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.

Conference trip memory (2 of 3): More bus trip stop.

As I stood out in the back parking lot of the truckstop eating an Oreos-brand cookies-and-cream ice cream bar and sipping coffee from my thermos, while I was standing in a position where I could see what the bus driver was doing at all times so that he didn't accidentally go and leave without me, this (like early 30s) (vaguely darker-skinned) (thinner) (shorter) (Latina) woman with pulled-back curly hair and a clean crisp style even though she seemed like she didn't have all that much money, was standing somewhere near me, since she too had positioned herself to look through the door of the bus and was also standing there watching to make sure that the driver didn't accidentally go and drive off without her.

And, I thought to myself that she might be Dominican, though she was a little too light for that.

And, we started talking, and it turns out that she's from Venezuela, and so I sympathized with her about the Maduro regime, and I was saying how you never used to see that many (Venezuelan) immigrants, but now for like the past year or two, you see them all the time.

"Yes," she was like, "Life is more, I mean, life is... worse, now."

And then she smiled with a flash of humor and was like, "We are, in..., invade your country."

"Oh no!" I was like, "You are not invading our country."

Then, I made sure to use simple words and was like, "If there is not enough room, it is no problem, we will send Donald Trump to Venezuela, and you will stay here."

And, I got her to laugh.

Conference trip memory (1 of 3): Bus trip stop.

On my way back from the recent regional academic conference that I attended, I took a Greyhound bus, and like more than halfway on the way back we stopped off at this shiny clean truckstop by the side of the highway that had a McDonald's and a Subway and a video gaming parlor in it, for a fifteen minute break so that everyone could get out and stretch their legs and maybe buy food or whatnot.

And, the countergirl was like early 20s, but she had the lowest voice and the calmest manner and the dewiest eyes, and this big soft red hair like Farrah Fawcett, and I kept getting the sense that she was loved up all the time, but not in a nasty way, though all she was doing was standing there and saying "hon" and calmly ringing things up for people.

I mean, what must your life be like, to have not only that sort of presence, but also that sort of poise?!

It was truly exceptional.

And, there was this (short) (very fat and round) (punk-styled) (Latina) girl with heavier white makeup and earbuds who had been talking all the time on her phone on the bus, and she came up with her arms just overflowing with chips and pop and all sorts of fatty shit like that, and it rang up to something like nineteen twenty-four.

"That'll be nineteen twenty-four, hon," said the countergirl, as she calmly rang everything up, and just stood there exuding total presence and living totally and utterly placidly in the moment.

"Look at how I got that right," said the (short) (very fat and round) (punk-styled) (Latina) girl, as she held out a bill.

Then, she paused and was like, explanatorily, "I only have twenty dollars."

A recent table: Water, and noodles.

The other week I was waiting a table for this (older) (bearded) (white) guy with glasses and this (younger) (straight-haired) (slightly brown) (Asian) (college-age) woman (a professor and his advisee, or something like that?).

And, the guy was drinking a lot of water, so I was always coming back to the table to fill his glass back up.

"Thank you so much," he was like, after one of my trips there.

"No problem," I was like. "I'm always happy to facilitate hydration."

And, the (Asian) (college-age) woman laughed behind her hand, as she had when she and I were discussing something about the (Thai) restaurant's glass noodles and how good they were, and I had said something humorous to her about something or another, though I can't remember what, now.

A farmers's market interaction: Change-making.

A few weeks ago I was at the local farmers's market and was getting tomatoes from my usual stand and a few other things, mostly these big nice cucumbers that they had, and the one (Asian) woman who's always there at that stand with all the (white) women with slouchy tits was the one who came up to go and check me out.

And, she tallied up the cucumbers and the tomatoes verbally and was like, "It's fourteen, no it's fifteen," and then I was like, "Okay," and I paid her.

"You didn't check my math!", she was like.

And, I told her that I always buy kind of the same thing, and it's always like fourteen to sixteen bucks, so I figured it was right.

And, she didn't say anything, in reply.

Parental visit (4 of 4): A warning about ticks.

On that trip, I suggested that we go for a hike at a park, but my mother was worried about ticks, because of something her old friend Annie told her.

"Annie's sister lives on a farm and went to go feed the animals, and she came back with ticks all over her!"

Parental visit (3 of 4): Meghan Markle.

Around the time that I met my parents on our recent visit, Queen Elizabeth had died, and, oddly, it turned out that my mom had a lot of things to say about the royal family, and especially "that Meghan."

(She has this whole thing about how she wants to stick it to the royals and she comes in there and she isn't there that long and she tries to go and make everything about her and do things her way, and how she had broken relationships in her own family and now she has broken relationships there, and how her own sister said she'd cause trouble and she's a troublemaker etc. etc. etc ... I texted these opinions to my one [half British] [half Sudanese] friend [the sister of the sister-brother pair], too, and she texted back something like, "hear hear," since she hates Meghan Markle, too.)

Anyhow, my dad doesn't follow the royals that much, and when Meghan Markle's name came up, he was picking his teeth with a toothpick and was like, "That's that half black gal?".

"No," I was like, "She's the half white gal."

And, he continued to pick his teeth with a toothpick some more, and then he was like, "No, she's the half black gal, you'd call her the half white gal if she was in a black family, but she's in a white family, so she's the half black gal."

And, he continued to pick his teeth.