As it happened, one day I was driving from my apartment in Boulder down to Colorado Springs to visit family, and on the way passed a truck advertising the carnival. My girlfriend said (playfully) that we should go to it, and I (equally playfully) agreed, assuming that we would never actually go. As the week went on I found myself in Boulder again discussing the carnival with my roommate and girlfriend. The three of us decided that we should gather all available friends and make a night of it.

As the night approached I let slip that, though I considered myself an amusement coinsurer, I had never truthfully been to a carnival. This was met with laughs and promises that I would love the experience. I was assured that not only were they cheap but that the atmosphere would erase my cares about the impending semester at college.

We made the pilgrimage to the carnival grounds and two things became painfully apparent: First that almost nobody else in the city desired to go to a carnival, and second that the entire arrangement looked like a demented bet. Allow me to explain:

First off, the cost to purchase a wristband and ride whatever we wanted, as much as we wanted was fifteen dollars. That is not an unfair price, however there were only about seven rides total and none looked all-too reliable. In all actuality it would probably be cheaper to simply ride everything once and leave it at that. But our group was there for the long haul and therefore bought wristbands.

Next piece of the wager: the food stand. It smelled delicious; the corn dogs and chili fries, the cotton candy and funnel cakes, the huge sodas and fresh squeezed lemonade, it was all so… beckoning. More over, it was all so expensive, five dollars for the medium coke, another five for the chili fries. And to round it all out, six dollars for the funnel cake.

Now that our group was wrist-banded up and stuffed with enough fried and processed food make Ronald McDonald himself shudder, it was time to enjoy the rides. And this is where the bet really kicks in. You, the carnival patron, are betting the carnies that you can keep all that food down and still have the will to pry every cent out of the over priced wrist bands. Just like any Vegas casino dealer or New York hustler the carnie stacks the odds in his favor. Whether the ride is a demented wheel which only uses centrifugal force to keep the rider plastered to his spot on the wall or a simple (yet equally demented) tea cup ride, nearly everything is designed to make one feel dizzy, nauseous, and disoriented. My favorite example of this was the psychotic love child of a roller coaster and a Farris wheel named “The Ring of Fire,” wherein the rider is perpetually stuck in a giant loop.