Sleepwalking Into Madness

I read a story once about a man who sleepwalked to work behind the wheel of his car. He woke up in the morning and he dressed and showered and got ready and he drove, eyes closed, the whole way to work. He only woke up when his commute was over.

The article made a point about how this isn't too dissimilar from all of us, especially when it comes to something like the morning commute. It's kind of the perfect set of circumstances. You're still half asleep and you're traveling along a path you know almost by heart.

Apparently accidents happening during the morning commute are all too common because everyone is just on auto-pilot. When you're doing the same thing you've done a dozen times before it's easy to get complacent, and then you don't even notice the car coming until it's on you and you're reduced to a smoldering and twisted pile of metal.

Well tonight was a car accident in metaphor alone I guess.

The circus stood around me, silent until I noticed it and then blaring out afterwards. It was a brilliant and dazzling display of lights and sounds and smells and it was so jam packed into this tiny little space between the buildings that I could hardly even take it all in at a glance. It was too much, simply put. It was far too much to be seen all at once and far too much to occupy such a tight squeeze.

But it was here. It was here and it was all around me and as I stepped forward and ran my fingers across the canvas of a nearby tent I could feel it beneath my touch. Feel and smell and sight and sound. Hell the scents of it were so intensely vivid and present that I could actually taste them on the tip of my tongue, a heady mix of salt and buttered popcorn with that little bit of sweetness that was always so intoxicating. It was memory embodied in being present in this moment and this place and it took me so much by surprise that I barely even took a passing moment to question how I could have possibly missed it.

I didn't notice the forest for the trees. I didn't stop to ask how or why, just took it all for granted as I was set upon my back foot and pushed off balance by the full weight of my nostalgia.

My home town was a small town, one of those little country towns where the majority of the population lives on farms that are just little houses surrounded by vast seas of wheat or corn or hay or soy because it always seemed like it was only ever one of the four. In that town nothing ever happened that could be possibly mistaken for an event, because Saturday night at the lodge or a charity beef barbeque in the library parking lot was truthfully probably closer to a chore than an event, at least for me.

It was the kind of place where nothing happened and where nothing ever would happen and everyone there liked it that way. If they wanted change and excitement they would live in the big city, but the big city was too fast and too dangerous for their simple tastes. They liked it staid and ordinary. They preferred a world where every day was a carbon copy of the one that came before it and if they could they would have written that into law and it would have stood, unbroken, until the one day a year that it was shattered into pieces. The day at the end of summer when the fairgrounds exploded into life.

The fall fair, which only ever took place when summer was at its waning point, was the only reason anyone ever even remembered the name of my town. People would come from all over with plans to enjoy the food and the rides, maybe to sell something they'd made or grown or maybe even to enter into one of the competitions in hopes of winning a little bit of pride and a blue ribbon of their very own.

It was my first experience with change in the world, really. I mean people came to town, people who weren’t the same people I saw every last day of my life. It was my first indication that there was a world outside of this little existence, and it was a little like opening up my eyes and getting object permanence for just one instant before the morning came and the fair left and I was all alone again.

I know it's stupid to say this, but I think the fall fair was really the reason why I made the promise in the first place. I wanted to try to push for something more in life. I wanted to try to find some way to be something more than what was offered to me at first glance.

I wanted to live my life in lights, albeit only ever in a metaphorical kind of way.

But time moved and I moved with it and over the years that had passed since I left that hometown of mine I forgot. I forgot about the fair, about its existence at all. I forgot until I was back standing right in the middle of it all over again.

Not just any fair. The same fair. Here in possibly the last place in the world it should have ever been.

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