Three days. It takes three days of eating french fries and elephant ears and hot dogs- of paying grossly inflated carnival prices- before I give in and get in line for ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster.’ And it’s not even the food, really. I’ve survived on worse diets for longer stretches of time for no better reason than poor mental health. At the end of three days, it’s the music that does me in.
‘It’s a bit of a misnomer to call it ‘The Inevitable Carnival’ just because it’s home to ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster.’ The fact of the matter is that a traveler need not interact with any part of the enterprise but the rollercoaster in order to escape. It’s easier to pay for tickets and stand in line than it is to, say, sneak through the grounds and commandeer the ride, but there seems to be no standing obligation to be lawful in one’s actions in order to find one’s way out of the quantum looping carnival-shaped phenomenon that can be said to exist both everywhere and nowhere at once.
For the sake of describing it however, we’ll say that ‘The Inevitable Carnival’ appears like any other traveling carnival one might spot on the horizon, all flickering lights and tinkling music. There, at the center, is ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster,’ which stands much taller and spreads much more widely than any mobile rollercoaster should. Once one spies ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster,’ it becomes impossible to leave its outskirts. Practically, this means every road and highway will loop back around to the carnival grounds, reappearing on the forward horizon as soon as it’s disappeared from behind. The cycle is broken only after riding ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster’ and with no particular fanfare. In fact, riding anything else afterwards feels like an anti-climax.’
The thing is that I hate roller coasters and really all carnival rides. I get motion sick in the back of cars and on boats in anything but the stillest waters. I get extra motion sick on carnival rides and the sickness, there, is so much more public. So, while Day 1 at ‘The Inevitable Carnival’ can be reasonably written off as me doing my due diligence in confirming the inevitability of it all. The following two days are dread and hard-headedness and unceasing carnival music which rides the wind to my camp at the furthest point of the loop, where I can look every direction and see ‘The Inevitable Rollercoaster’ towering in the distance.
At the end of the third day I smuggle Hector into one of the little rollercoaster carts and when I warn the ride operator that I sometimes get sick she puts me in the back, saying that the ride goes fast enough that I’m unlikely to vomit forward with enough force to spray even the person in front of me- that, if I know what’s good for me, I’ll turn my head to keep from choking on throw-up that hangs in my esophagus, caught between the momentum of the coaster and the strength of my stomach contractions.
It’s the best advice I’ve received in a long time.
-traveler
