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The sixth epistle of JD Nielson. Mezzanine. Mature.
The sixth epistle of JD Nielson
by Anchises
Mezzanine universe. Mildly mature themes and content. A transformative work.
o mitchell! my mitchell!
you will doubtless be surprised to receive a missive from me at a point in time when i am supposed to be thirty thousand feet in the air. "goodness, beloved business partner, what on earth must have happened?", i am certain you won't say. in response to your question -- "nielson, what in damnation did you do this time?" -- i will plead the fifth. the airport is near, the pa system i hear, the people all fucking yakking.
no, don't worry, mitchell! my mitchell! (whitman would be proud. that's walt, not meg, by the way.) you don't have to come bail me out of the local sheriff's department's holding cells or render me extraordinarily from a delightful vacation spot ending in -stan. (how is stan, by the way? did he give you a good haircut?) no, mitchell, today's screed is coming from the lounge in our delightful west podunk incontinental airport. (why does this concourse smell of piss? i'm pretty sure our senators haven't been anywhere near it, and there's no other explanation that i can think of.) naturally, my decision to avoid driving to fucking denver -- o, stapleton, you've fallen cold and dead -- now seems to have been a poor one.
i arrived, bright-tailed and bushy-eyed, at the airport, fortified with the finest cookies from your kitchen and a mcmuffin. (shut up, mitchell, this is not the time.) now, you know and i know that we attempt to travel as light as possible. i had only my laptop bag and that shoulderbag you bought me for christmas, ostensibly, i can only assume, in an attempt to get me some more play, because it is the gayest bag in the world. i was significantly in a minority in this level of packing, mitchell, let me tell you. the entire population of colorado fucking springs was on the move, and i am still none the wiser as to why. you will appreciate my irritation at the fact that every jim bob, tammy fay and their adowable widdle wumpkins (who are all fucking called madison, every single fucking whining one of them) were in myezhdunarodny aeroport kolorado springs (four flights a month to nowheresville, canada!) along with their entire worldly possessions. including all the madisons.
the line, a veritable wedding conga of luggage, carts, and the whitest white people in the world (no, honey, if you're going to new york you don't want to be wearing a pink sweatshirt with "colorado" on it in pink glittery spangles) stretched out the fucking door, along the kiss-and-ride, and almost halfway to short-term parking. there appears, mitchell, to be a problem with the internet connection to every single check-in desk in the entire building today. and apparently there's a superspecialswell security alert!!! today as well, lest a small army of whining madison-children (hello, dolley) take over the planes and demand they fly to disney world or barbie land or whatever.
o mitchell! my mitchell! it took me an hour to get inside the terminal, only to discover that the goatfucking monkeyraping donkeyblowing chickenlickin' cretins at united had failed to mention that, owing to technical problems at colorado springs, the incoming flights had been diverted to denver. where they sit now, awaiting god knows what, because they aren't awaiting us.
i considered, as i waited in line, giving up and going to denver. or just fucking driving to washington. i even called the airline. i was, apparently, not the first person to give this option some consideration. there is, i am exceedingly unreliably informed by misty in chicago, "weather in salt lake". i asked misty in chicago whether there had ever been no weather in salt lake. (which would be an eminently preferable state of salt lake, i imagine.) misty hung up on me. however, the irritated boy in board shorts next to me in line discovered that, as a result of the mormon meteorological mayhem, anything connecting through denver is overbooked by a factor of, "like, five, dude".
you will be proud of me, mitchell. it took me forty-five minutes of standing in a line and not moving before i happened to the united station manager here at colorado springs kokusai kuko (international in all but name. or flights). never have i been so glad to be in possession of one of their global services cards, mitchell, because the man couldn't have been more solicitous if he had been on his knees blowing me like a trombone. i kind of felt bad about the fact that he had his deputy usher me personally through security. not too bad, mitchell, because this vodka and coke in the lounge is going down very nicely, and i am surrounded by an entirely better class of idiot here. at least none of them are called madison. (from what i can hear, they are all called chadwell or peyton or wellington or whatever boston brahmins were naming their children fifty years ago. and they all respond very well to a glare if they're talking too loudly on their crackberries.)
as i waited for deputy debra (who is delightful, mitchell, and who has given me her personal card in the event that i ever run into problems in colorado springs guoji jichang again) to ascertain the availability of an airplane heading in any direction that is not here, and which will connect me to our nation's capital (in my magnanimity, i even agreed that they could send me to dulles or bwi, for which i feel you should start beatification proceedings), i picked up a copy of the cos flight guide. which is apparently newspeak for "schedule".
