Curveballs and carnivals

The unmistaken effluvium of fried pork and cheap cologne floats through the dusk like a ghost ship. Pregnant teenage mothers and their boyfriends french kiss while standing in line for candy-apples. Menthol cigarettes and pawn shop jewelry. Fist fights by the House of Mirrors. Cascades of neon downpour your periphery like sour electric confetti. The colors wet the tongue. Every shade from Grape Strobe to Cotton Candy Blare. Tennis-ball Yellow and Wildfire Flash. \nAs if these florescents aren't enough to tantalize and toy with the childhood mind (some of us still have it), they embroider every spinning beam and spire. Walk through the Mid-Way and you're banquet fed a lasso of cartoon-ish verve. Pink gorillas and dartboard balloons. Lime toucans and vertigo ferris wheels. Alabama carnies and 13-year-olds prowling for backseat love.\nIt's the morning after, and still the memory resonates through my head like back-handed racquet ball. Tilt-o-whirls ricocheted through my dreams last night. All those gyroscopic rides and pellet guns. The room is still spinning.\nNo Indiana summer is complete without fairs and carnivals. The sad thing is that the refined clique tends to dismiss these spectacles as nothing but side-shows, appropriate only for misfits and delinquents. But on nights when rain rolls back and a chill blows down from Michigan like last night, when the sky looks like orange sorbet and turquoise jewelry, the planets are so bright they make you squint and when the moon looks like silver bull horns, put your post-modern booklets down and stroll through the carnival.\nMaybe it's the teenage pregnancies and basketball jerseys, but carnivals always remind me of my hometown. It's strange, I still remember walking through the carnivals of my youth. This is no nostalgic romp through childhood memories because I can't stand reminiscing. Memory is the vice of misery. I think Andre Gide said that. I can't remember. But for some reason I can't think about carnivals without thinking about being 15 and bumming around with my baseball teammates. The names Andy Leap, Jovan Flemmons and Ronnie Russle (God, could I go on) don't mean a thing to many, but to me they are like diamonds in my back pocket. \nOn nights after games, we all would caravan out to the fairgrounds with 10 dollar bills. It was always muddy and smelled strongly of wild mint that grows in roadside ditches. Someone would have a can of cherry dip (tobacco, not candy) and no one was in love. We hadn't discovered cigarettes yet and those who did really didn't like them. The girls all shaved their legs and the second baseman would be getting stoned atop the ferris wheel. The sluggers would flirt and the shy would fawn. \nThis state is notorious for suffocating young kids with sports. Drill sargent parents herd off their young at ripe ages to these ridiculous sports camps that do nothing but provide coaches with summer spending money. The concept of having fun is replaced with a competitive, dog-eat-dog repertoire of ankle-biting and brown nosing.\nBut somehow, my baseball teammates and I never bought into that competitive filth. Maybe because on the field, we were the perennial untouchables. Because of that, we played every game like jesters and never took a strike-out too seriously. We were too enthralled -- or maybe it was just I -- with the post-game carnival. It promised us that neon freedom and french kissing by the demolition derby track. We were a posse of young romantics. I tip my cap to you guys, where ever you are.