journal; the record of a passage through days.  It has been a while since I recorded anything, though the days have not stopped passing.  Nigh on two months now since I quit the job which, by the time I left, had become my only social life.  Now I post mundane, meaningless things to my blog which is very similar to my view of life— mundane and meaningless.  After I got out of bed (about 1:30 PM) I posted a link to some pretty good writing I did once, entitled 'incomplete suicide'.  Then I noticed a call on my caller ID; the ringer on the phone is shut off, but it was John, and he had just called, so I called him back. 

He's going to Florida this week for a couple days.  He said there's a big brush fire there, and it has closed I-95.  Realizing I have not seen any news for weeks, I went to CNN's website, which informed me that Isreal has a new government coalition, and that eighteen year old Florida State linebacker Devaughn Darling dropped dead after an early morning workout with his team.  I went to the story about the eighteen year old.  I continued chatting with John.  I noticed in a sidebar to the Florida State story that Dale Earnhardt had been killed. 

I recalled that Kathie, a former co-worker, had been quite upset one day when a racecar driver had been killed.  That must be Dale, I thought, and since Dale's death was obviously recent, then the day Kathie was upset must have been only shortly before I quit, which was in the first week of January.  But why, I wondered, is the story still in the news almost 2 months later?  The story I saw today was about events after his death, and didn't contain any information about the date of his death.  Journalism does not inform, it merely entertains those already informed.  But no, said John— who is one of the informed— and told me that Dale was only just killed last week.  That information, combined with my remarkably swift and fallacious reasoning, raised in my mind the burning question, 'So who was the race car driver killed in January?' 

"Bye John," I said eventually, but I continued to persue news of the mystery January racecar death.  Along the way I watched video of Dale's crash and discovered that Dale Jr. had a crash very similar to his father's and had to withdraw from his first race since the tragedy of his father's last race.  And I discovered that Devaughn Darling had a twin brother who was also a teammate, who was there when he collapsed— who could not stop crying at the hospital. 

I kept going back, searching stories from earlier and earlier, even back to October, looking for the racecar driver's death that seemed only weeks ago to have so shaken Kathie.  I found another article about how Dale Sr.'s seatbelt had let-go (I thought the crash was kinda mild by NASCAR standards— others have walked away from far worse.)  Then somewhere I saw the name Petty— I realized it was Richard Petty's grandson who'd been killed, and that's what had been so upsetting to Kathie.  And it had happened in May. 

Adam Petty, age 19, was killed during practice laps in Loudon, New Hampshire on Friday May 12, 2000.  Over nine months ago, Kathie walked in to the crazy admitting office after a break and told everyone how upset she was at the losses suffered by this family of racecar drivers she liked so much.  Adam's great-grandfather, Lee Petty, had died only weeks earlier.  In my distorted memory, it all seems to have happened only weeks ago. 

 i posted a link to my excessively whiney journal entry, 'incomplete suicide'.  Then, realizing how self-absorbed I am, and as a result feeling a little cut-off from the world, I went to CNN to find news about a brush fire in Florida.  Instead, I found news of a young athlete's tragic death which, coincidentally, was in Florida.  That led me to news of a racing legend's death which, coincidentally, was in Florida at the Daytona 500.  Which I confused with news of another tragedy, which disturbed a friend, which I vaguely remembered from the chaos of my workplace, as if it were a brightly colored piece of food glimpsed and recognized, then lost in a blender's turbulence. 

I was feeling a little depressed that I could so easily misplace nine months, without even missing it, so I checked my weblogs to see who might have been visiting my website.  That's consoling— as long as someone has visited.  I found one person had been there, and he came from this link.  He was searching for pages that have the word 'memberservices' in them.  Result number 19 is one of my pages; number 20 is a page titled 'Dale Earnhardt'.  This was pure out-of-the-cosmos coincidence. 

After only eighteen years of life, Devaughn is gone; his twin's grief is unknowable tonight.  Nineteen year old Adam Petty has been gone for almost a year, and though I heard the news promptly, you could say I just realized it.  Dale Jr. is twenty-six years old; for him it is nowhere near over. 

So what do I have to whine about?  Maybe being dead is better than being alive; like everybody says, they're in a better place.  So why aren't we happy to see them finish-up and go?  Why do I wish they were all still here, still ...incomplete, like me? 

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