there are, apparently, forty pages of flights in and out of flughafen colorado springs. i note your sudden yet inevitable surprise, because nothing larger than an md-80 lands here, despite the fact that it's actually part of peterson and has a runway two and a half miles long. i bet you didn't know know, for example, that you can fly to manchester, munich, mazatlan or madrid, oaxaca or ottawa, vancouver or villahermosa, amsterdam, acapulco or auckland from aéroport international de colorado springs? i thought not, and indeed, i was right, because you have to connect through denver, chicago, dallas or houston. or atlanta. (no.)
did you also know, mitchell, that there is a handy direct flight from macon, georgia to aeropuerto internacional de la gloriosa ciudad de colorado springs -- but that you should consult your travel representative (i guess that's bernice) to get to macon? or that there are six different options for getting to dickinson, north dakota? i don't even know where dickinson, north dakota is.
leaving aside dickinson, north dakota (and, really, who wouldn't?) the mind boggles like an irritating boardgame at the logic of some of the stated connections. why would i, assuming that some motherfucker would fly me to dc, want to leave 40 minutes earlier, fly through hartsfield instead of o'hare (and that, mitchell, is a "poisoning or ax-murder?" question if there were ever one asked), and arrive into john foster international hellhole 50 minutes later, on the same goatfellating airline, than a flight to national?
perhaps, mitchell, you could suggest a possible reason why the morning continental flight to national via denver leaves at 1015 on saturdays, and 1016 on sundays? is there perhaps some magical mystical mystery mistral blowing from sea to shining sea on shabbat but not on the sabbath? will that additional minute allow ida mae, the 95-year-old flight attendant who is here primarily for our safety -- and would you like some more warm nuts young man? -- sixty crucial seconds to prepare the plane like an antebellum drawing-room, plumping up the down-filled cushions, adjusting the antique lace antimacassars on our elegant headrests, filling up the condensation-bespangled crystal pitchers of sweet tea with fresh ice, and ensuring that the butler has opened the fine bourbon? will we be extra safe if barry our pilot today has an extra sixtieth of an hour to fine-tune his precision instruments (or to dick around with his laptop)? will ida mae, in addition to her previous duties ensuring that the terrorists do not win, have time to set up the ouija board and scatter the tea leaves so as to commune with the ghostly sprite of the dearly departed harris hanshue?
i cannot help but wonder whether the bright spark responsible for this "flight guide" has ever attempted to purchase a ticket. should i, for example, wish to spirit you away to zurich (which the bright spark helpfully informs me is in switzerland) with our untold billions of filthy government lucre, the guide suggests i first purchase a ticket on american fucking airlines to dallas, and from there take oh hell no fucking delta to zurich. now, mitchell, i realise that you are not quite so interested in the intricacies of frequent flier miles as i. (realise also whose efforts have netted us global services cards, mitchell. i'm just saying.) however, surely even you must know that these two airlines are direct competitors, and so a through-ticketing is neither possible nor cost-effective nor in any fucking way sensible whatsoever. given our equal service to god, country and mammon, however, if i were intending to buy you a fucking cuckoo clock, i would route us to chicago on united and then on to zurich with swiss, which has the best first class on the entire planet. there are fucking doilies on the plates on swiss, mitchell. you like doilies.
o mitchell! my mitchell! allow me one final anecdote of complaint, reserved from a previous experience traveling without you, because this never happens when i am with you since you look over the age of twenty-one (thirty-one, forty-one, fifty-one, who's counting?) and people naturally assume that i am your grandson.
is it so fucking hard to believe in the age of pets dot fucking com that the devilishly attractive young man typing furiously on a high-end laptop is perhaps actually a first class passenger, and is not simply occupying the seat on the plane out of ignorance, spite or sheer chutzpah? furthermore, in the event that a person employed in a customer service capacity (because, frankly, bullshit on primarilyformysafety, mitchell, because grandpa there couldn't open a door if there was an entire frathouse of oiled naked gerontophile jocks on the other side) had doubts about the right of the sole occupant of the first class cabin to be in that illustrious and refined position, would you not think -- o mitchell! my mitchell! -- that one might approach the subject with something more appropriate than "hey! you! this is first class! coach is back there"? initially, mitchell, though you do not answer, and bitch, you had better not be pale and still, because you still have that patch to write, and bernice will actually kill me if we don't have that deliverable committed and tested this week, you will understand my lack of immediate response.
