Welcome to July 1th, the day of "Strike One"--the first of two one-day boycotts of Major League Baseball to protest any work stoppage. This is our "pre-emptive strike." Hundreds of thousands of fans across the country are participating in the Fan Strike by boycotting games today, not attending them, not watching them on tv, no radio, no sportsbars, no MLB.com. (For more info, visit MLBFanStrike.com.)

To commemorate the date, I have an essay I wrote back in January of this year, but never published on WILBB. Perhaps now is the time.

I'm sitting in yet another airport as I write this. Like all American airports I've been through since September Eleventh, it is now patrolled by National Guard troops with rifles and the security safety announcements are incessant. But airports like this one, big airy fluorescent lit spaces, were already dehumanizing places, disconnecting us from our homes and localities. All airports seem somewhat the same, like shopping malls, with slight variations but more akin to each other than to the cities whose names they bear.

I have dreams that take place in spaces like this, airport-mall-convention-hall rooms, and have ever since I was a child. My memories of these dreams are always fuzzy, like my memories of the time I wandered away from my mother as a child, in a mall in Florida. Or was it Kentucky? Maybe that is the source of the dreams, that day when I meandered blithely from my mother's side into the care of the sales ladies in a department store. The dreams are not nightmares; I was not afraid as a child. But the dreams do come sometimes with a nagging sense of urgency--have I forgotten something?

I've lost myself. Here among the travelers, despite repeated showings of my government-issued identification, and my worn-out old Yankees cap, I am anonymous. Just another passenger. And tonight I feel especially adrift, even though I'm going home. It dawns on me as I am shuffling from one gate to another why, as my eyes track instinctively to the ESPN BottomLine on a television monitor in an airport pub I pass, and I see hockey scores. Yes, just as my life during baseball season is defined and shaped by the game, by the fate of the Yankees and the unfolding of the annual drama, during the offseason it is defined by the lack of it.

How many airports have I been through, calculating timezones and wondering "is the game over yet?" Detroit, barely fifty minutes between connections, and yet twenty minutes spent standing in the bar in the main terminal watching a soccer game, just to catch the MLB scores flashing on the bottom of the screen: Yankees 2, Red Sox 3. Then Yankees 3, Red Sox 3. Just as I am about to run to my gate: Yankees 4, Red Sox 3. (Yesss!!!) Or was that Minneapolis where I watched those two innings? I remember very clearly the McDonalds there, and the bag of french fries I munched greedily as I searched for a bar and a tv. Maybe it was Minneapolis--I'm not sure. The point is that I'm used to traveling while having this constant connection no matter where I am. There's always Sportscenter on the hotel tv at my destination. If I'm lucky there's CNNSI, and FoxSportsnet, too. When I call home, corwin has often kept score of the game for me, to give me highlights more detailed than the Baseball Tonight recap.

But it's January now, more than a month to pitcher and catchers, and not even a bit of baseball news has gone by on the ticker. A couple of days ago Ozzie Smith was elected to the Hall of Fame, and Juan Gonzalez signed back with the Texas Rangers. Since then, nothing. I'm adrift.

Whenever I fly, I read Baseball Weekly, as well. I read one issue on the way from Boston, and I read the next issue earlier today, on the first leg of my return. The issues are thin, don't take long to read, and have left me unsatisfied, with nothing to do but ruminate, as I am, in print.

At home it is midnight, and my flight will be an overnight one. I hope I can get a row to myself, stretch out, and have dreams. Hopefully dreams of grass and summer and cheering and rivalries and grace and power and plays at the plate. And not of airports.