There is no better city in the world than New York, let’s just get that straight.

I could get lost there and be happy for the rest of my life. Stick this Southern boy in a hot, airless subway and I could be perfectly content. I’ll pay ridiculous prices, and feel I’m getting a deal. I’ll get slammed hard by someone on the street, and thank them for the experience.

I’ve never felt a pulse like New York. It’s as close as I’ve ever come to getting struck by lightning — a rush of energy through my body that makes me think, “I’m alive! … or fried like chicken.”

That’s New York.

My wife (the pregnant one) and I went to the Big Apple for a last hurrah before the baby comes, and to celebrate her birthday (won’t say how old as the Surgeon General warns against it.)

The thing about life I’ve learned is this: Find a partner you can travel well with and you’ll never be unhappy. I’m very lucky, in that respect, and it holds true even when pregnant.

Although, when you need a pry-bar getting in and out of a cab, it tends to slow things down a bit. But I’m proud to say she never got stuck in a revolving door or a subway turnstile, as I feared. (She’s done it even when NOT pregnant.)

New York is fun with woman-carrying-child because it comes with power. You’re on a crowded subway, buried so deep from the doors that miners wouldn’t try digging out, and all of the sudden this woman I thought knew, so quiet, dainty and unassuming, yells from the bottom of her lungs, “Look out! Pregnant woman coming through!”

She then proceeds to bounce people out of the way as she snow plows through with her belly. I stood, just for a moment, in total amazement, then quickly came to my senses and followed her through.

“I’m her valet,” I told people as I passed.

That’s power.

And you get to use handicap elevators. Well, I’m not sure you “get to,” but we did one time in a subway. It was right after she used her belly as a battering ram, on a train that had creeped along so slow we decided to take our chances on the street.

When confronted with stairs to the above world, Nancy eyed the elevator and said, “We’re taking it!”

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Fresh air is like 10 steps that way. We’ll be out of here before the doors even open. I want to live!”

“We’re taking it!” she said again, and it was settled.

So we stood and waited. Behind us, all of Manhattan, and some 200,000 tourists, had time to file by. The train we had ditched traveled back and forth between the Bronx and Brooklyn twice, with time for a servicing. Days passed and I wondered how I would deliver a baby in a subway. And we stood and waited.

We stood next to a hunched over little man, who was probably 33 when he started waiting on the elevator. And eventually it arrived. We entered.

And … up … we … went …

The speed of honey … dripping ,,, down … the … wall.

I think it all-total took us 30 minutes to reach the surface, which must have really been 9 miles up, despite the fact that it looked like sunlight was so close.

But, you know, I didn’t care. I was in the most incredible city in the world, with my pregnant wife and this nice old man, watching the rest of the world shoot by me at the speed of sound, I can enjoy it even from the confines of a handicap elevator, where we celebrated three more of my wife’s birthdays. Even in the elevator, growing old and arthritic, it’s an amazing city, and I ate it up.

What did we used to do in the days before E-mail, and by golly, can we please go back?

Yes, I’m asking you sweet world to take this evil device for conveying messages and flush it down the great mystical commode from whence it came.

You heard me correctly. Even a son of technology, a child raised on the microchip, reared on the digital, trained on the mouse, married to the great World Wide Web has said it.

Take it away!

I’m done with it. I’m carpal tunneled out, my poor hands crippled.

Sure, E-mail can be a wonderful thing. But it’s also an undeniable scourge. A creeping virus. An addiction. The equivalent of electronic kudzu, spreading, growing, infecting, overwhelming, suffocating, driving me mad. If my office door is ever closed, it’s because I’m in there working like a fiend, typing like a mad man, trying desperately to reduce my electronic pile to something manageable.

“A-Ha!” I emerge triumphantly 18 hours later, my fingers gnarled-up, twisted and twitching. “I’ve reduced my inbox from 32,000 messages to a much more manageable 31,892. I now have a date with 17 martinis.”

I return and they’re back.

That’s why I’m proposing an E-mail-out Day, a great blackout for E-mail when we all swear an oath — as a nation and a world — to silence the E-mail airwaves for one day. We will all recover and drink beer in harmony, and not a soul will click send.

Just a little relief is all I ask. Get behind me on this, people.
Where did all these messages come from? In the olden days I never got this many phone calls or letters. So who are all these people contacting me now?

Many are work-related. Others are jokes, personal messages and offers for me to go to beautiful Nigeria and help a poor dethroned prince clean $320 million in US dollars, of which I will be able to keep my share. Then there’s my friend Damon who lives in Philadelphia and sends me a new photo EVERYDAY of his beloved, adopted city. Thanks, Damon.

