the big E

After watching lots of fat people eat baked potatoes that were bigger than Nerf footballs and smothered under gobs and gobs of squeeze cheese dusted with bacon bits, it became clear to me that the only food at the big E that would not quadruple my cup size and kill me was the 50¢ apple.  I ate one after eating some clam fritters.  

The most important thing about the big E is this: you spend fifteen dollars to spend fifty dollars.  As soon as I entered the grounds, I paid one dollar to look at Porky, the giant pig.  I was accompanied by a kid wearing nylon basketball shorts.  Porky was lying in such a way that I could not even see his head, so I cannot say that it was a dollar well spent.  I would have been much better off buying one of the miracle pet hair removers that can be found in the Better Living Center.  You can wash it, dry it, and re-use it.  You can also use it to pick up cat litter that the cat has shot out of the box.  The demonstration man said so. 

The trouble with writing about fairs like the big E is that there is really nothing new to say about them.  It's become cliché to talk about the correlation between fatty foods and fat people, cliché to point out the eerie proximity of fat man to fat animal, of mountainous piles of food to mountainous people, to talk about motorized carts, bad educations and bad taste; the only thing I could think to write about the big E that is not cliché is this bit about how cliché commentary about these fairs usually is.  So what else is there to say? 

The lobster was skanky.  We paid about eight dollars for one lobster roll, ate about three quarters of it, and pitched the rest of it in the trash.  Then we headed over to the Massachusetts building to look at some mums.  It seems that Massachusetts is famous for mums and little else.  Mums, Plymouth rock, chowder.  Maybe Robert Frost.  In any case, all the temporary landscaping delighted me.  Everywhere I looked, it was mums and red mulch, red mulch and mums.