They’re off to Sotheby’s at 4pm to Defend Johnny Cash from partisan sacrilege.

Caitriona is visiting with her husband Dan, reuniting my favorite trio. She’s here to cover the protests against the Republican Convention as a stringer for the BBC.

The move from Tehran to DC has been hard for her. She’s been turned down for all health insurance coverage due to her “pre-existing medical condition”—the seven-month-old American, conceived in the Axis of Evil, who squirms in her belly. Here, where doctors pay huge premiums to insure against malpractice claims, it costs ten to fifteen thousand dollars to deliver a baby without fripperies like pain relief. A Caesarian costs fifty grand—and American doctors are quick with the scalpel even on women who aren’t too posh to push. Those are the price tags for healthy births.

Forty million Americans have no health coverage. That’s 3.7 million more than when Bush took office. You can end up paying off an appendectomy for as long as a college loan or a mortgage. Cait has spent her first month back in America walking from hospital to insurance office to birthing center, trying to strike a deal, but there’s no room at the inn.

As she schleps her new belly and her tape recorder in the the New York heat, interviewing Republicans and ukelele-playing protestants, it must hard for her to stay out of the fight for health care and decency. There’s little common about decency.

This morning we were stopped on my block by a tall man who wanted to know if we were going to the rally. We said yes, even though my mouse arm was already numb to the shoulder at the prospect of yet another long day at the office keyboard. My protest has to stay personal and portable.

    “That’s good! Make your voices heard!” he said. His voice still had a trace of the islands. He pointed at my “Run Against Bush” sticker and then at her bump. “You, I can see running. But honey, they’re goin’ to catch you!”
    “She’s much tougher than she looks,” I explained.
We chatted a while, glad to share outrage with a neighbor. Then he said “But I don’t know what’s going on with Kerry. He’s playing dead!”
    “That’s exactly right! He’s just rolling over.”
    “Playing dead. He won’t fight back.” He shakes his head. “But you know, when you’re falling off a cliff, you’ll take anybody’s arm that’ll save you. You can’t look too close at who it is.”

He handed us leaflets and wished us luck with the votes we don’t have.

Carpal tunnel syndrome and long work days are making me terse these days. But someone has designated today as Day of Conscience for Sudan, and that makes me think of politics and the English language.

Words have such power. Here in the US, we put a five-second delay on live TV shows in case viewers are struck by the force of a word.

We shield ourselves, too, from the force of the word ‘genocide’. It is so powerful that when a government names it it is under legal obligation to fight it. An eight-letter word, in the right mouth, can mobilize armies, doctors, diplomats, logistics experts, and lawyers. Rafael Lemkin spent his whole life struggling to get that level of moral and legal authority for the word he coined. It didn’t occur to him, I suppose, that we would dodge his intent by simply renaming of what we saw. It costs no tanks or taxes to condemn ‘atrocities’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘Bad Things’.

Here’s a New Yorker article by the dazzling Ms. Samantha Power: Dying in Darfur

Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders use money well.

More northern Ontario photos from Ranger Tim:

At the Bastille Day tribute to Serge Gainsbourg, the Loser’s Lounge crew played grainy French TV shows from the early Sixties. Serge was precocious as a dirty old man. In one song after another, he leered at angel-faced Twiggies, and they gazed back full of wide-eyed love. What did they see in him? With pouchy eyes, ears like rashers of bacon, a huge shnozz, and lank hair, he was so ugly that it became another kind of beauty. I’d do him.

The truth is they look well-matched, the baby blondes and Uncle Serge. �Sois belle et tais-toi� (“Shut up and look beautiful”) he sang; harsh but fair advice to most twenty-year-old girls. It’s plain he just wants to bed them, but in return they might learn a thing or two. As for the crush-struck girls, they look hypnotized and flattered, but they will throw him over soon.

In front of the flickering videos the Losers delivered phonetic tributes to Serge. I knew only a few songs, and my date, Peter (who has a touch of Jean-Paul Belmondo about the eyes), knew none except “Je t’Aime”. That’s a good song to know; takes me right back to seventeen, when the girls in my class sang it on the bus all the way back from the Kerry Gaeltacht.

On the Bastille Day playlist, most of the songs were lecherous love-letters to the USA. “Bonnie and Clyde.” “New York USA.” “Harley David Son of a Bitch.” “Ford Mustang.” One singer stripped down to a pair of tiny red Speedos by the third verse of “Comic Strip.” In the American mind, Speedos have replaced berets and striped shirts as the national costume of France. His little basketball belly might have been Serge’s own.

The oddest tribute came from a twelve-piece accordion girl band wearing hipster jeans. They all looked new to the instrument: they frowned as they gripped their dozen squeezeboxes and rocked comically. Chord changes were tense for all of us, but it was worth sitting through for the sight alone.

I’d forgotten about them until this morning. It’s a glorious day, one of the perfect ones that will always remind me of September 11th. I took the long route to work, walking from Prospect Heights over the Brooklyn Bridge, and stopped at the little park on Clinton Street to scribble for a while. The park is too paved and manicured to be beautiful, but I love it because the neighbors use it. Old men from Atlantic Avenue spend hours playing dominoes while small girls on pink bikes ride circles around them. Hennaed Italian biddies swap gossip and aches and pains. A brat throws a tantrum, and his mother whines:
“Noah, remember we discussed co-operation ? I want you to know that right now this is a choice you’re making, to act and feel this way.”
If that’s what Noah has to put up with, I decided, it seemed like a pretty good choice to roar and stamp.

