if time is my vessel, then learning to love might be my way back to sea.

[intertribal]

Wreckage of the 1977 crash between the KLM Rijn (Rhine River) and the Pan-Am Clipper Victor at Los Rodeos airport on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands.  Essentially, a colonial backwater, administered by the Spanish military, a touch-off point for cruises, for first and second honeymoons.  I never knew about this crash, the worst in aviation history, until watching "Crash of the Century" this past weekend.  Both planes were Boeing 747s, and 583 people died.  I will be going on a Boeing 747 on Saturday.  But at least it won't involve the Atlantic Ocean. 

I'm oh so nervous, oh so antsy.  I hate late nights like this.  During the day you can walk it off.  It's hot and humid and I'll be arriving home in a winter between twenty and forty degrees, according to my mother, who is stressed with work and has to prepare various Thanksgiving dishes before I get home.  On Thursday it'll be my third Thanksgiving away from home and my second away from my mother, but I won't be alone this year, eating Chinese take-out and watching Friday the 13th in my suitemate's room.  This year I'll be packing, watching Law & Order.  Thank God it doesn't mean as much to me as Christmas.  I listened for the first time to the lyrics of "Winter" by Tori Amos: "I put my hand in my father's glove... I know dad the ice is getting thin".  It's her father telling her, "when you gonna make up your mind, when you gonna love you as much as I do... 'cause things are gonna change so fast".  But this line, it's ambiguous: "You say I wanted you to be proud of me" - is it "You say, 'I wanted you to be proud of me'" or is it "You say I wanted you to be proud of me"?  I think it runs both ways.  In four months I'll have spent more time without my father than with him.  He liked swimming at beaches at sunset, when I stayed on shore with my mother, so he didn't have to watch me and protect me from riptides or big waves.  I keep a picture of him when I cross international waters, next to my passport.  "I tell you that I'll always want you near, you say that things change, my dear."

The Partners of Veterans Association of Australia was briefly featured on tonight's Crime Investigation: Australia ("Who Killed Harold Holt?").  Harold Holt was a prime minister of the '60s who signed Australia's soul over to America and went "all the way with LBJ".  The PVA was only established last year, but I think it's astounding that it was established at all.  What it alleges is stuff we all know but don't want to admit - as one of their members said, "war damages men".  Suicide was mentioned; children with disabilities.  My impression from the program was that they want the government to acknowledge what it did to their husbands by sending them to Vietnam.  I think that once I'm old and established, I'm going to write a book - non-fiction - on men and war, because it's had such an effect on my psyche.  It will open with the lines from Nirvana's "In Bloom": "he's the one who likes all our pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun, but he don't know what it means, don't know what it means".  Harold Holt, incidentally, disappeared in the middle of his term while swimming at Cheviot Beach, near Melbourne.  Considering the amount of people that have gone missing there and never been recovered - including 35 victims of an 1897 shipwreck of the SS Cheviot - it's not surprising his body was never found, but apparently some people think he might have been picked up by a Chinese submarine or committed suicide.  It seems much more likely that he got tied up in kelp gardens and eaten by sharks.  He is commemorated in the rich Melbourne suburb of Malvern by a swimming pool. 

There was a plane crash over the weekend near Wilsons Promontory, the southern tip of Australia.  Four millionaires in a private plane - the middle of the ocean.  A wheel washed up on the beach today.  One body is still missing.  I remember hearing the family friend a couple days ago telling the media, "our hope now is that they're sitting out there somewhere, waiting for help".  A lot of people have gone missing in this country.  At the Great Barrier Reef, from an Adelaide beach. 

sources:  Tenerife disaster, Harold Holt, List of people who have disappeared, Four lost in plane crash near Wilsons Promontory, Michelle Kwan - "Winter" by Tori Amos