The day I left Tennessee, Knoxville proved to be a place that should immediately be nuked and started from scratch. I haven't heard too many good things from there lately, and my optimism that the people I love who still live there can pull out of the mire they've created is starting to wane, and quickly.
I spent the evening yesterday sharing a beer with a raging ketamine addict. Before you judge the wisdom of such an action, as I have already judged it thoroughly myself, it was pretty funny. Kind of like a Dostoevsky novel.
Other things, other things. I had my first ever trip to a laundromat. It was not very exciting. The leafy-green spendin money dwindles and dwindles. I may get a job at Williams-Sonoma, which will complete my whiteness. I no longer have a garden. Jupiter is not happy here, and the jury's still out with me. Although I will say that the loneliness I feel - the loneliness that I have - is forcing me into a more than a few intensely introspective moments, in which I have to wonder: what am I doing here? Why am I talking to this ketamine addict? And why, in the wake of my departure, and in all my teary goodbyes and my wonderful friends whom I miss deeply, do I feel rendered so unlovable myself?
Tomatoes aren't even in up here yet. Some guy down the street has a bucket of romas growing, and they're not even pink. Hard little green knots still. It is a culture shock.
My birthday is Wednesday.
