Protocol 7

First, we went warspying.

Then we played 9-ball at a college dive (which made me very glad I’m not in college anymore).

And then we made a snowthing and molested it.

From O’Reilly’s Ethernet: The Definitive Guide, “The ISO developed the OSI reference model to provide a common organizational scheme for network standardization efforts (with perhaps an additional goal of keeping us all confused with reversible acronyms).”

I left North Carolina Tuesday afternoon amidst a light snow storm. I usually fly American, but this time I was flying Delta because none of the American flights had the right combination of airplanes. At RDU American also has its own terminal (terminal C) dedicated to the entire airline, no sharesies. Terminal A is where all the other airlines cram together in a long line of confusion (I’ve stood in line for the wrong airline more than once). And terminal B appears to be one big baggage claim; I’ve never quite figured it out, though I do have a very vague memory of boarding a ValueJet plane destined for Florida a week before the fateful Everglades crash. So maybe baggage claim and mini-terminals for those ghetto boom-boom flights.

Anyways… the line leading up to the Delta terminal was one of the longest I’ve ever seen, and it consisted entirely of men in uniform (I’m assuming Army, I really don’t know these things). I freaked out since I can’t think straight in airports due to the drugs, and desperately tried to find Delta help. They pointed me to the self-check kiosks that were almost empty. Oops.

I passed out as soon as I got on the plane. I don’t remember takeoff (always a good thing), and didn’t really come to until the beverage people clanked down the aisle. I asked for an apple juice (I always drink apple juice unless I’m getting hammered) but they didn’t have any on the cart (?!?) and so I had to wait. When they brought my apple juice 5 minutes later, a stewardess leaned over and asked, “Miss Mignolo, would you like help with your connecting flight?” and since I can’t hear on planes and have so much xanax in me I can’t make much sense of anything, I say yes, figuring they wouldn’t ask me if the presumed answer was no. Maybe I was about to miss my connection and would to be zipped through the airport on those annoying ass airport-trolleys with the blinking lights that can never go very fast because of all the people, yet they are always trying as if a sliver of possiblity existed in which space would open up and they could just floor it.

We land and everyone begins the usual procedure of deboarding. The superhappy smiling steward and stewardess tell me that I need to wait. I wait until everyone is off, and then the steward helps me carry my luggage off the plane and directs me to a wheelchair. By this point I’m so confused I have absolutely no idea *what* is going on and mutely accept the ride. I couldn’t even get it together enough to ask what malady I was afflicted by. The man who wheeled me to my connecting flight took this intricate series of back hallways and elevators, and would jot things down on a sheet of paper occasionally. Everything was really empty, the superhappy helpful flight crew flashed into my head, and I wondered where I was really going to go. It’s fun to foment conspiracy theories when filled with a healthy dose of xanax - all the fun, none of the freakout. In a very disappointing conclusion, they wheeled me all the way to my connecting flight.

I now have a shortbus story and a wheelchair story. I’ll always wonder why they put me in a wheelchair… applejuice, in the context of Delta, will always be code for “act supernice and wheel them away quickly.” Maybe I was making it up, but I swear they got superhappy nice after I mentioned applejuice; like they were all in on a secret that I unknowingly triggered. Discuss.

I’m sure someone has already appropriated the Dolce and Gabbana logo + print ads (one in particular that I’m thinking of that has the D&G logo and then D&G themselves standing next to the logo) and altered them to Deleuze and Guattari, no? I’m being really lazy on my web searching…

I don’t remember everything, but here is what I do remember:

I dreamed that I tried to kill somebody, or something. Stabbing. In the head and between the shoulder blades. I think I got stabbed in the head too. But then I realised that my reason for killing would only make everything worse so I nursed whatever it was I had been killing back to health and took all the flack for my stupid murderous idea in the first place.

Morph to what I suppose is a totally separate dream (I don’t remember the continuity if there is any) and people are mind-melding all over the place. It’s like it’s required of society to function. Like to use the ATM or something - random strangers will be standing in line, and once you are done with the machine you have to mind meld with them briefly. I really wish I remember the details of this more. Some mind-melding then took you to like, an 8 bit cyberspace type area where everyone was represented in ascii with a few polymorphus blobs thrown in. I had just recently mind-melded with a stranger for some trivial task and was walking around town when this older man walks by me muttering excitedly about coughing and stronger encryption algorithms (some kind of cold was going around). And I was like, “how does coughing… oh, because of the randomness generated,” and kind of waved my arms around. And the man stopped to engage me in this line of thought, with diagrams on his clipboard and everything. The man was Chomsky, but it wasn’t really Chomsky because he had E.O. Wilson’s brain. E.O. Chomsky? Anyways, he had started getting all holistic on me talking about the yin and the yang he was so excited about when I was woken up by my phone, which is good because he was getting boring. Nica - I’ll give you a call when I’ve had some coffee.

There were also a large number of older cadillac’s dotting the landscape.

Good morning.