Back on My Bulls**t: Knoxville, TN

Drifting through a city in crisis while on a personal crisis

Back on My Bullshit are intermittent, totally idiosyncratic travelogues. Don’t worry, I give standard recommendations below but this isn’t your mom’s Travel & Leisure city guide.

Ok, but my little flame was burnt to a crisp by the time I got to Knoxville

I noticed the crowd as soon as I entered the lobby of the Crowne Plaza in downtown Knoxville. Mostly men in dark hoodies adorned with the iconography of a late 80s cliched motorcycle gang: skulls, snakes, menacing flames, winged bones, grim reapers, devils. The women were fond of visibly dyed hair, whether it was bleached blonde tresses or Crayola bright colors. Distressed jeans, frayed leggings, lots of cargo pants. Tattoos crept up from covered torsos, sneaked out from long sleeves, and matched their aesthetic's overall heavy metal vibes.

But it wasn’t their wardrobe choices that piqued my curiosity. It was their faces. Exhausted. Pockmarked. Scabbed. Battled. Haunted. Whatever was connecting them felt dark, despite their calm and polite demeanor. I asked the receptionist if there was a convention at the hotel and she said yes, and gave me an acronym. Up in my hotel room, I Googled the organization. A local chapter of Narcotics Anonymous was hosting their big annual weekend retreat.

My trip to Knoxville was not going to be a lighthearted one.

An in-your-face reminder of the country’s opioid crisis was not the cause of the heavy heart that I lugged around the Tennesse city, but it certainly contributed to my persistent melancholia. Usually, a weekend escape is enough to suspend any personal sorrows waiting for me back home, but my usual delulu coping mechanism proved ineffective. Walking around the city, its Main Street USA quaintness unable to penetrate my doom, I felt like a ghost, condemned to roam and wail, with no one to validate my pain.

Charming! Why do I wanna cry?

Mental health is not my angst, lol. By that, I mean that of all the topics I choose to probe, examine, analyze to death, and make grandiose claims about, the state of my emotional well-being has rarely been of interest to me. What I find even stranger is that the psychological balance of many of my loved ones isn’t a subject I care to write about either, even though all signs point to it deeply affecting the way I walk through the world. I have family members with diagnosed mental illnesses, the kind TikTok dating experts warn you about when it comes to “toxic behavior.” I’ve been romantically involved with enough alcoholics and substance abusers to tell after a couple of dates if someone has a problem. I’ve had partners with depression, OCD, undiagnosed ADHD. I went to therapy for six years straight, beginning with the breakdown of my marriage until my eventual departure. It gave me a ton of insight into my own “damage” (if you will) but even Dr. Mark agreed my shit was more situational than hardwired. Less motivation to dig any deeper into it.

In an age of self-diagnosis, radical vulnerability, and destigmatizing mental health crises, my reaction is mostly “Cool, cool” and then go about my day.

This was a weekend, though, where I could not turn away from pathos. I learned about the mental crises of two dear friends while roaming a Mardi Gras for Pets street festival. A close family member had gone quiet, a sign I learned long ago to interpret as a cry for help. I was still grieving the loss of a relationship that had been mired in mental health issues. And, I can recognize this now, I was in month ten or eleven of a stretch of high-functioning malaise and depression that I could not shake off.

And here comes NA to remind me that this is not a specific misfortune in my small network of family and friends, but a national crisis fueled in no small part by capitalist greed, government failures, and other systemic ills.

I’m not about to go all parachute journalism on you, and whatever I know of Appalachia’s drug epidemic I mostly gleaned from Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (the best book I read last year) and shows like Dopesick. I also hate writing that paints the South as an American aberration or as a beleaguered backward region compared to the North, which has a better PR strategy but often sweeps under the historical rug all the terrors they’ve inflicted on their population.

To the surprise of many people (mostly white liberals), the Southern states are my favorite place to travel to in the United States. It reminds me, in both good ways and bad, of Latin America: the friendliness, the warm hospitality, the culinary creativity, their tradition in community organizing, reliance on spiritual superstitions. I’ve felt beauty in Savannah, festivity in New Orleans, tranquility in Asheville, infatuation in Lexington, inspiration in Louisville, and forever bonds in Nashville. They’re cities built on terrible histories, like all cities. Yes, even New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

View from the other side of the riverfront

In Knoxville, I felt besieged, which is not fair to the city because it shares many of the traits I described above. Strangers charmed me with their small talk and good-natured smiles. Food and drinks, on point. There was a lovely afternoon, where I sat in the sun-soaked yard of a brewery, listening to bluegrass versions of today’s greatest hits. Downtown, Old City, and the Riverfront are extremely walkable. I strolled and strolled and strolled, stopping ever so often to read up about its status as the cradle of country music, a genre as exotic to me as huayno is to you.

