Welcome to Regretville.
The unofficial headquarters of Regretville is a cafe called Vienna Coffee House. Like 99% of Tennessee eateries it's part of a chain. Young women work behind the counter, presumably so their oversized pickup truck-driving boyfriends/husbands can cut limber or climb utility poles. I'm sitting at a counter facing the very heart of Maryville, Tennessee: an uphill slope leading to Church Avenue, a parking lot and its sclerotic main artery, West Broadway. I'm listening to a 1979 album by Junior Wells and Buddy Guy called 'Pleading the Blues'. I am closing in on 53 years of age and spend every day living in the skin of a homeless headcase who had a winning lottery ticket in his hands and watched it fall into a river. Anger and sadness are my cohorts in this land that I loathe, the Worst Place on Earth, where diabetes is a competitive sport and Trump's gas fuels well-stoked fires of bigotry and racism and a strain of willful ignorance hard-coded into the corrupted gene