memories of knoxville

I like to travel.

I love looking back and realizing that in this lifetime, I have lived in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I lived in Knoxville for four months, working on a short term environmental campaign. I manage to become friends with a large group of laid back and fun-loving college students and posse who identified themselves as anarchists. I played soccer with a group of them every Thursday afternoon, and went to their music shows on Saturday nights.

their headquarters, so to speak, was a large victorian house at the end of its own tree-lined street. it was a communal house where residents paid the mortgage, not rent. the front yard had a large climbing a rock wall attached to a tree. i made an impression when i climbed it in a skirt, on my first visit. at the house, they threw some great parties, which consisted of singing to melodies played on homemade guitars and banjos, and sipping on a wide variety of moonshine. we played crazy games that were really intended for 10 year olds not 20 somethings. Twister, pass the orange, and my favorite: the sticker game – a crazy game where each participant is given a roll of about 30 stickers. you run around the yard slapping stickers on each other, and the one with the fewest stickers at the end of the melee wins. it’s amazing to me that I experienced this I my life.

bicycles served as the glue that held the group together. at the house they ran a bike library, and the individuals could easily be spotted around town atop their tricked out unicycles, bicycles and tricycles! it's almost a no-brainer that it was this group that brought Critical Mass to Knoxville. Critical Mass originated in San Francisco, where one day a month thousands of people take to the streets on their bicycles, blocking traffic all over the city, creating a little bit of havoc on the Friday night commute. in Knoxville, critical mass consisted of a group of about 10 people – my friends-- riding bikes together around the streets of Knoxville, bothering a car or two. I always wanted to join them, but somehow managed to miss all the opportunities to ride with them on my shiny red bike with wide handle bars and three gears that i borrowed from the bike library.

And they faithfully attended all the protests and news conferences that I organized calling for climate change legislation. (that was the whole reason I was there, after all.) The group also had some pretty radical events of their own like radical cheerleading practice, anti- prison group rallies and a drum group circles complete with masks. I went to one of the drum group practices which was nothing more than a whole lot of people banging on all sorts of things. My instrument of choice was a metal pipe. surprisingly, all the noise was ordered chaos. it almost sounded like music.

we'd go to swanky art shows the first Friday night of each month, and drink the galleries’ wine and eat their hors d’oeuvres. sometimes, some people from the group would have art in these gallery showings. one of whom was my very talented best friend. she was a manic-depressive 5’10’’ red headed artist. she shaved the right side of her head, but didn’t shave her armpits. one of her painting collections was called “picking” and involved a series of paintings portraying people picking gross things like wedgies, scabs, noses, you name it. she had a Chinese style scroll hundred feet long that unrolled to reveal kudzu eating all of civilization. while I was there in Knoxville, I baked brownies for her 20h birthday. I hugged her the day got an abortion. I wonder how she is these days.

during my time in Knoxville, I felt really unstable. I felt that the world was out to get me. I remember crying a lot. I worried everyday about my job – should I quit? why am I torturing myself? I reacted to common things in ways that did not reflect my usual behavior. To put it bluntly, I acted like a crazy person.

I lived with my coworker. we spent far too much time in the same quarters, and naturally there was some friction. but this was the first time i experienced so much friction with another person. i'm usually laid back and can get along with everyone. but in Tennessee, i saw the one person i spent everyday with as her an evil bitch, with a sugary coating. she'd smile and offer to make dinner one minute, and would be plotting her next move to break my spirit the next minute. she once said that she had a special ability to say the one thing that could break people. she said she once made her macho southern 6’ 2’’ father cry.

I had a crush on a guy, that somehow turned seriously obsessive—it was an intense, scary attraction. I loved him and hated him at an absurdly intense level, after knowing him for only a few weeks. looking back on it, it’s a little hard to stomach the truth that that psychotic person was me. I hope psychotic is a bit of an overstatement, but I don’t know.

I felt as though we had known each other in another life. not only had I known him, but I felt as though he had cheated on me in another life. I always felt jealous when I was around him. I couldn’t concentrate when he was in the same building. we ended up rolling around on my “bed” ( which consisted of a musty mattress lying on my bedroom floor) for a while one night. I said no to sex. and he left and that was it.

I remember jumping on his trampoline, doing backflips. pretending I didn’t care about him. pretending I didn’t care about how he felt about me. at the same time I was sad that his best friend was moving away, leaving him on his own. I hated myself for liking him.

I wonder now if it was the company I kept that encouraged these feelings. I wonder if I had been surrounded by “normal,” boring people if I ever would have felt crazy at all. it’s as if by osmosis I sucked up all these crazy feelings.