joy riding.
i already told my little brother i'd murder him myself if i found out he ever did this.
four stupid freshman at my school went out in the middle of the night on friday and got in an insane car accident and two died, one automatically, the other was in the hospital and was completely brain dead so they pulled the plug, and the driver and other passenger are in critical condition.

there was supposed to be a 5th passenger which was one of my regular customers daughter, who i met during interviews for the center for art which i go to, just last week. luckily her mom caught her sneaking out.

richmond has been so depressing within the first two months of the year.

also, my friend died of heart failure in his bed this morning.

i don't know. i wasn't sure if anyone had heard about this or if it was just local news. the sick thing is that the four stupid kids in the wreck will get tons of coverage but will david (heart failure) get any coverage? not that it's important it just doesn't seem fair.
there was a huge gathering at the intersection where the crash happened, but i highly doubt there will be a large gathering at davids house to pray for his family members and to give hope to one another.. except for after the funeral.


i hate shit like this. people glorified the death of the 2005 graduate of my high school who killed himself last month, but i'm sure there won't be some myspace support group for david who died of natural causes.

sorry.
i'll stop ranting. but i think it's really important to talk about how you'll personally murder your child/sibling if they're young and don't have any business being in a car with someone who isn't supposed to be driving, or doing it themselves. i think a lot of people think that their parental job is done once they talk about the dangers of drinking, smoking, and not enaging in safe sex, but they don't address problems such as this. i know my parents never talked to me about it. of course i always had common sense and never did it. i knew if i couldn't drive while i was 14, 99% of the other 14 year olds couldn't.

school is going to be depressing tomorrow. i care about the deaths of the freshman, but i didn't personally know any of them but one, through my friend.. the only death that really affected me is the one of david.

sofar.. in my high school alone, i think there have been 5 godwin related deaths in the new year that i know of.
4 kids, one father of a guy i know, that killed himself.

life is so fragile. give someone a hug.

It's terrible that this happened, but I'm sorry, I don't see the problem with joy riding as long as they weren't driving intoxicated. A collision can happen just as easily joy riding as it can on a trip to the grocery store. You're taking a chance either way.

Joyriding is more likely to be lethal because you tend to be driving really fast. So yeah...don't do it'n'stuff.

She means joyriding when the driver's 14 years old.

When I went joy riding back in the day, it was in my friend's Chevy van and we were just cruising and listening to music. And looking for girls (hey, we were lame). It had nothing to do with speeding, or trying to race anyone. I guess I just see it differently.

yeah i mean joy riding when you have no business driving. and not driving really fast.

they are fucking retards. the car is mangled.

Joy Riding here is basically stealing a car and then driving it around really fast, trying to get the Police to chase you. Afterwards if you don't write it off, you burn it out on some waste ground.

To be honest, I don't have much sympathy when they kill themselves but all to often they take innocent people with them.

Sorry about your friend, David.

Yeah the other kind is called toolin' or cruisin' or motorin'.

That's odd, because there were two accidents this weekend that killed four teenagers here this weekend.

I have no beef with kids riding around being kids, but Maryland does have a law prohibiting new drivers from toting other non-family minors as passengers for the first 5 months of the provisional period.

I know I wasn't a great driver at 16-17, but in general we weren't too crazy. I'm not real enthusiastic about all the legislation aimed at teen drivers under the assumption that they are too stupid, naive or inherently irresponsible to handle automobiles. I think the bigger problem is that their driving habits are most influenced by their idiot parents, not radios or teen passengers.

school is so annoying today.
people who werent even associated with the kids are pretending to be sad. people are scared to be happy. hell, i'm not going to pretend i'm not happy because i am in a good mood and though the deaths are sad they honestly do not affect my well being at all. besides davids.

it's sad, but could have been prevented if they weren't stupid.

What kind of car?

It was because of this shit that my friend and I made our funeral pact in high school. When one of us dies, the other will operate as a doorman of all funeral activities, and we will prohibit any memorial crashers or people we didn't like from entering.

Sorry to hear about your friend David. Heart-failure in someone your age (I assume) - was he aware of any heart issues, or is this completely out of the blue. Maybe you should let some local news stations know about this - this is one of those heart-wrenching stories the like to air and it might help get some donations for his family, who can probably use the help with funeral expenses, etc.

In stupid driving-related news, a minivan with THIRTEEN people in it rolled over on the highway yesterday just outside of town, killing two people - one of which was a baby. Guess what? The baby was sitting on someone's lap. What the hell is wrong with people? I guess when you're carting around 12 of your closest, it's real hard to make room for that carseat. I mean, what's the likelihood that something would go wrong, right? Kid's are perfectly safe sitting, unrestrained, on a lap. They're small and resilient, and in an accident they'll just tumble out of the car unharmed, right? It just makes me sick.

