It’s State Fair time here in Florida!

Yes, you can tell by the rickety, glowing carnival rides barely standing upright on the horizon, the rapid spike in sales of antacids at surrounding convenience stores, and the ever-lingering stench that only the equivalent of roughly eight million farm animals with digestive problems could strive to produce, that everybody’s favorite deep-fried festival is back in town for a slothy two weeks of the kind of fun that only a cow eating a corndog on a rollercoaster could ever truly appreciate. But of course, for $35 admission and ride tickets plus as much cash as you’re willing to spend on your deep-fried meals, you’re more than welcome to try!

It’s almost hard to believe that they wouldn’t want to hire me for a PR position, isn’t it?!

I’ve got to admit that I’m not really the biggest fan of state fairs in general, as I tend to see them more as what the Magic Kingdom might look like if Disney were to abandon the park and allow it to be overrun by vagrants than a destination for family fun and good times. There’s just something about being crammed into a steel cage and spun around in a circle at 40 mph by a guy with only three teeth and a half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort that just isn’t exactly along the lines of what I would call recreational, at least as much as I likewise wouldn’t consider having my appendix removed or getting four simultaneous root canals to be a good time that I’d look forward to again year after mind-numbingly-painful year. And it’s not that I can’t appreciate the thrills, chills, and more often than not biological spills that carnival rides have to offer, but…well, actually – yes, that’s exactly it. No matter how many people step off The Eviscerator smiling and laughing, their heads and limbs still basically intact, there simply isn’t enough alcohol this side of Las Vegas to make that a consensual act for yours truly.

But you’ve got to hand it to those ingenious fair organizers, even despite their whimsical deathtraps and colorful brain slingshots, because even if you find yourself like me, ravishingly handsome and charismatic and funny as hell, and yet still embarrassingly afraid of heights, drops, and all things destined to revert one’s insides promptly to the out position, they’ve managed to offer another way to decimate yourself without your ever even leaving the ground … and I don’t even mean by getting trampled in a rampant cow stampede! The answer, my fat-bellied friends, lies beneath several gallons of boiling hot oil…

If there’s one lesson to be learned from the State Fair, besides the importance of washing one’s hands after leaving the restroom, that is, is that given enough batter and disregard for the human figure, you can deep fry just about anything, which is great for anyone who has either already given up their New Years resolution to lose weight or even is just waiting for that last sugary confection to finally push them over the top and thus bring them back down to Earth here with all the rest of us quitters! Twinkies, Oreos, candy bars, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, even corndogs … which I suppose is kind of redundant when they’re already covered in a layer of fried dough, but then again is there even such a thing as too much fried dough?! Points in case – deep-fried Pepsi, elephant ears, funnel cakes – they’re not even bothering to put anything in the batter anymore!

And we wonder where the term fat Americans comes from…

Still, whether it be for curiosities sake or simply a desire for heart attacks, once you step foot inside those hay-covered gates, there’s really nothing you can do to resist the urge to fry it up, even if only a little. And I guess as long as you’re not one of those professional deep-frying aficionados who also deep-frys food stuffs unknown in the privacy of your own home, what’s one little super-caloric Oreo going to do to you that three or four hundred laps around the track can’t work off?! I’m pretty sure the human body is built with extra arteries for just this sort of thing anyways, so embrace those deep-fried delicacies for all that they’re worth – besides, even at 3,000 calories and 28 million grams of fat per deep-fried Milky Way bar, it’s still gotta be safer than taking a whirl on The Paralyzer…