Summer festival season approaches, and I greet it with equal parts twittering anticipation and cringing dread. I adore county and state fairs with a passion equal to my loathing for Burning Man and Renaissance Faires. Civil War Reenactments? Love. A circle of humans, drumming? Haaaate.

I will let other, more deft people articulate my bad feelings.

Evany’s comments about Burning Man are spot on. Witness:

The “vacation individuality” thing that Burning Man represents to me, the sort of binge approach to personal expression, just kind of freaks me out. It comes off feeling too forced, too self-conscious, and even a little frantic, like, We have to jam a whole year’s work of naked bike riding and polyamory into just one week? Fuck! Where’s the hell is my silver makeup??? My nippleless vegan-leather bra? My car lovingly modified into a gigantic COCK? Because we need to MOTOR! Stat! The clock is TICKING!

Reid over at something awful really really dislikes the Renaissance Faire:

The one thing that is most abundant at a Renaissance festival is unbridled sass. Every hired drama student/sandwich engineer that works at the festival belts out personal insults at the passerby so they feel like they are really living in the Renaissance. I know if I spend $10 to get in, I expect a thorough sassing and will demand a refund unless I get called a “scrawny freckled rapscallion” at least 5 times during the course of the day. Words were harsher in those times, and it toughened your hide so you could withstand arrows and vampire bites. Feelings are for 21st century wimps.

And Hey Skinny dishes out a short and breathtaking dish of vitriol about BM:

What else do you call a highly organized ‘happening’ but a catastrophuck.

Of course, with my eternal terror of being abandoned and/or rejected, I now backpedal furiously and say Hey! Live and let live, man! I mean, I do short-form improv, for pity’s sake.

You go! Go over there! Let your cah-razy self run free! I’ll sit over here and eat funnel cakes and ogle carnies at the Ventura County Fair. Different sides, same oversized novelty coin.