It’s not enough the humans will not leave off killing the planet with their clinically insane koyaanisqatsi commutes to and from The Job, where they snail along slow as slugs for many many miles, day after day week after week month after month year after year decade after decade, they also have to further kill the planet filling the skies with helicopters and other aircraft, to Look at the koyaanisqatsi, and Report on it, for the radio, and the television.

Because humans do not belong in the air—they do not have wings—sometimes these aerial koyaanisqatsi craft crash. As happened last week, in Los Angeles.

Just a quick word about Los Angeles. It is a place wrong from the start. As the first structure erected there was a jail. Which means it was born doomed, will never get right, and so should best be abandoned, evacuated, even at once, and at top speed.

A pilot and reporter hovering over a “deadly crash involving a metro bus and an SUV” around Chatsworth died when their helicopter plunged to earth, also killing somebody who was just walking down the road. As people are supposed to do. That’s why they have feet. Initially all the hosannas were for the first two, as the luckless third wasn’t even named. But then finally we knew who it was they killed, 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia. He died in a parking lot. Multiple other people on the ground were sent to the hospital. We don’t know who they are. Or how they are.

Another example of how nothing is safe and sure in this world. You can just be wandering the lands. And get killed by a koyaanisqatsi copter.

I don’t know how many people have died for no reason in this way. I know the first I was aware of was Jane Dornacker, who went down in 1986. Age 39. She was kind of a special one. She’d come up in Albuquerque, where at age 8 she wrote a six-act play, and then sang all the parts in an opera of her own composition, "in a language no one could understand.” Naturally, she soon moved to San Francisco. In 1965 she was SF State’s Homecoming Queen, campaigning “riding a bicycle enclosed in a cage; she described herself as an 'Earth Mother' and declared that she was magic.” She formed a band called Leila And The Snakes, which came to the attention of a Tubes man; she toured with them two years, co-writing such songs as “Don’t Touch Me There.” In comedy she did stand-up, in theater she was a Sam Shepard person, and in radio she fell in with Scoop Nisker.

She never made any midas piles from all this, or odds are she wouldn’t have got on the helicopter. Where she went via Nisker, as a fast-talking comedic “traffic reporter,” at first on KFRC, a top 40 AM rock station. I heard her somewhere else, I can’t remember where, and I worried about her, and thought she was wasting herself up there, though I certainly know about making coin wherever you are able.

Then the NYC people lured her out there, to go “big time,” up in the helicopter, reporting on the koyaanisqatsi.

That lasted less than a year. She started in November in 1985, and in April of 1986 her koyaanisqatsi copter went into the water. She and the pilot managed to swim to safety.

“I don't think she really wanted to go back up,” said Chris Doyle, producer of her afternoon show. “Eventually, in June or July, she did.”

“After the first accident she was afraid of going up again but she knew she had to do it,'' added an SF friend.

“Had to”?

Oh. I guess. Because. Of. The Job.

Soon enough, in October, she was dead in the water. She and the pilot were alive when they went in, but they couldn’t get out, and it took 15 minutes for somebody to reach them.

That’s a long wait. Think about it. Put yourself there. Better yet, don’t. Put yourself there. Or think about it.

The koyaanisqatsi copter seized up mid-air and dropped like a rock because a military surplus part not designed for use in a civilian aircraft was installed and then had not been properly lubricated and it decided the time was now to do the second law of thermodynamics.

Her daughter received $325,000 from the wrong part people, but what good does that do, it doesn’t bring anybody back.

Lemmings are known to do the let’s travel in big streaming packs all close together. But a thing they do not have are tailpipes farting out into the air aerosolized dinosaur juice that wasn’t ever meant to come out of the ground. And they also do not have aerial lemmings with similar tailpipes reporting on the ground ones. You’d think maybe humans might have it more together than lemmings. But. Maybe. Not.