I’ve twice rented a bed at Madame Isabell’s hostel, located in the quite peculiar city of New Orleans. The first occasion I had gone to bed with the dawn, far from the room I’d rented on a Saturday night locked in a spectacular sky of diamonds. Today is a Monday, three years later, on a day of no particular consequence. I’ve managed to find my bed.

Andy, the hostel manager, wears Harry Potter-like bronze metal frames cracks spider-webbed down one lens. Welcomes me back to the black gated, pink and turquoise multi-level house nestled between ramshackle homes rowed-up on the northwestern outskirts of the French Quarter.

Familiar with these movements now – tuck my valuables (guitar and longboard) into the locked closet amongst numerous other beaten guitar cases and rides on wheels. Birds of a feather don’t take what does not belong to them. Messily pull a sheet onto my bunk, #4 in the girls’ dorm, and hit the cobbled pavement. I’m wearing a new black t-shirt (Lord knows I need more black band t-shirts) “I Drink And I Know Things,” it reads with a Game Of Thrones Lannister sigil. Dark haired woman walking fitfully, drunk howled and sneered at me from across the sidewalk.

“Look out! She drinks and she knows things,” smiles with mad intoxication.

Briefly startled, but it’s NOLA, hardly the weirdest I’ll see, keep walking on. The second comment on my shirt makes me a friend. Sara tends the front bar at BB Kings Barbeque in the Quarter, I post up and listen to commandeering Jazz and sip southern beers, Terrapin, nibble on appetizers in slow courses. Lose myself in the saxophone and rat-tat-tat of the snares; talking Game Of Thrones with the barkeep. Comments come steadily, languid conversations rolling.

“So what is it you know then?” another stranger asks and grins. Like I have a secret worth keeping, what do I know, sipping a bourbon neat?

“Ask me after another drink,” becomes my common response. Four more drinks and still I know nothing.

Ease quietly out of my jazz trance and wander back to Madame Isabelle’s. Buzzinggg in the back garden, jungle sounds and sharp cicada songs, fenced in paradise cleverly occupied by lithe friendly street cats, black and white skinny little luv jumps into my lap and purrs with the ambient night sound chorus. Dark green plants rise to the top of the fence, ten feet or so and enclose our merry band of misfits in a dream.

Two young men sit in the hot tub adjacent from the glass table I’m leaning back from – gazing at a Louisiana evening. They have dark hair and talk quietly and merrily in a language I honestly can’t recognize, like Italian but harsher – like beautiful music in a key I know not, accompanied by actual beautiful music drifting between us, hot bubbles frothing up over their shoulders. Art Tatum and Ben Webster, I find out those sounds to be, smooth and drawing tenor sax double bass winds through the evening and connects our rhythms, against circadian flows and as if backwards against time, it’s beautiful.

Andy comes out. He looks like he knows things. Sits beside me at the table.

“Out here drinking alone?” he asks eyeing my lukewarm Yuengling.

I hardly feel alone, adjacent with the simultaneous lives, language, and music around me, but contemplating the meaning of things solitarily nonetheless. Trip quickly down a tipsy monologue, sped up as I reiterate my last year on fast forward for Andy in a rambling rush.

“Honestly, what does it all really matter,” I bluff and undermine my strife. “Who honestly cares?”

Reads right through me, “You do, obviously,” Andy says. “I can hear it in your voice.”

Andy knows things indeed.

Of course I care, ruminating and blustering like nothing really matters, while the opposite is written so plainly on my face that a stranger can see me.

This old and eclectic city of rogues drinks, and she knows things.