The Lincoln County Fair is in the process of descending on our town. We live two doors down from the main pedestrian entrance to the festivities so we are expecting thousands of passers-by between Friday and Monday. The Carnies are already here. They started arriving (in transport trucks) at about 4:30 on Sunday morning and have been setting off bottle rockets and other minor incendiaries all day today.
The Carnies are a reasonably friendly folk, living as they do in Ferris Wheels and cotton-candy machines. They must be terribly flexible and not at all prone to motion sickness in order to live in the teacup ride and the Tilt-a-Whirl. Just watching other people on those rides makes me want to vomit so I can’t even begin to imagine how one would go about making toast in them as I’m sure they do every morning for breakfast.
These gentle circus folk are not the real concern. Even the people who may or may not be having sex on the sidewalk in front of the house don’t overly concern me (and yes, this is actually something that happens. Amy’s mom witnessed it). The Poultry Barn is one property away from our house and the ducks have been having a party all evening. At first it is sort of pleasant, feeling as though one is close to ‘nature’ (very little is natural about penned fowl) and hearing them quibble and squawk is not too bad. The second hour is less amusing and by the third one is prepared to go find a light gun and make terrible things happen (note the horrendous trigger discipline in that photo. Kids! Always treat your light gun as if it were loaded and do not point it at anything you don’t want to see destroyed!). The ducks remind me of college students with popped collars and Pabst Blue Ribbon but instead of saying “DUDE!” and headbutting each other, they just quack unceasingly. The parallels are, I feel, very clear.
Possibly worse even than duck party ’09 is whatever is making the ear-shattering screeching noise. I feel as though someone is running a cleverly curved rasp across my cochlear partition. It may be a chicken but I think it is more likely a chicken being sawn in half by seven or eight rusty chainsaws. I am frankly amazed that Amy is able to sleep with domesticated birds being rent in twain less than 80 feet from our bedroom. I will stand a vigil as long as necessary and maybe try to get the render started on the ducks.