thoughtjunkie

There’s people necking in the poolhouse. I imagine they stayed behind to count up the coins and ones from todays entries and hotdogs. They pretend to hate each other just a little too much, so everyone knows. They think they’re being clever, but everyone knows.
The pool is located on a vast hill of gravel. I try to imagine the gravel being covered in grass and trees; when it rains, the water runs through the grass in little rivers instead of forming the dust blisters it does now.
Inside the pool house, the couple doesn’t have sex, just the clicks of saliva and the nostrils of excited breath to tell each other how they feel.
The fair smells of sweat and manure and cherry flavoring. It’s an honest scent-- that is to say, it’s a smell made with no thought towards it whatsoever. It’s a smell that rings of activities rather than intents-- kid wants to ride a pony, so the fair smells of manure; there's oil on the food and in the machines, probably from different sources; it’s summer and there’s people, and that equals sweat.
The noise is maddening if you don’t know how to listen to it. People who grow up in cities do it automatically. For people in a Smalltown, USA, it takes focus and dedication. There’s bells and buzzers and screams and music. There’s machinery thrumming and pony hoof beats. Cars in the distance, conversations up close, and above it all, the grinding of cicadas. But then, see, I’m already doing it. Taking the Big Sound and slicing it into its parts, sense for the senses. You can’t write it on a page, it‘s too big. It’s the oppression and the exhilaration of having no control over your environment whatsoever. It’s sound waves you feel, reverberations that hit you in your eyejelly and throat. It can’t be written, and can‘t be read; I don’t even know why I tried.
There’s lights and movement and hairdos-- oh! The hairdos! (Buzzcuts and bobs and mullets, oh my!) The fair has two ferris wheels; the couple one and the lunatic one. Couples take the huge tall one, the one that puts out 70% of the fair’s light pollution. It towers above the other rides, high above the crest of the fair’s hill, and moves at a crawl. It’s like sitting in an Applebee’s booth that spins over the town.
The lunatic one is different. It has cages-- roll cages designed to withstand being dropped from it’s crest (not sure why, falling from that height would turn ribcage to chunky salsa anyways). There’s motors and pistons all over its exterior, trying to convince everyone that’s how it moves, but I talked to the carney who runs it for a bit, so I know better. In reality, there’s a huge underground hamster wheel that they put all the fair’s methheads on. “To load the Paying Customers,” he says, Paying Customers is like some zombie mantra to these people, passed down from corporate, “to load Paying Customers, we let the big hunk of meth drop from the ceiling and let them salivate all over it to soften it enough to scrape bits off with their teeth. Then when the Paying Customers are all settled in, we pull the meth up and off they go.” This makes sense to me. Fair week is the week all the methheads are conspicuously absent from the QuickShop.