Last weekend I had squad duty Friday, Saturday, and Monday overnights. It meant that there was a usable period of about six hours each day that I wasn't napping off the previous night's lack of sleep and was available for living. On Sunday Susan and I went down to the Mall with Sara and John from next door to see the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival.

Usually the festival highlights one or two foreign countries and a US state, often with somewhat humorous unintended consequences. A couple years ago it featured Côte d"Ivoire, Lousianna, and Iowa. The Ivoirian tents pulsed with West African rhythyms, and the Louisianan featured an enthralling range of blues and jazz musicians. The Iowa tent was set up to look like a high school gym (really) and featured clogging demonstrations and bands comprised exclusively of tubas. Basically Iowa got its ass whupped in the culture department. It was morbidly fun to walk out of a thumping dixieland jam session and shuttle over to see some Polka.

This year the festival departs slightly from the norm and highlights the Silk Road, the trade routes that once spread music, art, science, and learning back and forth from Japan through Asia to Venice and the rest of Europe. It's an impressive setup that fills a significant portion of the expansive Mall. There are about seven major divisions that highlight the cultures along the road, each with musical tents and areas with local craft demonstrations. As usual for the Folklife Festival, it was about 100 degrees and so jammed with humanity that their collective mass warped space and time, creating a super-dense event horizon of sweaty sunburned fleshiness into which we slipped reluctantly. It's always been a mystery to me why the Smithsonian puts on this huge show during what is the most unpleasantly stifling month to be in Washington DC.

We were pleased to see that the palnned security zone that will be erected around the Mall for the fireworks wasn't yet in place. Last time I looked at a seething mass of people fidgeting inside a double chain-link fence, it was in a jail movie. Instead, we filtered in and out of the throng. There were too many people to get a good look at many of the displays without employing vicious elbow techniques, so we spent most of our time ogling things large enough to fit many people in front of them -- tapestries, models of key architectural marvels, a mural of the two Buddhas that the Taliban reduced to gravel not so long ago. I spent a lot of time looking at a lattice arbor that had vividly colored threads of silk hanging down just over the heads of passersby. There was something almost touching about the way that people would reach up to grasp them, almost shyly, and then linger a moment longer than necessary when they discovered how soft the strands were.

Eventually the crush of other people got the better of us and we walked a few blocks north to settle into a cool dark booth and drink beer. There is something almost masochistically pleasurable about drinking a nice cold beer after emerging flushed and dehydrated from the bright summer heat. You start getting drunk almost instantly, but you can already feel the grubby hangover curled up inside the haze of instant fun.

By the time we got home I was almost ready for my second emergency nap of the day. First, though, I had some surgery to perform. Over a week ago I was bitten on the arm by some sort of fly, and the area around the bite has been getting progressively more red and itchy since then. In Senegal, there was the very real opportunity to have one's flesh become the incubation area for a rather nasty fly's larvae, so I was beginning to wonder if I hadn't in fact been assaulted by a parasitic insect dumping off its eggs into my arm and expecting me to raise and (eek) feed them. I'd noticed that there was a small dark spot at the center of the irritation, and my theory was that this was my larva, my little orphan.

This didn't bother me nearly as much as it probably should. I mean, having a little worm in your arm gnawing its way out is hardly charming but it pales in significance compared with the awfulness I see visited on the human form on a regular basis while riding the ambulance. So I was only curious as I flamed a needle and prepared to excavate.

It was suprisingly easy to open up the little wound -- when something itches as much as this has, sticking it with a needle is almost a relief -- but I wasn't able to find a larval hitchhiker in my explorations. Just for kicks, I smeared the good that came out on to a slide and put it under the microscpe. We keep my childhood microscope in the kitchen because you never can tell when something ordinary (maybe what you're cooking) needs an extremely close look. Hundreds of little lifesaver red blood cells sat around and wondrered why they weren't respiring any more. I had a bad moment when I spotted a few dozen spiky, horrific miniture urchins through the lens, but then I remembered that I'd been looking at pollen grains on this same slide earlier.