It’s getting so bad I’m considering setting up automatic replies that will send messages like you get on customer service phone lines: “Thank you for contacting Brian Thompson. Unfortunately, all of his operators are busy and he’s currently trying to pretend you and your problems don’t exist. While your message is important to him, let’s not fool ourselves, it’s really not. Current response time is approximately 18 weeks. Please hold and the next available service representative will ignore you shortly.”

Everyone’s facing it. Type in “E-mail” and “overload” in Yahoo and there are dozens and dozens of hits, from a leadership seminar on mastering E-mail by a guy named Stever Robbins to something about E-mail overload in Congress (poor babies!) and a 1998 CNN piece titled, “E-mail overload drives users bananas.”

You mean we’ve know about this problem for more than 7 years and no one has done anything about it? Congress obviously knows. Why haven’t they passed legislation!

I clicked on Mr. Robbins’ link and found an article so interesting, and frankly helpful, that (I can’t believe I actually did this) I E-mailed it to people! My God, what have I done? But seriously, if you’re having problems like me, this guy is worth checking out. (His best advice, truly: Charge people for sending you E-mail. I love it!)

I’m taking a trip soon, and at first I thought I would take a laptop so I could check my e-mail while away. But you know what? It might be time to take a little break from it. Put the out-of-office assistant on (“Brian Thompson is currently in a mental asylum trying to work out some deep-rooted E-mail issues caused by you!”) and forget Sir Isaac Johansen Email ever invented this awful scourge.

If you really need to contact me, send a carrier pigeon.

It was bound to happen. Inevitable is the word. You can run hard from the inevitable, but it will always track you down, trip you up and laugh at your skinned knees. Why fight it? Instead, embrace it. Enjoy it. It is inevitable.

And so it went this past weekend, designated officially on the calendar, in federal offices and schools, as baby registration day. Oh, not for all of you people. Simply for the Thompsons. Time for us to go into the baby stores, stare in awe and say things like, “Holy pickled peanut butter, I’ve never seen a breast pump before!”

I love the audacity of some places, giving you handy little lists of things they suggest you register for. Get a day stroller, and a night stroller, and possibly a formal stroller, for when you take baby to the ball in black tie. Stock up on formula, especially if you’re going to breast feed, and buy one pacifier for each day of the baby’s life for the first 15 years, just to be sure.

My wife and I are serious shoppers. We marched into stores with notebooks and baby-stuff books, dog-eared and highlighted. She quizzed store employees on merchandise with questions like, “So, you say this stroller is all-terrain, but has it ever been tested on the boulder-strewn trails of Mt. Kilimanjaro?” or “In 25 words or less, explain to me why on July 22, Cindy Shumacher was unable to release the easy-go latch while grocery shopping at the A&P in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.”

Usually the employee, who has been working at the store approximately 15 minutes, looks at me for reassurance or support. I just give him one of those “She’s pregnant. Better answer the question” shrugs.

Some employees honestly look like they’re being held up at gunpoint, and for easy questions. “So this has four wheels?” she asks and they’re off running for cover.

So many things are needed. I did not know this, but turns out babies actually require lounge wear. And apparently they go through like three sets of clothes a day. So at Baby Gap I bought 1,300 little jumpers, just to be safe.

Babies also apparently need Eddie Bauer tote bags, and designer cribs with DVD players and leather cushions. Babies need homecoming outfits, suede booties, car seat toys, travel mirrors, baby monitors, bassinets, porta-cribs, cribs, temporary cribs (where you put the kid in case there’s been an accident and the hazardous materials crew needs to come in and disinfect) and stroller insect netting (especially important if you live in the Amazon and like to go for a lot of walks.)

This all said, I can see why future dads would hate the experience of registering, but honest to goodness, I had a lot of fun.

I got to play with baby strollers, which are a lot like bumper cars. I got to use a portable scanner. I got to pick out toys. I stared wild-eyed and unsure at a breast pump.

And most of all through that whole experience, I saw very clearly just how real this baby thing is. Bulging bellies don’t make the connection for me. But while goofing off with a stroller, it became very easy to picture a kid in that seat, yelling for me to go faster and crash into a shelf full of car seats. (So I did!)

It became easy to see that kid in a baby bath tub, splashing and flooding the bathroom. And easy envisioning myself struggling with a car seat and the little one sitting there patiently thinking, “Just press the red button, dad!”

Registering is not just baby shopping. It’s the acceptance of the inevitable, that in only a few short months a little bundle of whoknowswhat will forever change my life. And by golly, I’m going to have that after-dinner stroller with a swinging Li’l Johnny monkey and the Ralph Lauren upholstery.

Surf’s up and I went down, over and over again.

But boy was it fun. I think I’ve found a sport where even taking a spill is enjoyable. (I face-planted so many waves, my nose is crumpled up.)
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