Freaks

I love freaks but I cannot really appreciate them like people once did. There aren't any real "freak shows" any more where human oddities are on display. You have pretenders like the "Jim Rose Circus Side Show". I'm sorry but a guy dangly lead weights from his testacles is not the same as a boy with flipper feet. Human oddities are delegated to spot appearances on Maury Povich. It gets them exposure but it hardly provides a living like it once did.

It is early October and the radio is filling with ads for haunted houses. If I had the time and money (I have neither) I would like to have an old fashioned carnival freak show during the Fall season. I want carnival barkers in top hats luring in passersby. I want dog faced boys. I want living skeletons. I want pickled punks, mummified mermaids, and pinheads. I want to have geeks biting the heads of chickens. It would be splendid!

There is quickly coming a time when such huge variations in humanity will be erased. Is it wrong to appreciate them while they are still around?

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Unrelated: I burned a ream of paper and printed out my novel. Being able to hold it and feel its weight makes it seem more real then when it had existed as a Word document. I'm going to let Rebekah read it and give me her 2 cents. I'm dedicated the novel to three people. One has read it, one will read it soon, one may never read it. In her column this month Jeanette Winterson talks about how it takes a while to become detached from a book you have written. During the writing you invest so much of yourself it is hard to look at it objectively or see it as something seperate from you. That's where I'm at now. It needs to be edited, badly, but now is not the time. I really need to look at it again in a few months and see what I think.