Anyone who has ever been to a county fair in the summer knows the exact moment when the festivities become a bit too much to handle.
Funnel-cake sugar has melted into both palms, turning your fingers into sticky little traps that make touching your own phone feel reckless. A warm gust carries the unmistakable musk of fresh manure out of the livestock pavilion. The Colorado sun is beating down with personal malice, and the jeans that seemed perfectly reasonable that morning have become a portable denim butt sauna.
You begin the long retreat toward the parking lot, dehydrated, defeated and prepared to abandon whatever blue-ribbon vegetable you had not yet admired.
Then, miraculously, you stumble across the Fair Garden. Someone places an ice-cold beer within reach of your gluey hands. A gritty blues riff rolls off of the stage, and you sit down, regain the will to live and remember that the county fair is supposed to be fun…