firstly, i had my headphones in, mainly to guard against the possibility of a matronly grandmother sitting down next to me and informing me in detail about the current state of her family and her hemorrhoids. secondly, i had some cognitive dissonance about the fact that the aging sky queen (his name was tad, as in pole, as in almost indubitably very little) was addressing someone in this manner. thirdly, i wished to highlight that, yes, people who are younger than you sometimes do book in first class, whether for the extra leg room or to get away from the teeming masses in sweatshirts, khakis and white sneakers.
i, the picture of calmness and measured response (stop laughing, mitchell), removed my headphones and fixed him with a polite, neutral look. "i'm sorry," i said, "i must not have heard you correctly. would you mind repeating that, please?"
"i said," he repeated, stamping towards me like a tanda in a tercio de muerte, "economy. is. back. there."
"oh," i said, with the smile i reserve for the mentally deranged, customer service people who it would be inconvenient to disembowel, and you when you are in one of your moods, "that's nice. do keep them back there, darling. i'd hate to have paid nineteen hundred dollars to have them up here mixing with the likes of me, although if mr 8b wants to come up and sit with me, then he is most welcome, if you know what i mean. thank you, darling. mine's a vodka and coke."
i feel, o mitchell! my mitchell! (rise up and smell the coffee) that the entire event would have ended poorly for me (do we have gulags any more?) were it not for the fact that, during my monologue (vagina-free for the hypoallergenic comfort of all our fellow passengers), I had pulled out my global services card -- the black is such a nice touch, don't you think? -- and snapped it onto the armrest. tad, it must be said, blanched beautifully, and stumbled over an apology and the row of seats opposite in his effort to fix me my damned drink.
for the love of god, i have been here far too long, o mitchell! my mitchell! i swear, i will fling a flag and trill a bugle for the first person to land a fucking plane here that i can get on to go somewhere closer to dc. i would even settle for hotlanta.
i have the deepest displeasure to remain, o madam,
y'r ob'd't yet inc'ss'ntly e'rthb'nd s'rv't,
-jdn
by Anchises
Mezzanine universe. Mildly mature themes and content. A transformative work.
o mitchell! my mitchell!
you will doubtless be surprised to receive a missive from me at a point in time when i am supposed to be thirty thousand feet in the air. "goodness, beloved business partner, what on earth must have happened?", i am certain you won't say. in response to your question -- "nielson, what in damnation did you do this time?" -- i will plead the fifth. the airport is near, the pa system i hear, the people all fucking yakking.
no, don't worry, mitchell! my mitchell! (whitman would be proud. that's walt, not meg, by the way.) you don't have to come bail me out of the local sheriff's department's holding cells or render me extraordinarily from a delightful vacation spot ending in -stan. (how is stan, by the way? did he give you a good haircut?) no, mitchell, today's screed is coming from the lounge in our delightful west podunk incontinental airport. (why does this concourse smell of piss? i'm pretty sure our senators haven't been anywhere near it, and there's no other explanation that i can think of.) naturally, my decision to avoid driving to fucking denver -- o, stapleton, you've fallen cold and dead -- now seems to have been a poor one.
i arrived, bright-tailed and bushy-eyed, at the airport, fortified with the finest cookies from your kitchen and a mcmuffin. (shut up, mitchell, this is not the time.) now, you know and i know that we attempt to travel as light as possible. i had only my laptop bag and that shoulderbag you bought me for christmas, ostensibly, i can only assume, in an attempt to get me some more play, because it is the gayest bag in the world. i was significantly in a minority in this level of packing, mitchell, let me tell you. the entire population of colorado fucking springs was on the move, and i am still none the wiser as to why. you will appreciate my irritation at the fact that every jim bob, tammy fay and their adowable widdle wumpkins (who are all fucking called madison, every single fucking whining one of them) were in myezhdunarodny aeroport kolorado springs (four flights a month to nowheresville, canada!) along with their entire worldly possessions. including all the madisons.
