I’ve never had that snug sense of pride in my hometown, a place so beige and indifferent that it made me sick, but I still lack the prose to describe the relief I felt crossing back into Ohio that day. Never did I think I’d beg to be dropped into such dull tones again, but the utter atonality I experienced in Jackson left me just short of exiting my car and kissing the sweet, GMO-saturated Ohio soil.

I may sound stuck up, maybe even bigoted, but I was rather patient that day, trying desperately to cling to any respectful foundation as the events of the day took large chunks of it, leaving excess teeth and cigarette butts in their wake. I really didn’t want to flee Jackson, at the beginning of the day, at least.

Hell, I was even excited to have a day off of work and check out the handful of record stores on that street, but it seems that the God of Chaos I first encountered in Ann Arbor saw how content I was and vowed to show me some more of his “monsters.” He certainly didn’t disappoint, and I’d be remiss not to acknowledge how subtly he let the “Devil’s Rejects” of Jackson grow in number and intensity.

Upon arrival, the first jarring observation I made was that the street in town was abandoned, save for an elderly man sitting at a bench and facing an outside patio of a small restaurant, not quite 5 feet away from the nearest occupied table, absent-mindedly staring at the customers and blowing through cigarettes like they were Tic Tacs.

I’ll never forget his pink, bulbous eyes that nearly fell from his skull, seemingly unable to blink and the cloud of cigarette smoke that hung over him like rain on a bad day, but I was able to shake this one off. Maybe I was being judgmental then, but in retrospect, I understand that this wrinkled nicotine addict was the first of many monstrosities.

The next omen, to my disappointment, was the record shop. I mention most of the people I see worthy of writing about as subhuman, which is heartless, I know, but necessary to explain my level of paralysis and revulsion upon first seeing them. The man running the record store told a different, much sadder story, though I wasn’t certain of the details, nor would I dare ask. Walking through the door of the store, I was greeted by dim lighting, a single shelf of merchandise, and a dirty loveseat in the center of the place.

It was immediately claustrophobic, and I found myself inspecting the couch, sweatshirt and socks littered at its feet, and framed family pictures and worrying that I set foot in somebody’s house on accident. I was confirmed to be in the right place when a near whimper interjected my thoughts, “Can I help you find anything?”

I looked around to see a grey, bearded man with a stained Fleetwood Mac t-shirt staring at me with the watery eyes of a lost puppy. I think I smiled and politely declined, but I’m also almost certain that the man made me jump, and if I jumped, he certainly saw it. I didn’t know what happened in this man’s life, but it’s hard not to blame the unstable Jacksonians I would see later, assuming he was born and raised here.

This may have been my fate as well, had I been born in Jackson, as the surreal characters stumble their way into reality, I could see myself losing all hope the way the he seemed to have. With this in mind, I sifted generously through the measly selection of records he had to offer, determined to buy something and keep his ghost business moving. I went up to his counter with a dusty, scratched Beatles record in hand.

What he said during the transaction was the wisest thing I heard all day, as it told more of his disillusionment than any timeline could. “Make sure not to leave this in the hot sun, or it’ll warp over time.”

It occurs to me now that I’m leaving out significant points of this trip, but that’s because I didn’t experience them firsthand. This was, in fact, a family trip, which should explain the urgency to entertain my two small siblings later on, and the most haunting detail that day left on me, though I wasn’t there to see it. Apparently, when I was wallowing in the old record store clerk’s sadness, lost in my thoughts and far secluded from the streets, my mom’s purse was nearly stolen by a toothless pedestrian. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one invoking the God of Chaos’ wrath that day, but he’d soon give up on sending one distorted reject at a time, and lead my family into a cesspool of teen pregnancy, drug-addicted clowns, and unruly Christian funhouses.

What attracted us to Jackson, of all places, was some hot air balloon fair. I remember what it was supposed to be poorly because I didn’t care enough, at the time. But there we were, walking into the attraction, and the image itself was enough to give me just as terrible a feeling as the record store.

