The rope ladder climb is arguably one of the most diabolical games; it looks like a test of strength and coordination, which is exactly what they want you to think. What it actually tests is whether you understand that the ladder has two anchor points at the bottom and one at the top, which means the physics are working against you from the moment you grab the first rung. The ladder will rotate every time.

Every. Time.

The only way to climb that rope ladder is to distribute your weight perfectly across opposite hands and feet simultaneously while moving in a slow and completely counterintuitive diagonal pattern for humans. You need to think (move) like a chameleon. Carnival operators sometimes hire a plant in the crowd to climb it successfully first, just to prove it can be done. It can be done—just not by you or me. I can keep going, list each game’s gaff and ruin all the fun, but let’s not.

Here’s the thing: People know things are rigged against them. You know, right? Of course you do. There’s a reason “carny” is now shorthand for a certain kind of cheerful dishonesty. The entire transaction is understood; you pay three bucks to play a game you very (VERY) likely can’t win, you get the thrill of alllllllllmost winning, and you go home. The carnival gets to keep chugging along. It’s a mutual fiction that both parties agree to. Vegas, diet culture—you can think of a million others.

Human beings are funky that way. We’ll walk straight toward a thing we know is rigged because the alternative, standing outside the fence, watching other people play, feels worse than losing. Hope, even purchased hope, often feels better than being left out. The carnival industry is built on that specific calculation, and they get it exactly right.

“Somebody’s gotta win, right?” People love that one. Does anyone ever respond, “Do they? Who says?” That’s what gets you to hand over another fiver and then another (and another…). Maybe I’m the exception.

I set my wee book in a carnival with a fortune teller and some paranormal doings because those are arguably rich and juicy sets for things that might also be true. The lines are blurred more often than we like. Or maybe that’s exactly what we do like.

The Fox sisters, who I want to discuss next, seemed to have understood this exceptionally well for their time. Those stakes were just considerably higher.

We took our time getting there, with a few stops along the way — including one to see dinosaur tracks near Tuba City on the Navajo Nation. If you haven’t been: the area is an ancient dry riverbed, or maybe a lake, without a clear beginning or end. You pull off the highway and it’s just there. No ticket booth, no marked parking lot, just seemingly endless flat land and a few plywood stands.

We’d read we didn’t need to be managed — that we could just walk around on our own — but when we pulled in, a man waved for us to park and introduced himself as Alvin, our guide. We decided to just go with it.

Alvin went Full Guide. He pointed out the tracks and told us, with passion and drama and considerable detail, exactly what had happened on the day these particular prints were made — and there are a lot of tracks. He also pointed out tracks made by a roster of dinosaurs I’m fairly certain never set foot in Utah: Velociraptor, T. rex, Giganotosaurus. I didn’t care. The nerdy eight-year-old in me was loving every second. Tell me more. What was this one. Where’s the poop. Honestly, I was in heaven.

Alvin had stamina. We stood in the 100° (dry, dryyy) heat while he told us about his Bigfoot sightings, his alien sightings, his lizard people transformation sightings, and the time he was abducted by aliens at the age of 12.

Heaven. Best road trip EVER. I tipped him well. Either he was sincere — in which case he more than earned his pay — or he was running a delightful con, in which case he more than earned his pay. Funland’s Maeve would absolutely have clocked Alvin in three seconds. At most.

Back in the car, Martha — who had been chugging water in the air conditioning and missed the finale — was eager to get Alvin’s dinosaur list in writing. She took a sharp right to see where he’d gone.

I didn’t realize she had driven onto the dry bed until the horrified wavings of the grandmas seated by the plywood stands caught my eye.

I screamed YOU’RE ON THE FOSSILS. Over and over. Martha SPED UP and KEPT DRIVING (how do you find the exit when there’s no entrance?), yelling that she was looking for Alvin, and I kept screeching THE FOSSILS, THE FOSSILS, utterly vaporlocked.

Alvin, for his part, had taken his tip and hauled ass.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. Unless you don’t want to.

Before all this, “midway” wasn’t really a thing. But after the Fair, the word took on a life of its own. People started using it to describe the amusement section at any county fair, circus, or festival — basically anywhere you’d find rides and cotton candy and someone trying to get you to throw a ring around a bottle. That usage stuck, and it’s been standard in the US and Canada ever since.

I’ve been writing about midways, one in particular, for long enough that I’m almost done. A novel with a weird mix of dark and funny and wrong (excuse me, I’m standing right here), Funland has allowed me to stay enmeshed in a make-believe carny / con artist subculture based on real carny / con artist subcultures, plus I just made up some stuff.

It started with my town’s annual midway. The idea, I mean. Every year in early July, this little traveling fair would appear on my high school’s football field in Lexington, Massachusetts. Like all kids pre-internet, I knew that was the place to be until it, oh, so heart-breakingly, packed up and moved on.

Decades later, I was back there with my then-little kids, peeling an old ice cream wrapper off the sole of my shoe or listening to the groaning bolts on the Merry, and I knew I wanted to set a story there. I’d get to indulge my love of midways (or “carnivals,” which you should probably say instead because no one knows what the hell you mean if you keep calling them “midways”), and I’d get to think about more than just how fun red and yellow striping is, or how insane it is to get into a Ferris Wheel with impulse control-challenged strangers, and how much even the most righteously faith-themed midway (they exist!) can’t completely scrub away the deliciously unsavory vibes. I’d get to write about how your chance of climbing that rope ladder is slimmer than the dime you threw — the one they know you licked first — and why it still bounced right out of the glass plate. And how there might be evil afoot, though maybe it’s just another con, and how, even after all these years, you still don’t know who to trust.

That last part’s mine.

I’m headed north to a writing retreat where I will ask clever, lovely strangers to tell me what I got right and what I got so, so wrong. If the workshopping goes well (if if if), I’ll be done with Funland at the end of June. Done enough to start querying agents, hat in hand.

If it doesn’t go well, well, I get to spend more time in Funland. That’s as close a win as you can get when all the games are stacked against you.

I’ve missed very few deadlines. The one that still makes me wince happened when I was working a FTE copywriting/editorial desk job that had me commuting an hour-plus each way and working as Managing Editor of Hooters magazine, and writing for MSN Entertainment. Oh, and my mom had just been diagnosed with lung cancer so I was taking off Fridays to drive 3 hours each way into the summer heat and fetid air of the central valley to be with her during chemo.

You get it.

Add in some hard drinking most nights to get to sleep (I know, right now you just want me to circle back to the Hooters thing. I will! This is my attempt to explain the name of this blasted thing.) and I missed a deadline for MSN and then panic-sent an unfinished word doc I thought was done. This is after I had pled my case that an article pitching a potential road trip series starring (2013’s) Paris Hilton and Kim Jong Un would be hysterically funny.

Reader, it was not.

I’ve missed two other deadlines, I think, once during my kid’s chicken pox run and once when I had the flu. Not bad for hustling as a hack for something like 25 years.

That leads me to my favorite writing quote by Douglas Adams, the gorgeously brilliant mind behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy six-book “trilogy.” The quote in question can be found in The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time:

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

So, hey. Here I am, currently on deadline, and doing this instead. I’m practically forcing the next whoosh.

This is a story place, not a monetizing place. There won’t be anything hidden behind a paywall. It’s like a blog if blogs were still a thing. Or, no, it’s like you’re driving along, listening to music and checking your texts, half an eye still on the road, whenever you think no cops are around, and then I pull up next to you at a red light to yell “Wanna read something weird?” as I throw a one-pager in through your open window.

-your pal, b