the line, a veritable wedding conga of luggage, carts, and the whitest white people in the world (no, honey, if you're going to new york you don't want to be wearing a pink sweatshirt with "colorado" on it in pink glittery spangles) stretched out the fucking door, along the kiss-and-ride, and almost halfway to short-term parking. there appears, mitchell, to be a problem with the internet connection to every single check-in desk in the entire building today. and apparently there's a superspecialswell security alert!!! today as well, lest a small army of whining madison-children (hello, dolley) take over the planes and demand they fly to disney world or barbie land or whatever.
o mitchell! my mitchell! it took me an hour to get inside the terminal, only to discover that the goatfucking monkeyraping donkeyblowing chickenlickin' cretins at united had failed to mention that, owing to technical problems at colorado springs, the incoming flights had been diverted to denver. where they sit now, awaiting god knows what, because they aren't awaiting us.
i considered, as i waited in line, giving up and going to denver. or just fucking driving to washington. i even called the airline. i was, apparently, not the first person to give this option some consideration. there is, i am exceedingly unreliably informed by misty in chicago, "weather in salt lake". i asked misty in chicago whether there had ever been no weather in salt lake. (which would be an eminently preferable state of salt lake, i imagine.) misty hung up on me. however, the irritated boy in board shorts next to me in line discovered that, as a result of the mormon meteorological mayhem, anything connecting through denver is overbooked by a factor of, "like, five, dude".
you will be proud of me, mitchell. it took me forty-five minutes of standing in a line and not moving before i happened to the united station manager here at colorado springs kokusai kuko (international in all but name. or flights). never have i been so glad to be in possession of one of their global services cards, mitchell, because the man couldn't have been more solicitous if he had been on his knees blowing me like a trombone. i kind of felt bad about the fact that he had his deputy usher me personally through security. not too bad, mitchell, because this vodka and coke in the lounge is going down very nicely, and i am surrounded by an entirely better class of idiot here. at least none of them are called madison. (from what i can hear, they are all called chadwell or peyton or wellington or whatever boston brahmins were naming their children fifty years ago. and they all respond very well to a glare if they're talking too loudly on their crackberries.)
as i waited for deputy debra (who is delightful, mitchell, and who has given me her personal card in the event that i ever run into problems in colorado springs guoji jichang again) to ascertain the availability of an airplane heading in any direction that is not here, and which will connect me to our nation's capital (in my magnanimity, i even agreed that they could send me to dulles or bwi, for which i feel you should start beatification proceedings), i picked up a copy of the cos flight guide. which is apparently newspeak for "schedule".
there are, apparently, forty pages of flights in and out of flughafen colorado springs. i note your sudden yet inevitable surprise, because nothing larger than an md-80 lands here, despite the fact that it's actually part of peterson and has a runway two and a half miles long. i bet you didn't know know, for example, that you can fly to manchester, munich, mazatlan or madrid, oaxaca or ottawa, vancouver or villahermosa, amsterdam, acapulco or auckland from aéroport international de colorado springs? i thought not, and indeed, i was right, because you have to connect through denver, chicago, dallas or houston. or atlanta. (no.)
did you also know, mitchell, that there is a handy direct flight from macon, georgia to aeropuerto internacional de la gloriosa ciudad de colorado springs -- but that you should consult your travel representative (i guess that's bernice) to get to macon? or that there are six different options for getting to dickinson, north dakota? i don't even know where dickinson, north dakota is.
leaving aside dickinson, north dakota (and, really, who wouldn't?) the mind boggles like an irritating boardgame at the logic of some of the stated connections. why would i, assuming that some motherfucker would fly me to dc, want to leave 40 minutes earlier, fly through hartsfield instead of o'hare (and that, mitchell, is a "poisoning or ax-murder?" question if there were ever one asked), and arrive into john foster international hellhole 50 minutes later, on the same goatfellating airline, than a flight to national?
perhaps, mitchell, you could suggest a possible reason why the morning continental flight to national via denver leaves at 1015 on saturdays, and 1016 on sundays? is there perhaps some magical mystical mystery mistral blowing from sea to shining sea on shabbat but not on the sabbath? will that additional minute allow ida mae, the 95-year-old flight attendant who is here primarily for our safety -- and would you like some more warm nuts young man? -- sixty crucial seconds to prepare the plane like an antebellum drawing-room, plumping up the down-filled cushions, adjusting the antique lace antimacassars on our elegant headrests, filling up the condensation-bespangled crystal pitchers of sweet tea with fresh ice, and ensuring that the butler has opened the fine bourbon? will we be extra safe if barry our pilot today has an extra sixtieth of an hour to fine-tune his precision instruments (or to dick around with his laptop)? will ida mae, in addition to her previous duties ensuring that the terrorists do not win, have time to set up the ouija board and scatter the tea leaves so as to commune with the ghostly sprite of the dearly departed harris hanshue?