The place was a field of dead grass and occasional pieces of litter, but the townies had crawled from whatever shack they inhabited, blew up balloons, set up small shops and barbeques and transformed their village wasteland into a cheap circus that drew in the vilest of characters, coming in waves of body odor and brown teeth into the one place they understood, a place that reeked of food and bright colors. What else could be more fitting for brains smothered by alcohol and the magic smell of gasoline?

Contrary to the release of hot air balloons promised online- It terrifies me to this day that at least one of these Spaghetti Western atrocities had access to a computer- the pinnacle of the makeshift circus was giant blue tent, surrounded by rusty metal fences. This area was titled the “Kids’ Play Place” and funded by a local church, though it was a sorry excuse for fun. The local church had scrounged up enough money to purchase — or rent, which is likely given the unreliability of the equipment — an array of inflatable playthings, subdividing each object into little stations supervised by a middle-aged, blue church T-shirted zealot staring at his phone.

When I followed my family into this Stephen King-style funhouse, I turned to my right, and watched an unattended little boy pick up an inflatable basketball and bounce it twice, before a supervisor looked up from his phone and leered at the boy with a hatred so rich you could cut a chunk of it from the air around him, and belted out a single “Enough!” while dragging his index finger across his neck. The boy simply walked away, miraculously not showing a hint of emotional trauma. That was too much. I had to sit down.

Luckily, or so I thought, a row of metal chairs was located right behind me, and not a single one was in use, so I sat down, examined the record I had just bought, and nearly forgot all of the incidents of the past few hours. But the God of Chaos wasn’t finished with me. No, he had been merely toying with me before, I realized as I heard the ground rattle beneath my feet, the tremors getting closer to me each time.

Finally, from the corner of my eye, I watched as a hulking, toothless woman dressed in a shirt that clenched to her torso, but was failing with his gaping, fishlike inhale she took, expanding a ribcage that couldn’t afford to expand any further, shuffled in my direction, gasping for breath and covered in a slippery, July-induced film. Though there were countless empty seats, she decided to back herself into the one directly beside mine and spent a good five-or-so minutes heaving in my direction. What expelled her gaping mouth was olfactory assault in its purest form, a smell which caused me to ponder the ability to leave my own body in order to escape it.

She then turned away from me, allowing me to take some not-so-subtle breaths of the air only half polluted with more distant tones of sweat and breath, to face a small tribe of kids. These kids all varied in age and color and were all dressed in Disney pajamas, so I was able to deduce that they spawned from the toad woman next to me, though she spoke to them with the intensity of a drill sergeant. It didn’t occur to me until I left that I was staring at this family with no attempt at hiding it, but I don’t think they were at all aware of my present, as the one looked in my direction a few times, but seemed to look through me rather than at me, the notion of which chills my bones to this day.

It was during this prolonged period of staring that one of the kids had informed her mom of her son’s behavior. I didn’t know what exactly this kid was doing that stirred his family so much, nor did I know of this son’s existence whatsoever, but something was going wrong here, something this woman felt obligated to put to an end. I was still confused when the woman began turning purple, but the urgency of the situation revealed itself when she quietly but sternly told her children to “get Bill.”

The group of pajama minions rushed off, save for one, who clung to her leg, paralyzed in a fear only the most grotesque of Lovecraft incarnations can instill in the human heart. The mom then turned in that direction, a direction I was too afraid to look toward myself, and the sweat on her body simmered from her eggplant-colored face. “Bill!” She screamed, causing me to jump and look again to cocked eyes that continued to look through me. My heart had endured so much today, but this lady’s intensity was certainly putting its integrity to the test. What she said next screeched through her vocal chords like tires against the asphalt in the face of collision.

Three words, among all others, that I’ll never be able to shake no matter how hard I try to repress them: “He’s hittin’ kids!” There they were, but they read my mind as one command: RUN.

And run I did, away from these forsaken carnival, away from Jackson and back into the comforting arms of boring, rural Ohio. I’ll never be one to accept the monotony of my home state, nor do I plan to settle into the meaningless existences it nurtured and housed, but I’ll always choose this environment over the Rob Zombie inspired ghost town of Jackson, Michigan.