Sleeping on airplanes is like sleeping on busses: I can't do
it.  God knows I try, but I can't.  You'd think if you were
tired enough, it wouldn't matter, that you'd drop like a
stone the first chance you got.  Well, not me.  I can't get
comfortable.  The smallest thing sticking into my back or
pressing against my leg drives me nuts.  I can't relax.  I
mean, for Chrissake, I have three seats to myself here I can
lie down and stretch out, but I can't get any sleep.  Gotta
find another way to pass these six hours until San
Francisco.  I didn't even bother to ask for headphones on
either of the flights.  The Tel Aviv-Newark flight had
monitors in the seatbacks, when I got tired of reading I
turned mine on and played some computer blackjack.  This
flight has little monitors that come down from the cabin
ceiling over every three or four seats, like a robot
assembly line of in-flight entertainment.  Looking down the
cabin at the twin rows of monitors, they remind me of the
feedback image you get when you point a close-circuit TV
camera at its screen.  There was a good movie on before, but
I saw it last month in the theatre.  Now they're showing me
some iguana being released into an aquarium.  Twin rows of
iguana feedback.  I read some more, finish the longest short
story in the book.  It's got a sad ending, but I didn't
really like the characters anyway.  It's a good book,
somebody gave it to me before I left.  The author reminds me
of another Israeli writer I like, and I seem to recall a guy
I know saying that everybody tries to write like that one
writer.  Well, looks like he's right.

The view outside the window bores me.  A few hours ago we
were over farmland, and I was struck with how many circular
fields are down there.  I think about getting drunk, and
decide not to.  On the first flight I tried, but I only got
a headache.  I think back to Newark.  I had almost five
hours of early morning to kill between flights, and drinking
worked out fine.  I guess it helps to be on solid ground.  I
watched the sky go from black to murky pre-dawn blue as I
nursed the fifth of scotch my friends gave me at the airport
back in Israel.  It's tricky work staying drunk for five
hours, but I manage.  The view outside the huge glass
windows continues to lighten, large industrial shapes taking
form in the haze-buildings, mammoth port cranes, the control
tower and hangars.  New York City's skyline in the distance,
sans two tall buildings destroyed exactly one year ago.
Where was I then?  Hell, I was still in the army.  When
those two planes hit the World Trade Center, we all figured
we had twenty-four hours before war broke out and we'd be up
to our necks in it.  But here I am, a year later, on my way
to college.  I waited in Newark until 8:00 and called my pen
pal in New Paltz.  My call woke her.  Her voice was sexy in
the morning, waking up.  I was still drunk when I called.
By the time we boarded, the sun was up.  In one of the
stories in my book, someone says there are always pretty
women on planes.  I look around, but it's slim pickings.
Never mind.  I start thinking about patterns-used to be, I'd
spend the school year in Israel and visit California in the
summer (at least until I was drafted.  Now I'll be spending
the year in California and coming to Israel in the summers.
A mirror image, a negative of life before.  I feel like I'm
at that point when you move a magnifying glass away from an
object and you can only see a blur, before it clears up and
you see everything upside-down.  I'm in the blur.  I wish
they had better food in the blur.  Lucky for me, the same
friends who gave me the scotch also supplied me with a
bottle of sweet chili sauce, bless their souls.  We have an
ongoing obsession with this most wondrous of sauces, and
we've experimented widely with different ways of using it.
It has triumphed once more.it can even make airplane food
taste better.  Thailand should get a Nobel Chemistry prize
for this stuff.

The plane begins its descent.  Lower and lower over
tiny-looking houses, cars, highways.  Over the blue-green
waters of the bay.  Lower, lower, still over the water, any
second now I'll be wishing I had brought a snorkel with me
and then whoooosh, bright orange lines on gray asphalt
beneath us.  The plane hits the runway like a speed bump.
My grandfather meets me at the airport, we get the suitcases
and we drive off.  Every radio station is going on about
9-11, so we turn the radio off.  As we leave Oakland and
head for the tunnel, the hills around us remind me of the
Upper Galilee, where we served on the border last summer.
Plus de change, plus la meme chose.