Knoxville, 2025

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Knoxville was always a stopover town.

Memphis was too far West — barely across the Arkansas border, and in many parts, too sketchy to stay in. Nashville was never quite far enough East.

So every time we drove across country, on our way back from Arizona to Virginia, we’d stay in Knoxville.

As cities go, it’s fairly small. About 190,000 people, according to the most recent census. Or at least, that’s what Siri says when you ask her. You can pretty much tell, though, when you cross the Tennessee River on the Henley Bridge, or any other point South, by simply looking back at the skyline. There’s an obvious dearth of high-rises amidst a collection of low-lying structures jutting like baby teeth from the maw of a nascent metropolis.

But when you’re actually downtown, you can easily forget you’re not in a bigger city. It’s full of trees, hills, and winding streets, punctuated by classical architecture, Roman columns, and reclaimed factory buildings in freshly-painted brick. Ornate, black-lacquered street lamps line rows of breweries, coffee shops, restaurants and boutiques, a hipster-retro-industrial gentrification vibe redolent of Denver or Austin or Pittsburgh or even St. Louis. New suburbs borrow aesthetics from the refurbished parts, layering in brick and ironwork and panhead lights, missing only the faded remains of old Coca Cola billboards tattooed on early 20th-century shop facades.

It’s funny, but I never liked Nashville. Always felt run down, sprawled out, totally overrated. A recent visit there for a wedding was the longest I’d ever stayed, and while I loved the people I was there with, I couldn’t wait to leave. It’s a city as overrated as the music that made it famous.

But Knoxville, on the other hand, is a hidden gem. The whole place feels as though an oligarchy of 30-somethings in earth tone cardigans and knit beanies and horn-rimmed glasses are vibe-coding it into existence in real time.

We’re here for a big meetup of my wife’s growing real estate team, which began in Virginia, but now has offices in several states. Jamie is responsible for building up the new Raleigh office, but the Knoxville location is further along and doing great, and the events are being held here, in part, to celebrate their success. Most of our kids are old enough to stay at home without us, but the baby of the family still doesn’t like being away from mom for too long, so I came along for the ride, and to keep him busy during the day.

At a bougie donut shop downtown, decked out in a neo-retro industrial style I don’t quite know how to describe, I order a quad shot iced latte and a monstrous donut for Eli, our precocious but highly particular 4 year old. I grab a gluten-free cake donut for myself.

The total comes to 16 dollars and change.

Like everywhere these days, this is a far more expensive transaction than it should be, considering what we’re getting, but it’s the kind of splurge you make when you’re on a trip out of town and don’t have all the comforts of home. We’ve been living off of cheap groceries on this stay, and I can’t eat another bite of smoked sausage or scrambled eggs or deli chicken slices.

My debit card, which had $48 left on the previous night, is declined. Stupidly, I didn’t look at my account before coming in. I do my best to keep my face from flushing. There are few things more embarrassing to me than this. I know I don’t have a single other slab of plastic with even a dollar available, so I reach into the pocket of my wallet and pull out some wrinkled cash. My wife told me this morning she dreamed she had a $20 bill, then looked and found that exact amount in her own wallet. I had a $10 and two $5s from random delivery tips.

It would have to do.

We sit at a table and dig in. Me, the Irish/Slovak giant hulking over my tiny gluten free, Eli, all of 31 pounds soaking wet, with his colossal Chocolate Sprinkle. After a few messy attempts to eat it with his hands, and me reminding him not to wipe them on his shirt, he begins to dig in using just his mouth, going at it like a dog with a bone. Ordinarily, I’d correct this behavior, but his sensory issues are not a joke, and forcing it will not get me a more proper display of manners, just a meltdown. We’re here because his mom has two long days of meetings with her entire multi-state real estate team, and it’s my job to keep him happy, not melting down. An autist dad and his autist son can easily trigger mutually-assured sensory destruction, so it’s not a game I’m willing to play.

But neither am I willing to sit idly by while my debit card gets declined. I knew coming on this trip meant not working for most of the week at a time I could ill afford to cut off the income trickle, but our cash burn is faster than I anticipated. I’d planned on spending the time working on writing and trying to flesh out some new gig work ideas, but now my account has an echo and I know I’m going to obsess about it until I can conjure up at least a small buffer.

So I reach for the same insufficient solution I always do, because even though it sucks, it’s always available everywhere, and always good for a little cash.