A man slowed down and nodded, and when I smiled back he got brave enough to sit on my bench. Wherever I go I draw small girls and oddballs (“Because you talk to them!” explains my sister) and so I wasn’t surprised when he asked if I’d mind if he played some music.
“What sort of music?” I said.
“I’m learning the accordion.”
Those aren’t the best words to start a life-long friendship.
“People don’t seem to mind,” he said anxiously. “Sometimes they say it makes it feel like Paris.”

He fixed his music stand, set up his backing CDs, and unpacked his shiny red accordion. And he launched into “Moon River,” and then “It Might As Well Be Spring.”

It was lovely. Cobble Hill did feel, improbably, like the Jardins du Luxembourg for an hour or so. The toddlers started dancing, and the bench people clapped. Another accordionist introduced himself, and they made arrangements to play together next week.

Ranger Tim, who has sharp instincts for the next big thing, bought a junk-shop accordion a few years ago, though he failed to teach himself to play. His New York apartment was decorated with a record sleeve of a green-eyed vixen hugging a squeezebox. I’d put it down to his polka and knackwurst heritage, but now it looks like he was set to make a hit with the ladeez. First trucker hats, then knitting, now accordion music: is there nothing New Yorkers won’t rehabilitate?

On the Q Train, late last night, there was a man whose white hair was fluffily balding and whose white eyebrows were fluffily sprouting. I couldn’t see much below that, beyond a glimpse of walrus moustache, because he held Ship of Fools so closely that he had to move his head left to right to read. I expected a typewriter’s ‘Ching!’ at the end of each line.

Every page or so, he coughed wetly into the book. It made me queasy.

I wonder how Danny Gregory would draw him, if I described him?

Most social software acts more like a gawky thirteen-year-old than like Emily Post. I write customer service email for a living, so I’m touchy about software corporations telling me how fabulous a job they’re doing.

Spare me and show me, kids.

Frank is my Friend? That’s what my mother called menstruation when I was twelve.

From Ranger Tim, who doesn’t hold with this kind of thing:

“ Vapid New York magazine concepts are now being outsourced to Ireland, in the fashion of Dell call centers.”

At least the publishers don’t go so far as to own one of the creatures.

Most of my toys were stolen from storage while I was away: laptop, cellphone, Palm organizer, digital camera, jewelry, journals, and CDs. More were stolen from my backpack while traveling, or worse, misplaced, like my Buddhist paraphenalia, by the guardians in whose care I’d left them.

I can finally laugh at how cross I was to learn that my meditation cushions and little altar were thrown out by the friend who had asked for them as a keepsake. A bodhisattva he was, the careless fecker, slicing through my spiritual materialism. These weren’t just cushions, you see, in spite of their kapok-and-cotton manifestation. They were zabuton, and they were fifty bucks apiece. Hand-stitched by chanting monks and stuffed with their shaven hair, I suppose. I had bought them from a special website three years ago, when I was bent on following the upper-middle way. Now I sit on the floor in my lower-middle neighborhood, and brood about attachment. Mine.

Of all the things I lost, I miss the cellphone least. I used to design software for cellphones, so they feel like work, and now that I pay my own way the billing plans confuse and worry me. You would think I’d like phones, given that their main function is to put off decisions, but that’s cancelled out by the multiple calls that every meeting now requires.

Sadly, these days I’m too rarely untethered to need a cellphone. I’m on my fifth startup, and startups don’t change. That means I’ve spent the summer at a desk, Sundays too, or at my volunteer gig for a change of desk. So it was last Friday when I finally missed having a phone. My friend Amy had asked me to a showing of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour under the Brooklyn Bridge. I met Amy in Mexico last year, and she is one of my favorite Brooklyn people, the kind that always has a scheme for something to do. But I live online and she lives on the phone, and so our arrangements to meet can be awkward.

The movie started just after sunset and I was late when they valet-parked my bike. No Amy. I searched the park for a small woman with two deck-chairs and couldn’t see her. I did bump into Michael, whom I’d hired some years ago to work on cellphone applications with me. I knew I could count on him to lend me a phone, but didn’t want him to think his old boss had hit the skids. So I nosed around again during the opening credits, squinting in the dusk as Edward Norton did something with a dog a few blocks from the same park. Finally I sat on the grass by myself.

After the film I stood at the back and scanned every face leaving, but there was still no sign of Amy. I collected my bike, and wandered around DUMBO looking for a payphone. But DUMBO is one of those fake neighborhoods where people pay huge sums to live in old factories, and there are no payphones and no bodegas. Eventually, I biked up to her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, sure by now that she’d suffered a terrible accident and was lying on the bathroom floor while I’d watched Edward Norton for two hours.

Amy answered the door in her pyjamas. She’d given up on me and left an hour into the movie to go home to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.
“What did we do before cellphones?” she said sleepily.

Well, we said more than “See you at the park.” We said “Let’s meet at the popcorn stand at twenty past eight.” But we’ve been trained out of these habits, and now we need our walkie-talkies.

A year ago I wrote a piece on Van Morrison that sparked a small discussion on the meaning of the Irish term “the crack was good”. This morning Eddie enlightened me on the roots of ‘craic’.

So there you have it. The crack is as good as knockin’ boots and rock ‘n’ roll. Thanks, Eddie!