Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Free Fallin'

As sometimes happens -  usually once per month - I just blank on this blog. 

Nothing going on in my life you want to know about - or that I care to write about, at least today. There ain't much going in this world worth of interest either. 

Well, maybe one thing. 

An - and I quote - "expert skydiver" fell to his death over the weekend, when he grabbed camera gear to film a jumper, and leapt out of the plane himself. 

.......but without a chute. 

I don't mean to be crass or anything, and I know news organizations are on skeletal staffs, but maybe an editor could have (and should have) ix-nayed the 'expert' part? 

Oh and yes, someone captured footage of his fall - though I don't know they knew what was going on at the time. And yes, that is a still from the video. 

Mind you, I did not click on play. I'm never going to see the movies "Faces of Death" that catch real people in the process of dying or about to. 

The dude was 10,000 feet up, so you've seen the free falls from there on shows and such. You fall for a while before deploying the chute. Morbid as it is, I can't help wonder at what point did he realize, "oh fuck......."?   And then just have to wait for the inevitable to happen. 

Maybe you go out doing what you love and you kind of accept it.. Like the surfer who drowns, or the professional baseball player who eerily gets at neuromuscular disease that oddly has the same name as yours. Maybe it's already drilled into you that these are the risks of the job - though I have to believe the risk is the faulty chute, not forgetting to put it on. 

I know when 710 was skydiving for a while there were 72 different checks and balances of equipment et al. I suppose no one does that for the staff. 

.....but I bet they are now. 

Can you imagine being the client who was jumping and it was supposed to be filmed, but then, you know, the guy died for your vanity video?  And you realize it was a non-refundable purchase and now you don't even have the video? 

I have read no detail on any of this.  Now and then I can be morbid, but this isn't one of those times. 

I mean, even the blog title and the image are questionable.............at best. 



Song by: Tom Petty

3 comments:

Travel said...

I suspect clickbait, the person in the image has a rather large hump on his back.

James Dwight Williamson said...

Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you, somedays you both go hungry!

Anonymous said...

You went from saying you had nothing to say, to writing a post. This may explain why you have been blogging for years.
JP