“Eli, you want to go do some missions with me?” I ask, opening the DoorDash app. I explain that we will go shopping, but it will be like a treasure hunt, and when we find all the items we bring them to the people and we get paid money. He loves the idea.

Far more than I do.

We grab a bathroom key tied to a baking whisk — Eli finds this hilarious — and head to the sink to clean the film of chocolate frosting off his various extremities that have somehow come into contact with the stuff, then go to the car. I’m driving a rental on this trip, and the little Mazda gets far better gas mileage than I’m used to, even if it’s as low to the ground as a go-kart and hard as hell for a man of my stature to get in and out of. Still, I figure I can make the most out of 30+ miles per gallon for a few orders.

The first one takes us to a Dollar General, where a burly young black man with glasses and peroxide-frosted tips is talking about pescatarianism with a toothless old redneck who waxes poetic about fishing through a Dixie drawl so thick it may as well be draped in the confederate flag. Our entire order, all sixty-plus dollars of it, is a list of candy and chips and queso. Multiple bags of Doritos. Red hots. Kit Kats. Mike & Ikes. Zero bars. Lifesaver Gummies. Sour Warheads. Gummy Peach Rings. Big Red gum. The list goes on. The customer texts me through the app and tells me he’s in a local hospital, and I wonder, considering his order, if he’s terminal and decided to go out eating the worst things he possibly can. Eli is amazed at the quantity of junk food, but he helps me find items hidden on low shelves, and we work together as a team to fill the cart with the exact kind of crap that got Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. a job at HHS. The young man at the counter, who wears a black-enameled ankh over a black sleeveless shirt, shares our disconcerted astonishment. But we all have jobs to do, so we do them, and load up three bags with sugar and processed carbohydrates and seed oils.

I pack the car with the little guy and the “groceries.” In the spot next to us, a woman who is clearly living out of her beat up, fire engine-red Lincoln MKZ, is eating Peter Pan peanut butter from a jar with a pair of brown plastic chopsticks, all while juggling a cigarette. For reasons I decide I’m never going to guess, her right leg is wrapped tightly from the knee down in some kind of black trash bag-grade plastic. She smiles through sunken cheeks at Eli, and it looks genuine, but I’m not stopping to chit-chat. This is one of those parts of town where barnacles latch on if you don’t keep moving.

The next order is a study in contrasts. Healthy food from a store called “The Fresh Market.” Fruit, vegetables, some panko breadcrumbs, a couple of Ollipop pro-biotic sodas. We drop them at a beat-up apartment complex in front of a door with an infant audibly crying on the other side. Down the hallway, exposed to the open air like the top level of a Motel 6, a chubby, tattooed woman in a baby-blue tank top half-way unbuttoned steps outside to light up a Newport. She has the kind of face you could imagine having been almost pretty, had she lived a different life. Instead, she looks like a hundred miles of bad road. For her part, she barely spares us a glance. We take a photo of the order sitting in front of the door and keep moving.

For the next job, I switch to Instacart. It’s a Kroger order, and I don’t look closely enough before accepting. It’s a daytime request for boxed wine, a bottle of ketchup, and some kind of shelf-stable Starbucks pink drink. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses of downtown Knoxville are lined up to do something at the service desk. The place smells uncomfortably of old cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies, and the old fluorescent lights are putting out just enough illumination to remind me of the dark, wood-paneled, shag-carpeted living rooms of the 70s. Eli, still thinking about all that candy, begins loudly pointing out that the rough-looking man at the kiosk next to us is buying junk food. I can’t tell if his vestigial judgmentalism from the earlier order is real disgust or envy. I try to re-direct him, but the man doesn’t seem to notice.

“Why is there a little girl working here?” Eli asks. I don’t know what he means until I’m surprised by an employee who comes up behind me to check my ID for the alcohol. She wears unflattering coke-bottle glasses, and her stringy hair is by turns neon green, neon pink, and black. She is maybe 4’ 5,” tops, and has the unfortunate bone structure of so many lower class white women — jutting chin, prominent cheek bones, pointy nose. I finish checking out as quickly as I can, and we head back to the car, parked directly adjacent to the Lot Cop — one of those solar powered, trailer-mounted blue-light strobing, halogen light broadcasting mobile security towers they put in grocery store parking lots in the troublesome parts of town. We’re on order number 3, but hour 2, and Eli is already wearing out. He tells me he wants to stop “doing missions” and go home and play with Legos and watch a movie. I tell him that’s fine, but we have to drop this one off first.