i cannot help but wonder whether the bright spark responsible for this "flight guide" has ever attempted to purchase a ticket. should i, for example, wish to spirit you away to zurich (which the bright spark helpfully informs me is in switzerland) with our untold billions of filthy government lucre, the guide suggests i first purchase a ticket on american fucking airlines to dallas, and from there take oh hell no fucking delta to zurich. now, mitchell, i realise that you are not quite so interested in the intricacies of frequent flier miles as i. (realise also whose efforts have netted us global services cards, mitchell. i'm just saying.) however, surely even you must know that these two airlines are direct competitors, and so a through-ticketing is neither possible nor cost-effective nor in any fucking way sensible whatsoever. given our equal service to god, country and mammon, however, if i were intending to buy you a fucking cuckoo clock, i would route us to chicago on united and then on to zurich with swiss, which has the best first class on the entire planet. there are fucking doilies on the plates on swiss, mitchell. you like doilies.
o mitchell! my mitchell! allow me one final anecdote of complaint, reserved from a previous experience traveling without you, because this never happens when i am with you since you look over the age of twenty-one (thirty-one, forty-one, fifty-one, who's counting?) and people naturally assume that i am your grandson.
is it so fucking hard to believe in the age of pets dot fucking com that the devilishly attractive young man typing furiously on a high-end laptop is perhaps actually a first class passenger, and is not simply occupying the seat on the plane out of ignorance, spite or sheer chutzpah? furthermore, in the event that a person employed in a customer service capacity (because, frankly, bullshit on primarilyformysafety, mitchell, because grandpa there couldn't open a door if there was an entire frathouse of oiled naked gerontophile jocks on the other side) had doubts about the right of the sole occupant of the first class cabin to be in that illustrious and refined position, would you not think -- o mitchell! my mitchell! -- that one might approach the subject with something more appropriate than "hey! you! this is first class! coach is back there"? initially, mitchell, though you do not answer, and bitch, you had better not be pale and still, because you still have that patch to write, and bernice will actually kill me if we don't have that deliverable committed and tested this week, you will understand my lack of immediate response.
firstly, i had my headphones in, mainly to guard against the possibility of a matronly grandmother sitting down next to me and informing me in detail about the current state of her family and her hemorrhoids. secondly, i had some cognitive dissonance about the fact that the aging sky queen (his name was tad, as in pole, as in almost indubitably very little) was addressing someone in this manner. thirdly, i wished to highlight that, yes, people who are younger than you sometimes do book in first class, whether for the extra leg room or to get away from the teeming masses in sweatshirts, khakis and white sneakers.
i, the picture of calmness and measured response (stop laughing, mitchell), removed my headphones and fixed him with a polite, neutral look. "i'm sorry," i said, "i must not have heard you correctly. would you mind repeating that, please?"
"i said," he repeated, stamping towards me like a tanda in a tercio de muerte, "economy. is. back. there."
"oh," i said, with the smile i reserve for the mentally deranged, customer service people who it would be inconvenient to disembowel, and you when you are in one of your moods, "that's nice. do keep them back there, darling. i'd hate to have paid nineteen hundred dollars to have them up here mixing with the likes of me, although if mr 8b wants to come up and sit with me, then he is most welcome, if you know what i mean. thank you, darling. mine's a vodka and coke."
i feel, o mitchell! my mitchell! (rise up and smell the coffee) that the entire event would have ended poorly for me (do we have gulags any more?) were it not for the fact that, during my monologue (vagina-free for the hypoallergenic comfort of all our fellow passengers), I had pulled out my global services card -- the black is such a nice touch, don't you think? -- and snapped it onto the armrest. tad, it must be said, blanched beautifully, and stumbled over an apology and the row of seats opposite in his effort to fix me my damned drink.
for the love of god, i have been here far too long, o mitchell! my mitchell! i swear, i will fling a flag and trill a bugle for the first person to land a fucking plane here that i can get on to go somewhere closer to dc. i would even settle for hotlanta.
i have the deepest displeasure to remain, o madam,
y'r ob'd't yet inc'ss'ntly e'rthb'nd s'rv't,
-jdn