fair's midway now looks like this during the week of the fair:


That big ol' building in the background wasn't there during my childhood. Nor was the drive, or that parking lot. If memory serves, the building to the left in the foreground might have been present, but it wasn't enclosed. I don't recall for certain.

I understand that small, poor counties like ours possibly can no longer afford the extravagance of having a carnival as the centerpiece of the county fair, especially if you combine that cost with liability issues. (Yet another consequence of living in an overly litigious society. Thanks, you fuckers.) Still …

I wasn't around when they put that big dumb "community building" right smack in the middle of the fairgrounds, thereby ruining in perpetuity the opportunity for my son to make his own memories on the Ferris wheel or The Scrambler. (At the very least, in my county. He'll have to go to the next county over to make out with some chick behind the Fun House, and I'm going to have to make sure he has all of his shots.) The quarter-mile dirt track adjacent to the fairgrounds is mostly grown over now, with only the front stretch being continuously maintained for demo derbies and tractor pulls.

There weren't even any games (and your correspondent didn't go inside the "community building" – now available for receptions and Your Company's function). If there were any inside, fuck that – the fair's not about being inside.

Anyway, the occasion for my first visit to the fair in two decades was the kiddie tractor pull.


I think Son might have had a little bit of stage fright, given that he pulled about 5 inches (seriously – 5 inches was the measurement), but he got a ribbon for participating, and he did his best. I was proud of him.

Before the tractor pull, however, we visited the concussion pit


(because the line to Box of Glass stretched all the way to the goat barn).

This was the extent of the "midway." Weep with me.


Better suited for a cut-rate street carnival than the county fair.

How fucked up have things gotten at the fair? My brother-in-law went a food stand sponsored by my high school alma mater. Wanted some nachos. Couldn't get nachos, because the 4-H people wouldn't let them sell nachos because they were selling their own nachos.

That, my friends, is fucked up. Isn't 4-H about, like, sharing and shit?

All in all, I would have had more fun fucking my neighbor's chicken.