But I could never relax. Bland developments, the kind where Love Is Blind houses their contestants, jutted throughout the skyline. I wondered how many minimum-wage jobs locals needed to afford a month’s rent. In a misguided attempt to “shake it off”, I downloaded Bumble with some vague hope that maybe a fun and flirty fling would make me forget my weakened heart. I took it as a bad sign that every person I swiped right on matched with me. I took it as an even worse sign that there were too many jokes about not being into drugs or too many blunt statements about refusing to date addicts. Whenever I returned to the hotel, swarms of NA members were holding court outside, smoking and shooting the shit. I want to make it clear that they were friendly, and courteous and I never felt unsafe in their presence. But it pained me to know they were hanging on by one cigarette and group meeting at a time.

What to make of Knoxville? I walked, I ate, I grabbed a beer, I read, I journaled and I told myself my torment would end one day. I berated myself for not being in a better state of mind, feeling helpless that Vacation Ines had disappeared in my sadness.

Visiting cemeteries is only creepy if you plan on burying a dead pet to see if it comes back alive as a demon

During COVID, I got into the habit of visiting cemeteries where I could roam maskless and take in some beauty. In the Old Gray Cemetery, I learned that Knoxville had been one of the most divided cities during the Civil War. It changed hands between the Confederate and Union forces for years, finally ending up under Union leadership. It suffered an 18-day siege. After the Emancipation Proclamation, former soldiers or their family members enacted revenge by murdering other soldiers or their family members over events that occurred during the war. But, for the most part, the white townspeople decided that the best way to deal with the schism was to never talk about it again. There are few markers or monuments of either the Confederate side or the Union side, which speaks less to a commitment to its “proud Union stance” or neutrality, than a commitment to burying trauma as far down as it can go. To let it rot. (Unfortunately, I did not come across many—if any—mentions of the history of the Black community. That silence speaks for itself.)

Knoxville had a gilded age after the war, but its history is mostly one of stagnation, debt, and political abandonment. There have been revitalization efforts since the 80s but, as my cab driver called it, “it’s a middle-of-the-road kind of city.” He meant this as a compliment, citing it as the number 1 reason why he loved it. At the end of my trip, I asked my Lyft driver, Karen, about the construction boom. Her summary was a familiar one, a repetitive narrative I’ve heard all over the country in the past decade: they’re geared towards the influx of new residents from the West or the East Coast, coming in with triple the amount of spending money and the benefits of cushy remote jobs. Rising rents are pushing locals out of their neighborhoods, out of the city, out of the county. People feel like they can’t afford the basics, and schools are going down the toilet. She loves this place, just look at the landscape. You’ll never see more beautiful hills, more peaceful woods. She did not know how much longer she’d be able to stay.

“Maybe this is extreme of me, and you might disagree, but I think the problem is unfettered late-stage capitalism,” she said, as we pulled up to the airport.

Its own illness.

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Where to Stay

• Most of the sights and vibes are in Downtown, Old City, or the Riverfront so you’ll be fine staying in any of those areas. They are all within walking distance to each other too. If you’re coming from a walkable city like New York or Chicago, you can probably even hike it up to Happy Holler, like I did. Please note that cabs and Ubers are crazy expensive—think JFK to Manhattan prices—and bus routes are on an every 30 minutes or 1-hour timetable. It was the reason why I didn’t venture to the Botanical Garden and Arboretum.

Where to Go

• Walk around the World’s Fair Park grounds and gawk at the Sunsphere.

• I wandered down the riverfront to look at James White’s Fort but didn’t enter the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame because my interest in sports stopped with David Beckham marrying Posh Spice. But I know some of you out there would love the museum!

• Market Square serves as the central hub for restaurants and nightlife and overpriced tchotchke stores. It took me three days to find it, lmao, because I kept going up and down the side streets. It was cute.

• For rare and vintage books, head to Addison’s. For new releases and readings, go to Union Avenue Books.

Where to Eat and Drink

Thank god my depression did not get in the way of my appetite: bialy and dips at Potchke, lemon olive oil cake at Wld Love, hush puppies at J.C. Holdway and the bar at Tern Club.

• I need to give a special shout-out to J.C. Holdway for not only having one of the most charismatic servers I have ever met but for also having a Peruvian chef de cuisine at their outstanding restaurant. They treated me like a queen and the scallion hush puppies with caramelized onion aioli is one of those dishes that epitomizes why Southern cooking is the superior regional cuisine of the US.

• Yassin’s Falafel House rivals any chicken shwarma I’ve found in Brooklyn.

• For breakfast and brunch, I delighted in the bialy and dip comforts of Potchke, the crispy chicken n’ waffles at Farmacy, and the tender olive oil cake at Wild Love Bakehouse.

• Count on me to find the tropical-themed cocktail bar in any city—in Knoxville, it’s Tern Club.

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