. Peace Through Entropy We’ve had a week of pleas…

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Peace Through Entropy

We’ve had a week of pleasant surprises. In addition to the changing of the guard in Washington, 15th -ranked Rutgers booted 3rd-ranked Louisville from the national college football championship with a last minute field goal Thursday night. This is arguably the first good news for the Scarlet Knights since they beat the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton) 6-4 in the first intercollegiate football game in 1869. Party in Piscataway.

Closer to home, Emily got an acceptance notice yesterday from a school that, until recently, topped her list of collegiate ambitions. So, she’s one-for-one, which is a good shot of positive vibe, and nicely timed. This particular school also happens to be my financial worst-case-scenario. But like most other high school seniors, she is applying to about ten schools, so it’s early days. At this point her two favorites are my alma mater, and my colleague L’s alma mater.

So it’s been a very good week. But who knows where we’ll be in a month, a year, two years? Who’s to say with this war, with these colleges, with the footballs. The one thing we do know is that the primary engine of history since about World War II is entropy. All good news goes into the hopper.

Two Saturdays ago, Maureen and I went to a wedding in Long Island. At one point during the drive through a deserted midtown Manhattan at 10:00 AM, it occurred to me that my backlot-consciousness, working in default mode, had me going to a funeral. I was wearing a suit, and I knew I would be seeing old friends and acquaintances. That hasn’t meant “wedding” since some time in the late-disco ’80s. Nowadays, it almost always means funeral–one of which I subconsciously assumed I was going to. I snapped out of it, which was good, because I was driving.

Then I was driving through Queens on the Long Island Expressway. Then Maureen weighed in: “What’s that?”

That is the skeleton of the 1964 World’s Fair, my dear. A big bonework globe hard by bizarre spindle-top towers. The towers are what remain of the New York State Pavilion, which I vaguely remember as a centerpiece to the fair when I went there at the age of seven. The big attraction for my Catholic family, especially because my grandmother was with us, was Michelangelo’s Pieta. I remember it vividly, displayed on a glassed-in stage in a Virgin Mary-blue theater. There was also the Pepsi Pavilion, which was moved after the fair to Disneyland—Yes, It’s a Small World After All was first foisted upon us by Pepsi. There was the GM Pavilion, which displayed the technological wonders of a future now past. And in the center of it all, the mosaic tile map and banner-hung towers of the New York State Pavilion, the theme of which was “Peace Through Understanding.” This all took place one year after the Kennedy assassination, and four years before the Tet Offensive. A month after it was over, the City of New York forgot it was there. The towers spring up now, baffling egg beaters perilously close to air traffic from LaGuardia, a rusting apparition very near the miserable funnel of highways in and out of Long Island. Behind it, the bones of the world. Entropy Through Neglect.

Meanwhile, at Lydia’s grade school, they are dismantling our beloved wooden playground apparatus and replacing it with a typical pre-fab polymer monstrosity. Somewhere inside the last remaining monkey bar fort house, a sage child (Baba Pat N.?) lays on us graffito thus: Love it while it lasts. .

That’s about right.

I danced at the wedding with Maureen and all my friends from the last magazine I worked at—all of whom I miss very much and see regularly because their magazine competes with the magazine I currently work for. Too much drama about how that happened, believe me. Interestingly, given today’s topic, there has been somewhat shocking churn at the top of both magazines’ mastheads in recent weeks. Mine also happens to have been redesigned recently to look like a heating, ventilating, and air conditioning engineers association publication from the 1970s.

Entropy Through Futzing. It happens. And…

It’s all good,
Vanx

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Fairground photos: Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times. Garden State Parkway Road Sign Photo: Suzy Allman, The New York Times. Bottom Photo: M.