In fourteen days the State Fair of Texas comes right and ready to our little neighborhood.

For 340 days of the year we live, we work, we play next to eighty acres of haunted fairgrounds. It is a cement life with booze and tatoos and stories that get told soley for public interest. Exposition Park creates our own side show parties, and the lonely fairgrounds serve as a backdrop for us. We hate the State Fair of Texas, because that's when the background overtakes us; it steals our parking spaces, it commandeers our barstools, it crowds our safe streets with corn-dog-sucking, Coors-long-neck-straddling strangers. It surmounds to anal date rape. What ever anal date rape feels like.

Our home town becomes a barbarians Meca, and to kick off the invasion- a college football game that rivals every bit of the film Gummo. They paint their faces, they mutilate their bodies, destroy their cars, and then go home and beat their wives and/or girlfriends. It's how babies are made, how ex-cons find work, it's how the great state of Texas earns it's beer-gut-flauntin', gun-wieldin' reputation. They all come here to the Texas red-neck convention to fill their bellys with top shelf grease, tounge eachothers missing teeth on the farris wheel, and start fist fights over who's got the best hefer.

So, I'm preparing myself for my exile: visiting with old friends I won't get to see so much, sifting through old hobbies I've shelved to the closet, and scoping out temporary digs until this twister makes it's way out of town. The shop keepers prepare signs with special fair hours (that relieve their staff of the torture), stock up on domestic beers they normally refuse to carry, and pull in television sets for people to watch the game on.

I'll miss you Expo Park. Take care.