Oh, The Things You Can Fry

Yes, it is truly amazing the sheer number of fryable things out there. Indeed, I plan in the near future to compose a short ode dedicated to this theme. My muse will be the Puyallup Fair*. My afternoon trip there will be my research.

The Puyallup Fair is Western Washington's largest fair. It has all the things a fair should--4H cats languishing (or at least hiding in litter boxes) in diorama displays, chickens with inexplicable feather growths, people pretending to be cowboys (you know, the ones who call into country stations from Bellevue with a deep southern twang that's as real as their September tans), Royal Canadian Mounted Police prancing about on Canadian horses to peppy Canadian music, rabbits contemplating heart attacks because they don't even have a litterbox to hide in, tremendous pumpkins, arbitrarily judged floral displays, enough moving, blinking, "musical" rides to send me into a blithering state of sensory overload and, above all, fried foods.

Now, I'm not talking about just any fried foods--though, of course, those were there too. I'm talking about "see-it-to-believe-it" fried foods. My co-worker, her husband and I were on a mission. We searched, we asked, we scoured. Following rumors, hearsay and the smell of hot canola, we eventually found ourselves winding around the outskirts of the fairgrounds. There, in the twilight, we saw it, glowing like a shrine to all that is excessive and glutinous in America. Now, maybe it was wrong to support such a thing. I'll let you judge. Nevertheless, as we slowly walked home, exchanging fried twinkies, snickers and oreos**, a little bit of that Fair Glow followed us, and I could feel the end consonants dropping off words like years off my life.

Y'all come back now, y'hear, and don' be keepin' all those twinkies fer yerself...

*I will personally award a candybar to the non-Washingtonian who can phonetically describe the pronunciation of "Puyallup". Frying is optional, cheating is not.

**Not as amazing as fried pickles, granted, but still pretty stellar. Shout out to Bef for alerting me to this new pickle phenomenon. Gross, but I'd probably try it.