What I saw at the fair

It's not as if anything changes from year to year at the Minnesota State Fair. It's just that, inevitably, I'm at different places at different times, and therefore see new things. This year I saw five.

Young women wearing evening gowns and lots of jewelry driving low-to-the-ground, two-wheeled carts pulled by ponies. Uh-oh, I have to admit I'm not sure they really were ponies. I was too amazed by the drivers to pay much attention to the animals. But they don't race goats, do they?

The sow, from the annual sow-and-new-piglets display in the swine barn, urinating so copiously that I wondered if they'd bred her with an extra bladder. I know they're not beyond that kind of thing.

My niece carrying a blue balloon with a GOP elephant logo on it. I don't know which adult of the four present allowed it, but I know who it wasn't.

An 89.3 baseball cap that I coveted, but did not buy.

A huge stuffed Stewie lying on a roof underneath the gondola ride where some adult, ashamed of himself for carrying a doll, had dropped it. No child would ever carry a Stewie.

Three oinks for the fair

The Minnesota State Fair is almost here, and what's more, it's as late as it can mathematically be, which means there's the least possible time between the fair and Christmas, the two most fun events on the planet, and well-deserving of a run-on sentence. I don't need to defend Christmas, but really, the Minnesota State Fair? You bet.

It's filled with fat people eating unashamedly, the only place in the wild this happens.

It's the only place in Minnesota, which lacks real public transportation, where all social classes and ethnicities and geographies mix freely.

There are lots of pigs and goats. There are also lots of cows and horses and sheep, but I find those dumb, and two of them are so big they're scary. Pigs and goats, however, are smart and you can tell they have a sense of humor, so it's nice to mingle with them.

If you want to see it, you have to walk.

It's the only mass event left that isn't openly orchestrated and exploitative. Baseball games used to be like that, back around the time the Dodgers left Brooklyn.

It allows everyone to be a low-life, to wallow unashamedly in tastelessness and ugliness, and then to find joy in the wallowing.

It's way too hot and there's no way to air-condition it, so that for a few hours we have to give up our insane desire to master the planet.

New York, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston, and all the other hip places don't have anything like it, which provides a rare opportunity to count your blessings.

Everyone can eat like a fat person and do so unashamedly.

Tactical rudeness

LaGuardia, roughly ten o'clock on a not particularly hot, but definitely muggy, Friday night. The cab line is 300 people long but it's moving; it will take only about a half hour to get to the front. There are young and old and middle-aged, men and women, professional and working class, Indian-, Pakistani-, Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-, African-, Dominican-, Jamaican-, and Puerto Rican-Americans, and quite a few white folks of the originally-European variety.

As I move closer and closer to the head of the line, where it folds into an S before feeding people into cabs, I notice two men, jaw to jaw, arguing angrily. One is a movie-star handsome mid-30s Hispanic businessman in a beautiful suit; the other is a burly, hugely tall, late middle-aged white guy. I can't hear what they're saying, but they're pretty damned interesting if only because they're the only two out of 300 who are doing something other than looking at their smartphones for salvation from cosmic boredom.

They argue, and they argue, and they argue, and suddenly, up from the line jumps a short, fat, young woman in hip-hop clothes who screams to all 300 of us, "hey everybody, this fat white motherfucker jumped in the line what are we going to do about it are we going to let this cocksucker just do it c'mon everybody speak up let's do something you're not going to just allow this prick to break into the line . . . " And before she can put it on a loop, the burly, hugely tall, late middle-aged white guy shrugs, walks away, goes to the back of the line.

Everybody cheers.

Which makes me wonder how my children, growing up in Minneapolis, will learn the essential skill of tactical rudeness.