Starting off with a binge

New Years toast at Glenn and Ahn's place. 

    It was frenetic, exhausting; it was desperately trying to prove a point, whatever that point was.  And it was exhilarating while the energy lasted.

    The fun started 11 Sunday morning with a bike ride to the Jack London Square Amtrak station.  To me, the high vaulted ceilings have an energy like an expansive mood.  15 other passengers waited on the platform, and there wasan excitement in the air that you would never find at a gas station, or a line of cars creeping toward a toll both.  We boarded the San Joaquin bound for Sacramento, and for two verypleasant hours I watched watery landscapes drift by and made notes in my journal.


    The Sacramento Valley Amtrak station is a major rail hub, with different gates, like at an airport.  From there, my GPS guided me on a 10 mile ride cross town via the Jedediah Smith bike trail, to my brother Glenn's house.  Glenn and his sweetie Ahn were throwing a big dinner party, and I was put to "work" preparing food — my exertions consisted only of riding with Glenn to pick up trays of food at a Vietnamese delicatessen, and of slicing a tray full of cucumbers and cherry tomatoes.

Ahn

Glenn

    Dinner started at 6:30, and then course followed course.  One guest, Ray, is a colleague of Glenn's in the American River College math department, and we three indulged in shop talk about grading.  As well as some grousing about millennials, each and every one madly in love with their smartphones.  Another guest, Andreas, is an M.D., who has had a front row seat for viewing the opioid epidemic.  His specialty is physical medicine (as in recovery from injury), and he recalled that not too long ago, he was instructed that pain is the 5th vital sign, and that opioids prescribing based on patients reported pain level carried no risk of addiction.  Combine that with the legal fact that there is no limit on damages claimed due to pain and suffering, and voila! An epidemic.  Not imported from Mexico, as Trump would have it, but dispensed at our own native pharmacies.  Someone asked me if I had any resolutions for 2018, and I said only one, IMPEACH HIM.  No one demurred.

Mamu, an exquisite creature
and reglal presence in the
Glenn & Ahn household

    And nobody complained at my skulking away at 9:30 to go to a contra dance.  Single sexagenarians have their rights.  At midnight, we dancers greeted 2018 with raised glasses of sparkling apple juice, and sang Auld Lang Syne. I got lucky and found a charming partner for the last waltz.

    The next morning Glenn got up after only 5 hours sleep to give me a ride to the train station.  There followed two more pleasant hours watching scenery, followed by a bike ride the long way back to Alameda: east along Embarcadero across the Park St. bridge, then back west along Clement. Somehow the extra pedaling was part of the point, could easily have taken the 51A.  But after that, time was tight, and there were two NYD parties to go to.  I transformed into motorist Americanus.

   The first party was was at the home of my friends Nick and Ronnie in El Cerrito.  There must have 20 guests mingling around their table, drinking wine and sampling delicacies.  It was a lively crowd. Talked with a woman named Joleen, whose Ph.D. thesis was about how Melville's Moby Dick owed much to Milton's Paradise Lost.  Ahab as Satan.  And Trump as Ahab?  Tried my New Years Resolution line about impeachment, and just got a worried head shake.  Nice idea, never happen; seems we're doomed to confront our captains white whale.  At 3 I left for the last event in my social pentathlon (more or less), a music party at the home of John and Sue in San Jose.

Fiddlers at John and Sue's music party. 
Sue is the one on the right with blonde hair.

    A half dozen musicians played their fiddles, while the rest of us enjoyed the music, chatted, drank champagne punch, and ate black-eyed peas and collard greens for good luck. It was dark by the time I started home, and  truthfully, there were times when lane markers seem to waver. But I gripped the wheel tightly and commanded my brain overrule my eyes. The point became make it home without being a fatality or causing one.  Point taken.  Home by 7, slept for 10 delicious hours.