Knoxville

This here Knoxville, Tennessee must be a bad, bad place, the Greyhound Depot is jammed with folks trying to get out. I been into this trip for 8 days now and this is the first or the worst, however to say it, the most people and the worst setup. This is the bus system I remember, crowded and dirty. Yet the ironies abound, I’m on one of the new coaches, leather seats, (well, leatherette anyway) kind of bucket style, plugins that work and WiFi like the website brags about.

I was warned about Knoxville last night in Virginia someplace somebody in the dark was talking about how backward it was. It seems so harsh to say so and to go on and on about it. I wouldn’t but when I thought up this trip this is what I figured would be the norm.

Maybe it’s the south is all, and an infrastructure still recovering from the war. 150 years later.

And the resource tradeoffs might be a regional thing, out west the money goes into new real estate facility, here it goes into coaches. And the density of population and the tradition of the poorer classes…

There’s a thing about standing in line, some are fanatics about who’s where, some don’t know and some don’t give a shit. There’s a minority that fuck the system and ooze in to the line especially in a night mare like that scene we just left with people gobbed up wall to wall, there must have been two hundred people in an area a quarter the size of Portland’s . Oh well, we’re rolling.

Asherville is apparently over the ridge from here and I’m ready to see the south and particularly these Blue Mountains.