Based on the order, I expect another crummy apartment, but the GPS takes us to a cookie-cutter suburb full of half-million dollar homes. I ring the doorbell. Nobody comes. Ring it again. Still nothing. I’m legally not allowed to leave alcohol at the door of a house where I can’t verify ID, but I’ve got a tired, whiny preschooler and I do not want to drive back 6 miles to have to return this to that store, with its long line of burnouts waiting for customer service. I’m contemplating leaving it on the front step and letting Instacart ban me for life, but I give it one more shot. I count to ten and knock, hard.

Finally, a middle-aged woman comes to the door.

“Sorry, I didn’t know if the doorbell was working,” I say, in a tone far more apologetic than I actually feel.

“I was vacuuming and couldn’t hear” the lady says, through a thick accent that could be Russian or Balkan or somewhere in the general vicinity. She is stocky, with rough-chopped short hair, and is wearing some kind of smock. There is an awkward, almost embarrassed smile on her plump face, and she hands me a California driver’s license.

Franzia Chardonnay seems like a downgrade from Stolichnaya, but who am I to judge?

My internal critic prattles on non-stop, like I have a second, subordinate brain that operates on autopilot, making crass observations, and some days, I don’t have the energy to tell him to shut up.

I dodge a Fed Ex truck on my way out of the subdivision and punch in the address for our AirBnB. We’re well on our way when a new order comes in, and the description says it’s only 10 items at Target. It’s an 11 mile delivery, but the offer is $18. On paper, it’s worth it, and it would bring up my abysmal earnings for the morning to something a little more standard. I try to get Eli on board with doing one last “mission,” but he’s not having it. Resigned to the will of a tyrannical toddler, I start to drive away from the Target, but then the opportunist in me takes the wheel and I flip a hard U-turn and head back. I tell Eli we’re doing it anyway. He says no. I say yes. He says no, and cries. I try to bribe him. He’s stoic. I decide I don’t care. It’s not like I want to be doing this either. But the next time I want to buy him a donut or me a coffee, I don’t want my card to be declined.

We enter the Target together and I pull up the shopping list.

Twelve bottles of isopropyl alcohol? An assortment of glass jars?? Is this woman preserving human body parts???

We shop for the items. Per usual, Instacart’s inventory estimates are totally out of sync, and I am stuck fulfilling a partial order, which typically means getting paid less than expected, even though it’s no fault of my own. 2 out of 3 of this jar, 2 of 4 of that jar, substitute that plastic bin, etc. I do my best to sub out replacements and keep the total order price near where it was. Finally, I finish shopping and load the car. Eli asks to listen to AJR, and I’m happy to oblige if he’ll stop whining. We drive off, and as I keep looking back at him, I see his eyelids begin to droop, until his head starts bobbing. I do my best to shove a small pillow under his head, and turn back to the task at hand. On the way, I ask ChatGPT if it thinks, based on the order items, I’m delivering supplies for someone keeping heads in jars.

It laughs, in its new, suddenly much more human voice, but ultimately tries to deflect.

“Haha,” it says, “it’s pretty unlikely. While the combination might seem a bit odd, there are plenty of harmless and practical uses for those items…”

I lose interest, because what fun is a prosaic explanation? I turn the music back on.

The delivery is at a house at the top of a dead end road in a rural community. As I get within a hundred feet of the address, I start seeing trash in the road. An old Mercedes sits in the front yard with an extension cord running out from under the hood. The yard is strewn with garbage. On the right side of the property, a garage bears a sign saying the place is a screenprinting shop. Well, that at least makes sense out of all the solvent I just picked up. On the left, the peeling wooden deck of an old above-ground pool hexagonally circles a patch of dirt where no actual pool exists. More trash is piled up on either side of the stained concrete steps to a front porch, where a youngish woman of indeterminate age is smoking a cigarette while her toddler — a pretty little girl with curly blond hair and beautiful blue eyes — crawls around in nothing but a diaper behind a baby gate. She is visibly covered in dirt from the waist down. She stares at me as I approach.

I grew up around places and people like this. Rural upstate New York, where some of the high school boys on my bus who lived in trailers had mullets and mustaches and wore meshback caps emblazoned with the logo of the Volunteer Fire Department, or maybe John Deere. I hate this way of living, but I’m there to do a job, not participate in a game of mental class warfare.

