We drove by the New York State Pavilion from the ’64-’65 World’s Fair.

I’m used to being on the Van Wyck, on the other side of the pond where Elliott Murphy’s dad used to run the aquashow.  From that side you can see into Shea Stadium, the Unisphere is ensconced in greenery, and the rotunda and the tower of the New York State exhibit are off in the distance, in pristine relief.

But up close and personal they’re derelict.  Reading about the deterioration in the "Times" I thought they were fixable.  But they appear too far gone.

That’s all that remains of the World’s Fair.  The Unisphere and the New York State Pavilion.  The World’s Fair was a highlight of the sixties, where we drove in Mustangs at the Ford Pavilion and experienced touch-tone phones for the very first time.  The show went round at the GE exhibit, and we learned it was a small small world.  I rode the monorail and heard "Satisfaction" blasting from the speakers as we rounded up the family to go home.

That was over forty years ago.

Back when I still used to play baseball.  The season never began before April.  This exact time of year.  Oh, we might have gone to the park in late March, but Little League didn’t start.  But tryouts and cuts and uniform issuing all happened in three weeks, by my birthday, the games began.

It’s not quite cold enough to be winter, but it’s not quite warm enough to be spring.  By the end of the month, there will be one of those seventies days.  When the temperature soars and you wear shorts and you believe the summer will finally arrive.

It’s funny returning.  Because on one level, I’ve never left.  Everything’s familiar, from the West Side Highway to the cancer in the exposed iron structures.  From the homeless people wandering the streets to the ethnicities performing the service roles.  Everyone’s thrown in together in New York.  But somehow it works.  It might look like chaos, but there’s a strange order.  And a pulse.  Crawling through traffic looking at the edifices and the people on the sidewalk you get the feeling that this is where it’s happening.  That we’re just playing in the rest of the world, but the down and dirty, the important effort, is being made right here.

At least financially.

But in the twenty first century you’re local everywhere.  Just a click away from New York City even if you’re in Tijuana or Taipei.  Denver or Deer Valley.  Our world has shrunk.  It’s a twenty four hour cycle.  We’re plugged in.  And the more we come together, the more photos and information we disperse, the less the center holds.  Everything is flattened, nothing rises above.  Broadway is just another choice.  Like listening to terrestrial radio, satellite radio or your iPod.

And speaking of iPods, this hotel has got a combo alarm clock/radio/iPod speaker contraption.  That’s how embedded into the culture Apple’s device is.  Pay $4 and you can insert an iPod jack in any device you want.  We the public are starting to expect plugability.  The public is always ahead of the industry, just like the mainstream media is behind the public regarding politics, regarding the election.

Maybe that’s all that rises above anymore, our tools.  Our mobile phones, our laptops, our automobiles…  And that’s why we discuss them endlessly, they’re points of connection.  We used to discuss movies and music, back before everybody went his own disparate way, when we started living in a Tower of Babel society.

Like Dan said last week in Utah, no one can keep up anymore.

But it’s hard to accept that.

Landing at JFK I think of all the exploits I want to have in the city.  Alas, I only have two days.  And, I won’t be able to say I can always do it in the future, next week or next month, because I only live fifty miles away in Connecticut.

But like in "Harry Met Sally", you never do take up so many opportunities, not only do you not have sex on the kitchen floor, you don’t go to the local museum, you’re too busy watching television or surfing the Net.  Then you’re dead.

But when you’re in NYC, you feel positively alive.  Maybe that’s why everybody’s drawn here.