Real life

 They'll be doing something pretty silly today up in Chicago, weather permitting. Bunch of wild boys will climb in muscled-up Toyotas and Chevies and Fords, and then they'll go blaring along Lakeshore Drive and Columbus Drive and Michigan Avenue like they don't have a lick of sense.

They'll bellow past Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park.  Turn Lake Michigan into a blue-green blur (dotted with sailboats if the weather's right). Hang a few squalling lefts and rights like commuters in the express lanes on the Dan Ryan, only crazier.

The Grant Park 220, NASCAR will call this.

Jimmie Johnson, who wanted badly to run this first Chicago street race in his semi-retirement, will not be there.

Something a lot more serious happened to his family this week, see, which is why what happens in Chicago today will feel so ... pointless. It's bread and circus for the masses, is all it is. What happened to Jimmie Johnson's family, on the other hand, is real life at its worst.

What happened was his mother-in-law picked up a gun and shot her husband, and then her 11-year-old grandson, and finally herself.

And so while the masses will gather to see just how fast a man can drive on Lakeshore Drive when there are no cops looking, Chandra Johnson will struggle to find sense in the senseless. In one awful swoop, her mother, her father and a beloved nephew are gone. And by her mother's own hand.

In the days since, speculation has blossomed like summer weeds, because in these matters human beings need a "why". The most plausible explanation is it was delayed-reaction blowback from another family tragedy, the skydiving death of Chandra's brother nine years ago. Mom reportedly had been struggling with depression since.

People will call what happened this week unimaginable, because that's the word everyone hangs on tragedies like this. It's not really. Depression is rampant in 2023 America, for reasons both understood and not so. And Americans die by the gun every day in our national shooting gallery.

Two  more victims were found in a strip-mall hair salon last night in Indianapolis, where there's a shooting in the wee hours almost every night. Thirty more people were shot, and two died, at a Baltimore block party on the same night.

Depression and violent death are our new normal, sad to say. Or at least they are too damn often. That they have touched a celebrity athlete's family, therefore, is not unimaginable at all.

It's just life, real as real. And no fairy tale even for the blessed among us.