The State Fairground Blues
The misses got all kinds of excited about a never-before-seen-on-planet-earth huge sales extravaganza that she saw advertised on television. She knew that I had spent the previous week scouring the town unsuccessfully for new stereo speakers, so when she heard something like “20 to 80 percent off stereo speakers – this weekend only!!”, it seemed like the planets were aligning for a speaker purchase. Friday night we were off to the State Fairgrounds to this mystery “Extravaganza” that advertises, “Most Attended General Merchandise Sales in the Nation!!!”, to look for speakers and whatever other general merchandise we could get for those once in a lifetime prices.

Now the State Fairgrounds is just a fucked up place when the state fair isn’t actually going on. It’s like a little small town onto itself. Or more like one of those Hollywood towns they erect to shoot a movie – you kind of expect weird things to happen: Sean Penn to step out of the empty Kare 11 booth with guns blazing or a jazzman to come strolling up Main Street playing Chim Chim Cheree on his saxophone. In other parts, especially at night, it’s simply every horror movie you saw from age eight to 18 rolled into one little Fairground.

After driving around that creepy place for awhile and having already stopped in at two wrong mega-sales in other barns on the Fairgrounds (the Wilson’s leather outlet sale actually smelled very similar to the State Fair when it’s in full operation), we found the Sale Extravaganza and happily paid our seven dollar entrance fee just to have the privilege of the deal. That my friends was our fourth mistake.

I can’t even describe what was going on at this sales event but I’ll try. It was either:

the Russian Mob, wearing four inch wide dollar sign necklaces emblazoned with 36 Karat Dimamondella stones selling Dell computers out of a highjacked truck while playing Dungeons & Dragons or,

it was an after party for the movie 2Fast 2Furious and someone had brought in a highjacked truck of CD’s headed for the local area Kmarts or,

someone had discovered every piece of software nobody in the world uses anymore and was packaging it 4-for-1 with Samurai Swords, sci-fi meets Lord of the Rings 13 point daggers, and 8×10 jungle print rugs.

Get the picture? Yeah, neither did we. I did see a sweet piece of software tho called Cosmo’s Virtual Makeover. And I did threaten the person who brought me to this “extravaganza” that this handy piece of software was going to find it’s way into her Christmas stocking.