When you write light pieces for a newspaper, eventually everything looks like a potential feature story.

Downtown is half covered with water? Good opportunity to jot down people’s thoughts about dampness. A nuclear weapon is about to go off nearby? At last, a chance to use the phrase “an afternoon high of 3,000 degrees.”

At the same time, there’s a danger that other people’s enjoyments can become your drudgery. And that’s how the Iowa State Fair lost its charm for me.

Sure, it’s easy to enjoy the fair when you’re young and you haven’t been there often enough to realize that it’s the same show every year. Exactly the same moderately interesting stuff. Every. Single. Year.

Apparently this doesn’t bother most people, and to them the fair always feels like a party. But when you spend a steaming hot day scampering around the fairgrounds as deadline looms, trying to decide whether to write about the weed identification contest or a guy who’s displaying a lock of Abraham Lincoln’s hair, you get frazzled.

The next time, you get discouraged.

And finally, like an Iowa teenager on her second trip to Paris, you get jaded.

From that point on, the livestock barns seem less like a charming throwback to the days of family farming and more like a desperate plea for self-cleaning concrete. Over in the Agriculture Building, its tables full of competing foodstuffs, you wonder if a judge really can tell the difference between this jar of kernels and that one. Maybe he’s controlled by powerful interests who wouldn’t hesitate to place a severed ear of corn in his bed.

It’s amazing, the enduring popularity of our fair — and lots of other state fairs, for that matter. We have lost interest in drive-in double features and ballroom dancing, and we’re not all that crazy about circuses and bowling anymore. But we keep traipsing through the Varied Industries Building, which is like watching a series of infomercials with people bumping into you.

We sit, sweaty and exhausted, listening to bands that we would instantly click past on television.

At its pure, quaint heart, the fair is about the competition among common folks. It’s nostalgic, it’s admirable, and it really gets interesting if you or your kids are involved. But when it’s some stranger’s peach pie or chess match, a lot of the drama drains away.

After all, we are the most thoroughly and professionally entertained civilization in history. Maybe you can still get a thrill out of watching a horseshoe match, but you can’t help thinking that every so often something should explode.

On the other hand, the lemonade is terrific. The giant slide has aged well. There’s still an abundant supply of interesting characters to watch.

To be fair, a day at the State Fair is never as bad as the time the editor sent me to the fairgrounds to write about Lollapalooza. Now there was an event that combined the hygiene of the swine barn with the refinement of the guy in the midway dunk tank.

But I only had to go once.