Letters to the editor:
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Now We've Done It

Fellow Metro Pulse readers, have pity on me. I must admit that despite every effort and constant claims to the contrary, I have become (gulp) a...Knoxvillian! Ahhh! Alas, where did I go wrong?

Was it by living in this vague city longer than anywhere else? Was it by making my home in a UT dorm, a house in Fort Sanders, another in Fourth and Gill, and now the abandoned borough of South Knoxville? Was it by working for a largely invisible cadre of organizations that try to make this a livable place?

I'm not sure, but I don't think so. I think it's because of that damned Jack Neely and his unrelenting efforts to make Knoxville interesting, of all things. And I blame Metro Pulse too, for supporting him and largely devoting themselves to the same twisted cause. You perverts!

Why couldn't you just leave me alone? But nooooo, you had to tell me about John Sevier and Andy Jackson, Harvey Logan's jail break, and the history of practically every downtown building. You're worse than Carson Brewer (bless him).

I know more about this town than my own family, and guess what...it is interesting. I go downtown so much now my friends make fun of me. The insidious side to your brainwashing is that, once you know all this stuff, you can overlook today's vacuum-headed leaders and sycophants to development, because you know that, just like Parson Brownlow, they will pass, but Knoxville will remain. And probably get better.

You've won, and I hope you're bloody happy. I'll probably be stuck here for the rest of my life, but you know what? That thought no longer sends shivers up my spine—so there. But remember. I know where you're going to retire, Jack, and I just might move in next door.

Jim Mongold
Knoxville (sigh)

Knoxville: Fizzy, Fat Contentment

Knoxville, downtown—It is the place that I have been in the habit of calling home for the last several years. After all, it is the place that I have rested after every travel and excursion since leaving the nest. So, after all of my many returns and liaisons here, I have a multi-layered connection to this small city (or big town as my cynical ex, John, likes to call it).

This onion of emotions consists of love, heartbreak, hope, disgust, inspiration, boredom, lust and even the sort of fizzy, fat contentment one feels after years of marriage to the same fellow. You know, he's sort of petty and unglamorous at times, but you simply have to wrap your arms around his precious, protruding beer belly and attempt (through osmosis) to recall why you fell in desperate love with him in the first place.

Yes, to speak about Knoxville these days I must swim through pools filled with past days of emergency room one-act plays, acting out fake suicide attempts at the YWCA, making out and breathing heavily in the Market Street alley, and even the slightly wholesome, good girlfriend days at the St. Oliver Hotel. There was the hot, ripe summer spent at the Elliot Hotel, and for that season Market Square, the cemetery on State Street and the Old City were my universe. It was bewitching...and from the old wrought-iron balcony on my third floor, I could have been in N'Orleans, Charleston or even Paris.

I was 23, drunk and blissfully ignorant of the danger that I was told awaited me if I walked downtown, plump, alone and freshly intoxicated at night. I paid no attention to the West Towners' warnings of death, rape or even muggery... Weenies.

In that time I saw Knoxville as harmless and hopeful as a blank and welcoming canvas, and I painted it and brushed up against it with every ounce of hunger, mischief and wonder I contained. To this day some of my favorite things in Knoxville are the secrets. The hush-hush of society that seeps through the cracks of the seemingly quiet sidewalks, the cultures that come and go in the bars and coffee joints and live-in hotels in this town, the rise and fall of dreams and desires, the ebb and flow of everything eternal in our city.

So many precious places have seen their days and vanished with a shrieking silence (Mercury, Pandora's Box, The Printers' Mark, 319 to remember a few). But their ghosts will always walk with us and revivals are always in the works.

And yes, I love preachers on the corner of The Square; the Greyhound station at 2:33 a.m.; the Paradise Taxi stretch limo that always makes me feel rich and silly; the beloved bums that blatantly tell you they want booze and you need to get the money out faster because the liquor store closes at 9!

I am even fond of the times when I was offered crack and other various substances in Old Grey, during one of my usual dreamy naps there. For, how can one be offended at someone willing to share? I can even recall one glorious day of hallucinating with J. and K. in that very cemetery that WE (three young, spoiled kids from craptowns taking refuge in the big city) were OFFERED money from one of the homeless...Pure Knoxville...Pure Love.

Nikki Hamblin
Knoxville