People deal with grief differently. It's perfectly natural to take on a tribal mentality and sympathize for those who lost their lives whether you knew them or not.

high school is so unyieldingly weird.

yeah, i guess.
i mean, i know.. but the sort of shit that makes me angry is, well for instance.. the kid who graduated last year who was a huge dick to everyone but his close and "popular stoner friends", well he killed himself and kids took it upon themselves to make a stupid myspace support group where a ton of people who didn't even know him joined and left stupid bulletins talking about how they saw him in the hallway and thought he looked nice, and though any death is sad these people share these "memoirs" thinking they even are memories even though they shared no real significant memory with the deceased.
it's just annoying. it's the sort of "i borrowed a pencil from them once" sort of stories that people tell to make them look in with the person, but if the person hadn't had died then they would have never bragged about the story.
that bothers me.
just say "it's sad, it's affecting those who surround me and that's sad, but besides that it doesn't affect me" and let life live on.

who are you to say how people should react?

it's shocking when anyone young dies if they are a huge dick or not. I know lots of huge dicks who eventually became great people, or who at the very least were friends with great people. It's sucks when anyones life is cut short, and even more shocking when they die at such a young age for such a stupid reason.

just let people deal with it the way they deal with it and live your own life.

that's what i'm doing.
i'm just merely commenting on what i think is stupid.
he was a dick. i didn't say i was glad he was dead.

We had a member of the football team top himself during his senior year (one year ahead of yours truly). I became quite the pariah when my response was, "too bad, he was an ass-hole".

I'm really sorry to hear about all of this, it's pretty insane.

I had a fairly good friend of mine die suddenly from a brain anerism a year after we graduated from high school. It's a pretty insane thing to deal with.

14 year olds randomly taking out cars and speeding when they can't even drive is just totally insane. I don't even know what to say about that except that it is very sad.

Take care Cemetary P.


(I realize I've over-used the word insane here, but it's the only word that seems to describe this stuff)

I was the "designated driver" as a freshman in high school. Granted, it was in the sticks of PA on roads where I've never seen a cop (and this is in more than 25 years of living memory).

Driving a '72 Malibu with four of five wasted summer job co-workers through twisting hilly roads was insane fun at the time. Pretty stupid in hind-sight, but teenagers are generally stupid. At least I kept it out of the trees.

CP. I think I can understand where you're coming from. Especially in light of this overshadowing someone who actually went through and dealt with something real.

I suppose the deaths in the car accident, although very saddening, is easily viewed as justice or something for doing something very dangerous. However, your friends heart failure puts him more in the innocent category. He didn't do anything and passed away, those kids were doing something silly and dangerous and died.

I think I would probably not be running around joking as though nothing was different if some people I went to school with and didn't know died. It's sad either way and honestly I think it may be good that these people are feeling sad because this may communicate to them that life is pretty fragile sometimes. When you're 14,15,16,17,18 and so on, until you're probably middle-aged, you tend to feel like you have forever. A death like this can be a reality check. Maybe this experience will offer some greater knowledge to the next batch of 14 year olds that want to go joyriding.

When I was 20 I was working in The Outer Banks in N.C. One of my friends was a beach life-guard out there and on his spare time he would fly those little planes that carted the advertisements in back of them. When landing you have to pass over the runway and unhook the sign then circle around and come in for the landing. When he unhooked the sign he pulled up and the plane stalled. He flipped over and the plane crashed and landed upside down. He died from this accident. When everyone heard about this, even people that did not know him, just were horrified. It had very little to do with the manner in which he died but more so with the fact that he was no longer living. I think that may be something similar to what the kids in your school are feeling. The context of death has very little to do with the sad reaction only because most people recognize death as being awful regardless of how they died.

The thing that got me about my friend and the plane was the media attention. I was kind of pissed because they decieded to play his final communication with the airport and the last thing he said was, "Oh god, I'm gonna die". Now, that is horrible in and of itself, but they played it over and over and over again on the local news. I absolutely HATE the local news. I would rather there have been no media attention because they have the tendency to exploit these deaths rather than actually honor the people that died or even show respect for them.

yeah, I was really horrified by the Harvey family murders though I didn't know them.. and I felt connected through my connections with friends and family members. So I get what you're saying.

It doesn't seem the same as when someone boasts about how they glanced at eachother in the hallway.
I understand being emotionally touched or hurt or confused, but the way that people boast about meaningless encounters bothers me.

No, she's right. I remember in high school when something tragic happened. It's not the tribal mentality -- I got no problem with that. It's when the drama queens try to out-suffer each other. O woe is me! O woer is me! Blah blah blah, shut up, they didn't even know him. I think they were just trying to get out of school.

I remember these type as well. It seemed they were more concerned with being "in character" than the actualy reality of the situation.

Most eople---God bless 'em---just don't have a clue how to react to these kinds of things. Upon hearing I had lost my father as a child a new friend of mine in high school (3 years after the fact) began crying in the hallway. I ended up being the one to comfort her.

She also decided to perform a lip-synch version of "the Living Years" in theatre class and dedicate it to me. Even though the song is about wishing you had told you father you loved him before he died---which wasn't even nearly the case in my situation.

Ah, well-meaning but soooo painfully off base.