Soy turkey, midnight futbol

I'm back in Oakland, having chosen to come up and have Thanksgiving with my good friends John-Paul and Andrea Tyler. Since moving to California in 1989, it is the first time that my family hasn't had Thanksgiving with Rickey (a longtime friend of the family, who has a passion for goofiness and a penchant for making incredible stuffing). The Tylers have been inviting me for Thanksgiving for a few years, and so I thought that this would be the best year to take them up on their offer, seeing as how all tradition has been foresaken anyhow! Though the dinner was vegetarian (gasp!), it was quite wonderful and I call it a smart move on my part to come here.
Yesterday was the first time that I'd played soccer in goodness knows how long. Around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, John-Paul, his brother-in-law Christian (originally from Ecuador), and I met up with a couple of guys to go play on a turf field near UC Berkeley. One of the guys, Lass, is from Ivory Coast, while the other, Imad, hails from Morocco. What fun it was, playing around with people from such varied backgrounds. Although any one of them, including Mustafah (also from Morocco), whom we picked up later, can kick my ass up and down the field, it was still great fun hanging out with those guys.
But wait! There's more...
JP had heard about a group of people who play soccer at midnight every saturday at a nice lakeside park near his house. And so, as you know I would, I stayed awake with him and went down there to check it out. Now, I'd never tried playing soccer in the middle of the night with no lights, on lumpy ankle-breaking grass, and with a smattering of what might have been grenade craters throughout the field, but it was interesting! Only 9 people showed up total, but it was a good group of young people who aren't too serious and just want to have fun. I think they all know each other from Narcotics Anonymous, because they just had that kind of look about them, and they were discussing how they quit using. I think the soccer gig is a healthy nighttime diversion from the temptations of drugs and alcohol, and it was really fun hanging around with a group of people who seem happy just to be alive and well.
Tomorrow I return to Carmel. I'm going to head down to the Monterey harbor and see about getting a job on a diveboat there. I might even go kayaking with Jenn to the Point Lobos Reserve, which I've been looking forward to for awhile now. Yay!