Conference trip memory (3 of 3): Rooftop bar.

At this one rooftop bar near the conference site that everyone decamped to for a happy hour get-together after the second and last day of the conference, it was getting dark out, and people were breaking up and the bar was filling up, and I was standing in line waiting to get one more beer, and there was this kind of amorphous and haphazard crowd starting to clog up the bar area, as everyone was waiting to get their drinks there, and the one (middle-aged) (black) woman dressed in (all black) and (a stylish rumpled hat) eased herself around back behind the bar and got everyone's drinks, one drink at a time.

And, there was this (younger) (tall) (white) (bearded) guy, and this (shorter) (very white skinned) (very dark haired) woman with dark satiny clothes and slightly devilish eyes, and you could tell they were a couple, and they asked me if I was ahead of them in line, but they had been there first, so I told them that, and then we started talking.

And, it turns out that they now lived in Kansas, but they had lived in St. Louis for years.

"You know," I was like, "This is my fourth time here, but I just don't get this city, it's like I'm here and I see stuff, but I just don't get what it is or how it works," and I made a grasping motion with my hand, to represent my mental grasping.

"The way I see it," the woman is like, "is that it's like New Orleans, only it's young and raw. New Orleans has been around a while, everything's settled down, but here it's young and raw."

"Yes," I was like, "But what is it.  I mean, I'm here, but there's no center to it, it's just like stuff happening and people here but none of it matches up and I can't make any sense of it, it's like chaos energy or whatever the fuck you call it from Dungeons and Dragons."

"That's your problem," she was like. "Just don't think. Don't think. Just be here, and just live it, and don't think."

And, she looked at me very intensely with her weirdly devilish eyes, and she seemed gleeful, but she was also serious, because that was actually what she thought and the way that she lived her life, it wasn't some act that she was putting on at all.

And, I don't think that I seemed weird to them, and they weren't judging me at all.

It was like everything around me was happening, and none of it fit together in any way, and none of it made sense.

That city just has the strangest vibes.