About Carnies, Carnivals, and the Hot Dog Nation in which we live...

Let it be known that I have always (and probably always will) loved carnivals. I love the smells of greasy food, sweat, ride grease, and quiet despair and fear. I love the cheesy rides and the crappy games that allow you to win a cartoon animal toy stuffed with sawdust and broken dreams. I love the actual food - yes, even the food. I even once designed a carnival of my own (will upload the pictures at a later date). My father remarked that it was highly probable my family possessed significant amounts of carny blood. To be sure, he did not elaborate on why he felt assured of this particular fact. Yet, he seemed very sure of it, all the same. With this in mind, I recently went to the Tennessee Valley Fair, eager to be amongst my people. I had not been there since, probably, 1986. However, this most recent visit was not for fun. Instead, I volunteered to aid Boy Scout Troop 58 in their fund-raising job of cleaning the fairgrounds after the park closed.

I watched this video, hoping to show something of the fair's true nature. And, to be sure, the reporter's views were not unfounded. But, despite her rosy assessment of the Fair's participants, I witnessed a myriad of strange and disturbing sights, starting at around midnight as the people began to leave.

I could go into graphic details about the trash we picked up under the bleachers at the tractor pull area. I could rail about the dirty diapers I picked up in the parking lots. I could shock you with tales concerning the carny village we walked through at 1:30 in the morning. But the most disturbing thing for me was the amount of wasted junk food littered throughout Chilhowie Park. The United States IS the Hot Dog Nation, as we picked up (conversatively) close to 1000 half-eaten corndogs (funnel cakes...now that's another story entirely). It is little wonder that the rest of the world hates us, what with our wastes and our waists (I know I'm not Charles Atlas, but I can touch my toes and see my crotch without looking in a mirror). The amount of food lying in the dirt under the bleachers there was appalling. Lord help the bacon-clad men from my last post here - the tractor pull / rodeo crowd would probably eat them alive, literally.

Maybe we should reconsider cannibalism a la Soylent Green. We wouldn't waste food, it would minimize our food production costs, and we would only have to sweep up crumbs at the fair (instead of picking up half-chewed up corn dogs). Something to think about...