“You want me to leave these on the steps?” I ask, startling the mother. Somehow, as a 6’4” man, north of 300 lbs., I still manage to sneak up on folks a lot.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” she says through a smoker’s wheeze and a twang.

There’s no driveway to get me close to the house, so I have to make multiple trips with large glass jars of various sizes. As I make my third and final run to the house on an uneven front walk made from poured concrete, I hear her telling the baby they don’t have any Coke.

“You do now,” I say, handing her the 24 pack she ordered, feeling like I’m handing her an 8-ball.

“No Coke that’s ready,” she says, correcting herself.

Ready? I think. What makes Coke ready? Is she going to put it in a baby bottle?

Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

I complete the delivery and drive off.

I pick up my phone, and I see a notification that the customer from The Fresh Market lied and told DoorDash I dropped off the wrong order. This pisses me off, because I had to scan, photograph, or weigh every single piece of produce, every bar code on every item, and I know for a fact that I didn’t miss a single thing. I also know I dropped off the order I was given, since it was the only one in the car at the time. DoorDash warns me that this is a contract violation, and I’m stuck filling out a dispute form they also warn me they may never read or respond to.

Everything is automated these days, or offshored to India or the Philippines. Nobody on the other end of these businesses is ever empowered to do anything useful. They just waste your time.

God, I miss having my own business, or even a real job.

Everywhere I go these days, I talk to silver-haired folks bagging groceries or working checkout lanes who share my sense of bewilderment at how we wound up doing this kind of work at this phase of our lives. I talk to some of them. They’re not stupid. They’re just stuck. Just like me.

But I haven’t been able to get anything going, and for me, anyway, deliveries trump working retail. At least I don’t have to deal with people in more than a perfunctory way. No midwit managers breathing down my neck, asking me why I’m not putting the new cover sheets on my TPS reports. I’d much prefer all these no-contact deliveries — the vast majority of my orders — over having to pretend I care. Either way, I still have five star rating with customers. I do a good job. I just don’t want to talk about it overly much.

But it’s so damn much wear and tear on your car. So much gas. I can’t keep it up, and I know it. I just don’t know what to do instead. My job applications go unanswered. I don’t want to get stuck doing something I hate even worse. I’ve already lost enough self-respect.

The trip “home” is quiet until I’m a few miles away. Suddenly Eli pops awake, unsure of where he is, straining at his car seat harness. I try to calm him, but he tells me has to pee with an urgency that tells me I’m about to be dealing with a flood in the back seat of my rental car. But I’m stuck at a red light. Not much I can do. He’s freaking out, and I’m feeling the stress building.

“Come on light, turn green!” I keep repeating, for his benefit, not mine. “You’ve got this, Eli. Just hold it and I’ll pull over as soon as I turn down that road!”

It finally, mercifully, turns green. I turn into the gas station on the corner.

It does not have a restroom.

Sigh.

I pull him out, and tell him he’s got to just go outside. He has never in his young life peed outside, or even standing up. Can’t get the hang of how to do it. Gets stage fright. Can’t figure out the body posture. I pull his pants down and try to bend him so he’s aiming forward, not down at his shorts. His body, for some reason, always wants to be concave in these scenarios. The exact opposite of what I need to avoid a big mess. He’s panicking, crying, and struggling against me. I manage to contort him, half lifted, so that the business end of his pee-machine is pointing towards the ground. Kind of. He can’t hold it anymore anyway, so he lets loose, a jet of pressurized liquid hitting the sandy loam at the edge of the parking lot harder and faster than it can be absorbed, splashing all over the side of my shoe. I shift my foot as far as I can without losing my grip on the little guy, and then decide I just don’t care. He’s winning a big victory against precedent, and I don’t have to detail the inside of the rental. If I’ve got to clean my shoe later, that’s still a win.

As he goes, I notice an electrical panel covered in skater stickers. A single sticker might be considered vandalism, but this many turns the utility box into a collage. It’s urban art in my eyes, and I appreciate its organic, middle-finger-to-conformity ethos.

After Eli discharges far more fluid than his tiny body should theoretically be able to hold, I help him get re-dressed and congratulate him on breaking the bathroom ceiling. He’s proud enough of himself to let go of the distress he was feeling a moment before, at having been forced to endure such a colossal indignity. I tell him that the reason he had to go so bad is because he kept sipping on my coffee, because “that’s what coffee does: it makes you have to pee.” I buckle him back in and we head home.

