I truly don’t get it. I watched my first NASCAR race today. I did not do this on purpose. It was a side effect of reaching an almost Zen-like level of mindlessness while watching the husband at his pool league. It was at a sports bar with many, many TVs. They were all tuned to the Daytona 500.

I watched the cars go round and round the track. It reminded me of non-horse people watching horse shows and wondering why we found horses going round and round interesting. But at least with horses every so often one group is done, a winner is called, and then a new group comes in. These were the same cars going round and round all afternoon.

The announcer every so often shut up after instructing the viewer to turn up the volume on the TV to hear the engines roar. I don’t get the celebration of noise pollution. Same reason I don’t like Harleys I guess.

At one point one of the many, many TVs was accidentally switched to a dog show. I was excited. Dog shows aren’t the height of excitement but at least there is some variety. However, there was a huge uproar from the crowd and it was turned back. Why can’t one TV out of 15 be turned to something different?

With 10 laps left to go the crowd got wild. A woman sitting next to me didn’t understand the excitement either. She pointed out that it seemed strange to have people yelling at cars that were 1000 miles away but this crowd was into it. One man was a bit too into it. He was yelling things like, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, they pulled you in, they pulled you in,” and so on. When it was over he was actually panting and yelling, “Oh baby yeah, that was awesome!” over and over. I didn’t turn around to see him because I was afraid there may have been a bit of indecent exposure. I was also slightly afraid that it may have been someone I knew, like a teammate of the husband and I have to see these people again.