Olde Tyme Kotton Kandy

Knoxville, to be perfectly honest, is giving me the creeps.

I mean no disrespect when I say that. It is a pretty city; tree-lined to the nth degree, with a lovely historic downtown and some good kitschy artifacts, like the stratosphere or sun tower built for the 1982 World's Fair, the kind of thing that you can laugh at and simultaneously feel like you now have a better grip on the American landscape. The stratosphere is not very tall, but is impressive in a kind of East German Palace of the Republic way, i.e. it looks like pieces of the large reflective sphere are about to topple off.

It has a free East Tennessee historic museum, with a life-size model of an old-time drugstore and a streetcar, and a temporary exhibit about the 1982 World's Fair, which includes several models of pavilions, and a wall where people could put post-its with their memories of the event. Apparently, a large automated Rubik's cube was part of the Hungarian display, while the Japanese pavilion featured painting robots. This sort of thing is good fun, and here I am trotting it out for you as evidence that I am doing my job of travelling the country well. I am seeing America. It also has a good alternative weekly, and a letterpress shop that was the sort of place that you could describe as combining a wry sensibility with old-fashioned craftsmanship. If you were so inclined.

Knoxville smells nice, and it's warm in a lovely warm-bath kind of way right now. The cigarette tax is 20 cents a pack.

Still.

There is something unnerving about a city where one bus route consists of two buses looping the same loop, only in opposite directions. And that bus runs once an hour, and mostly shuts off at 6:15. I can't get it out of my head, those two buses going around and around in opposite directions. And the hotel clerk couldn't suggest a single place that would still be serving breakfast after 10:30 a.m. These are not complaints about Knoxville; they aren't bad things. They're just the only things I can hit on to explain my distinct sense of unease in this city, a sense that I could live in this place for ten years and never once have a really good time. Have no doubt, the fault would be mine and not Knoxville's. And probably I'm wrong about that anyway.