The crash

It's hard to understand just how something like this could happen, but once it does, you start wondering about the obvious stuff, like why do people line up on the street to watch a high-powered car kick up dust and take off like a slingshot into the distance?

It's such a senseless thing, really. Just a few minutes of loud thrills, Man showing his mastery of nature and machine and speeding around like the laws of physics don't apply to him (although they clearly do). But, you know, we all do senseless shit all the time. And no one ever really assumes it's going to get them killed.

It was all in good fun, and all for charity. (Incidentally, it's a charity I'm all too familiar with; my dad entered the Selmer Cars for Kids show many, many times when I was a kid. I spent many a Father's Day weekend sitting in a lawn chair beside his recently polished gold '73 Camaro, waiting for the judges to saunter by and take notes.) To know that something with such good intentions could go so horribly wrong is just awful. There's not much more you can say about it. Just awful.

So far, my family doesn't seem to know any of the victims. That sort of surprises me, actually. Selmer's not that big, and it's a mere 15 minutes from my parents' house (where I am sitting right now). But all six fatalities so far are young (between 15 and 22) and, while deaths like these are tragic no matter how old the victims are, it still just sort of makes it sting a little bit extra that so many young people's futures were snuffed out, just like that, on the side of the highway in Anytown, Tenn., during a moment of pure frivolity.