Lights & Motion

Tonight I was thinking about carnivals. I pulled into the parking lot of the Milford mall expecting darkness only to be faced with flashing lights and constant motion. The entire parking lot was illuminated by the neon lights of the carnival and I was intimidated to even get out of the car. People flowed in and out of the entrance as different sized mobs, and here I was with my father, moving awkwardly through the throngs of people and praying I would make it to the door unscathed. The inside of the mall was just as crowded and it aggravated me to the point where I bitterly contemplated why teenagers would choose to wander around parking lots and and a mall for a carnival they are not officially attending. I soon felt hypocritical because that's how myself and all of my friends are. Most people go to carnivals to hang out with their friends even though it would be easier, not to mention cheaper, if they hung out at someone's house...which logically makes no sense but in another sense it does. Carnivals are figuratively cut off from the rest of the world, an enclosed area where everything is flashing or in motion. Carnivals create an alternate reality where you are practically living in an animated world. The most bizarre aspect is that once it is gone...once the bright lights have been turned off and the overwhelmingly large rides have been cramped into boxes and loaded onto trucks...after the world slinks back into its normal gloomy atmosphere...after all of that, you would think people would long for that animated ecstacy only something completely fake could provide. But in reality, when I drive by the parking lot of the middle school where the carnival resides once a year...I cannot picture it. I cannot see the parking lot as it would be for those few days of the year, and when it is there, I can no longer envision the parking lot.
Is everything that interchangeable? Is joy that false and ephemeral?
Ephemeral, yes...false, sometimes.
The things that make us most happy are not things at all, really...
They are uncontrollable emotions that we wish could last forever.