The Black Death Hits Shakopee

It showed 57 degrees last night at around 2am where I live. It's August.

Fuck.

A subtle reminder that the 3 weeks of normal weather that this state gets is basically over, and that Jack Frost is just around the next corner, breathing heavily and clutching his engorged prick; impatiently waiting to sodomize us in the cold, dark alley that is Minnesota.

He never even takes us to dinner and a movie first.

But it's pretty nice today. The A/C is off and the windows are open. And not once yesterday, did I mop my forehead and wonder what the fuck I was doing outside in Shakopee all day long. The Renaissance Festival was actually a good time, and I'm glad I was encouraged to go. It wasn't as serious and immersive as I remember it being in 1983. Maybe because it's harder to pretend these days. Technology has come a long way in 25 years, and it's got to be almost impossible to stay in character when your cell phone is buzzing with a text in your pocket and you're wondering if you can get wireless internet to check movie times when your shift is over. Half the people I talked to seemed to be from California, and by throwing enough laidback-isms at them ("dude", "awesome", "fuckin'", etc...), which is very natural for me, they softened and broke character. Talking to our rickshaw drivers about Throbbing Gristle and SPK kinda cemented it. It's too much, in 2008, to be able to suspend disbelief as much compared to a quarter-century ago. Seeing a dude in full leather armor with a 6 foot battle axe strapped to his back futzing with his iPhone kind of throws the whole thing askew.

But the turkey leg was good, the juggling/knife-throwing comedy act was better, and finding bottles of Irn-Bru (pronounced "Iron Brew") in the Scottish Highland Games area was the best. Dressed like Chinese immigrants, the two fellas pulling/pushing our rickshaw maneuvered us through a maze like corridor, and took us into the strangely quiet Scottish area, which was made up of the games field surrounded by plain ol' booths with white tents. A lot of dry, Scottish history stuff, the obligatory kilt booth, what I believed to be a Scottish Ministry of Tourism booth (?), and what I'll call the Happy Foreign Sugar Tent. Besides the wonderful orange colored, bubblegum flavored soda, they had Lilt (in my top 5 of favorite UK sodas), Ribena, Mars Bars (not that weird American almond shit), and some great Cadbury products. Best. Booth. Ever. (And along with my "Simpsons" riff, I should mention that one of the fire-eater's acts was called "Tastes Like Burning". What little Ralphie has to do with the Black Plague, I'm not entirely sure).

The moral is: sometimes you gotta try things a few times just to make sure you don't like them. Or do like them. I'm not sure which way it goes. I guess it depends on how you feel about knights with cell phones.