mallorys_camera | The Columbia County Fair + Bonus Chicken Pix for Egg

The Columbia County Fair was kind of a bust.

I’m a Big City Girl—a New Yawkah!—so yeah: Sentimental fantasies about rural culture in AmeriKa? Guilty as charged!

When I go to a county fair, I wanna see Tess of the D’Urbevilles milking a cow. Columbia County has a lot of dairy farms.

I did get to see the pig competition. And a bunch of cows.

But the animals were segregated in a tiny bunch of ancient exhibition halls that were difficult to find.

Most of the Columbia County Fair had metastasized into a huge midway. Pleasure Island! Adrenalin and carbs!

No skin off my ass if that’s how people like to entertain themselves. Snobbery, elitism, and Bwana-ry of the highest order to tsk-tsk or interdict the necessity for more wholesome amusements.

Still. The number of obese people in their twenties and thirties waddling around was staggering. Obese people over 40 get Medicaid to pay for mobility scooters, I guess. (I am not talking about people with extra padding here,

lookfar! I am talking about people who fit a medical definition.)

By the way—do you know the only source in nature where fat and sugar are found in the same ginormous proportions they’re found in the processed foods that make up such a huge part of the average diet in industrialized parts of the world?

Breast milk.

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The rides were pretty empty. They fill up at night when the teenagers turn up.

I considered going on the Ferris Wheel, so I could take arty photographs, but then I decided, Nah—the pix won’t turn out.

The most popular attractions while I was there were the Bingo Hall and this very strange game, which had dozens of people lined up waiting for a chance to play it:

I have no idea how this game is played, or what you get if you score. Do you win all that money? (It’s not a lot of money.) All I know is that the prospect of running their fingers through those piles of gleaming quarters exercised a well-nigh hypnotic hold on Columbia County Fairgoers.

There were lots of things to buy, too. They looked like this:

Kinda cute in a ghastly sort of way, especially when they’re ganging up on you.

But you definitely want them to stay out of your dreams.

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I took some chicken pix for

egg_shell. The chickens were all in cages:

There was absolutely no one I could have persuaded to accompany me to the Columbia County Fair, of course, so I went alone, which meant that I was invisible for the three hours I was there. I felt like a character out of Christopher Priest’s very fine early novel The Glamour.

Actually, wait—no: One person did see me:

I figure she was very stoned and that there was a very interesting story behind how she’d ended up manning the strongman game at the Columbia County Fair. No tattoos! But note the socks.

In fact, I was so taken with this girl that I immediately incorporated her into the science fiction story I should—but probably won’t—write about the dream I had the other night: Forget mad scientists and strange elliptical conversations about morality! In this version of the Karma Police, our intrepid cosmo-detectives travel back in time so they can ensnare mutants at county fairs.

And I amused myself telling myself this story as I drove home through the strange little Mennonite villages that constitute so much of Northern Columbia County.