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I make lunch for the little guy and eat something myself, then get down to the business of writing. Jamie texts me and asks if I’m open to going to dinner with her team. A twinge of anxiety runs through me. As spergy introverted extroverts go, I’m pretty good at socializing, once you drag me out in public, but I never actually want to go. To make matters worse, I don’t know these people, have never met a single one of them, but I know enough of what she’s been doing, have listened in on a enough calls, that I know them to be success-driven folks, not a few of whom have a net worth well into the 7 figures.

My wife is this type of person. How she wound up stuck with an idealist, tortured-artist weirdo like me is something I’ll never figure out. At last count, she had over a dozen active listings, and has been the talk of the larger group for the speed with which she has been building out the Raleigh office of the team, whose HQ is based in our old stomping grounds in Northern Virginia. Our bank accounts are empty, but the business pipeline is full. It’s only a matter of time, but getting from here to there without getting scalped by all the bill collectors is proving to be a real trick.

I’ve told her more than once that I don’t like meeting people like this, because men in particular always want to know what you do for work, and I never know how to answer that question. Four years lost without traction at my age feels utterly humiliating, as does busting my ass for 12-15 hours a day for a few measly bucks. But my neurodivergent quirks are getting worse as I age, not better, and I can’t find the energy to hide the dysfunction like I used to. I’m ashamed to talk honestly about myself, but maybe I can find a way to fake it long enough to get some grub.

I ask her to let me think about the dinner, because I don’t want another bite of the limited food I picked up for our stay, and I knock out ten paragraphs or so before it’s time to go pick her up from a day full of meetings. I hate dropping a piece of writing in the middle, but something in me tells me to just suck it up and go, so I get changed and we head out to dinner.

It’s an Asian place with menu items that look to be a fusion of Thai, Vietnamese, and Laotian dishes. Our group is big — 35 people or so — and they’re already crowded into the private dining room in the back of the plaza, opposite the restaurant itself. It’s a big, loud, noisy crew. I’m introduced to a couple of the key players, but because we’re late, we wind up at a table at the far end, with mostly new folks or women who work on the ops team, and to my relief, we don’t talk about work or career stuff at all. I grab an order of pork laab, Jamie gets the curry chicken, and we eat our meal amidst polite conversation about nothing in particular until the sun sets and everyone has had their fill. To my relief, this meal is on the company dime, so we say our goodbyes and head home for the night, catching some Netflix before trying to sleep on a mattress that seems to have at some point in the not-too-distant past lost a battle with a particularly abusive gorilla. It has more hills and valleys than the bucolic landscape it’s nestled in, but we eventually find workable enough positions to finally pass out.

In the morning, we rush Jamie to another long day of meetings, then head off in search of a new donut shop to try. They don’t have anything gluten free, or even any good coffee, but Eli gets a glaze donut with pink icing and rainbow sprinkles, and my card goes through this time, thanks to yesterday’s handful of delivery runs.

Little man tells me he wants to go on more “missions,” so we do a couple of orders, but he wears out even faster than the day before, so we head back to home base, have a quick lunch, and then I settle into the work of finishing the piece of writing I started the day before.

If you’ve traveled much, maybe you know, but every place has its own energy, its own unique vibe. Doing half a dozen deliveries has shown me more of this city than I’ve ever seen before; some of it is spectacularly nice, some of it is trashy in ways that make me wonder about the future of our species. The natural landscape here is stunning; heavily wooded among rolling hills, punctuated by lakes and rivers and fishing ponds. The gentrified parts of town are as nice as anywhere I’ve been. The parts that have been left behind are a reminder, though, that not all is well. It’s like this everywhere these days, all across America. Alongside millions being poured into upscale development are old, abandoned shopping centers with long rows of vacant stores. New subdivisions emerge with fancy, expensive homes, but they’re always just a few miles away from slums that time forgot.

Jamie and I discuss how we actually really like it but wouldn’t want to live here, and we question how exactly you explain the feeling that a place is a good fit or not. It’s not the kind of thing you can put in a spreadsheet. There's a kind of woo science to it, if you can call it that. A personalized vibe check based on interior criteria that are hard to describe. There are lots of beautiful people you never fall in love with. The ones you do often catch you by surprise.

It’s kind of like that.

Tonight, there’s a thing at a brewery, and I have to spin the wheel of social anxiety again in deciding whether to go. Tomorrow, we’ll have breakfast and pack our stuff and get back to Raleigh, which is finally, after almost a year, starting to feel familiar enough to be almost called “home.”