I never wanted to be sexually harassed at my 2019 Chicagoland welding job where I was the only woman on the floor, have a maintenance man come up behind me to bump his crotch against my ass, have the entire workplace exponentially retaliate against me the more I reported harassment to HR, be fired and have to negotiate a settlement check. Union membership started at the 3-month mark there, my anti-union manager bragged about all of the people he didn't like who he previously fired at the 2.5 month mark, and then he did the same to me. I wanted to keep that job, further my career in metalworking, become a steward, and leave the litigious stripper life behind me for good. Unfortunately that did not happen, and in 2019, I never really recovered from the depression of losing that job. I was also having a hard time getting a new craftsman job down South.

After my 2019 trip to Cape Canaveral where I watched a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, I applied to SpaceX in hopes of welding there. I received no call back. I applied to a craftsman job outside Asheville, North Carolina. When the Southern man called me to ask for an interview, he asked if he can speak with “Mr. Campbell.” When I told him I am Brandi who applied for the position, he expressed blatant disappointment, stated he must've read the resume incorrectly, tried to backtrack his desire to interview me, and then reluctantly agreed to an interview at 5AM the next morning. I was too depressed and grossed out to go to that interview and didn't feel like suing him, so I let it slide.

I found a welding job in Knoxville that was only offering to pay me $13 per hour. Coming from a union shop in Chicagoland where I was getting over $23 per hour as a first year welder, I couldn't bring myself to taking it. Even my first non-union entry level Chicagoland welding job in 2018 paid me $16.50 per hour. I decided to just stick with dancing for a while. The return to dancing would only be temporary, I told myself. I'd find a decent paying welding job soon enough, I told myself. I could become a traveling pipe welder, I told myself. I could find a permanent residence as soon as I found a welding job, I told myself. Casually and lackadaisically, I searched for welding jobs that would pay me like my Chicagoland union shop, but never found them. As the weeks went by, I sluggishly stopped looking for both welding jobs and permanent residences in Knoxville. Mouse's Ear money was so damn good. I took off from work a lot, making sure to heal myself by spending all those bucks I saved from not tipping Alex Cave, on having a good time.

Tennessee has an abundance of budget motels that are owned by people from India, much like the rest of the United States does. I've often wondered what Christopher Columbus would think about that interesting turn of events. It seems like many of the motels in Tennessee violate basic health standards. One time I took a vacation to Sevierville, and the motel room smelled like vaporized feces. They told me there was a problem with the air conditioner, but did not offer a discount. One nice motel is called the Valley Inn, located on Raccoon Valley Drive in Heiskell, TN. The husband was very domineering with his wife, she always looked sad in the lobby, but their clean accommodations kept people coming back. It was in my Raccoon Valley motel room where I first saw the 2019 Centerfold ruling from Ohio. The NLRB was supposed to have emailed me about it as soon as the judgment came in, but they forgot to do that. I learned about it a week or two later, from a Google alert that sent me a link to a news article that had already been written about it. I privately cried with joy when I read it, examining the decision's prose that was so eloquently articulated by Judge Gollin, Jamie Lynn Stevenson the hero of it all, a hero to the cause of stripper rights, my hero.

Motel 6 was a block or so away from Mouse's Ear, so it was often tempting to stay there instead of drive out to Raccoon Valley. I think people from India owned that one too, but it was managed by poverty stricken Appalachian white women. They were usually very suspicious and disdainful of me for existing. The rooms were sometimes filthy and sometimes clean. I used my own linens, and requested the cleaning lady take out the blankets provided because I did not need them. One time they forgot that I returned their blankets, accused me of stealing their blankets, and permanently banned me from staying there.

Knoxville is not an exciting place for vegans to eat take out food. There are a couple of boring restaurants that serve mainstream American vegan dishes, but they aren't good. The only way for me to find good vegan take out in Knoxville was to either go to Waffle House, or order Asian curries and stir-fries. I went to one place called Sticky Rice Cafe several times per week. It mainly serves Laotian and Thai food that can be veganized upon request. It is family owned and operated by a mother and her grown children, clean, and absolutely charming-- but then again, what Laotian-Thai restaurant isn't charming? When is Mango Sticky Rice, Bamboo Tofu Stir Fry, and Boba Tea not charming?

Right down the road from Mouse's Ear, there's a lovely Waffle House with a working jukebox. Sometimes in the early AM hours after work, I'd go there to get my smothered hash browns, put on some Prince, get my dry toast with jelly, OJ and coffee, and tip the hard working waitresses 50% or more of my bill-- much more than Alex Cave could bully me into giving to her.

Kroger has come a long way since my days as a little girl making fun of the Southern chain grocery store. The Knoxville Kroger by Mouse's Ear is modern, open 24 hours, with a variety of vegan microwavable entrees, vegan sandwich fixings, fruits, vegetables, and non-dairy milks. I loved looking down every aisle of the Knoxville Kroger and seeing the results of all those years of vegan campaigns against animal agriculture. Some people say there's no ethical consumption under late capitalism, but dammit if I don't try.

Knoxville as a city is boring to explore, with an uneventful small downtown, suburban feel outside of downtown, many drug addicts, and a monoculture collection of eateries and shopping centers that make it feel like any other boring, late capitalist city across the USA. I am a bit of a romantic in terms of geographic places I've never explored before, so I expected more fiddle music, more craftsman anti-authoritarian cooperative living, musical street performers, and a general fondness for life.

Day trips outside of Knoxville can be more interesting than the city. Sometimes on my days off, I'd drive out to Pigeon Forge to eat a Mellow Mushroom vegan pizza in one sitting, loiter around the Christmas hotel across the street, get free coffee from their lobby, and explore the kitschy touristy spots by foot. The rural hollers of Tennessee have a lot of carpetbagging homesteaders and preppers who live partially or fully off-grid, to get away from the rat race and await the industrial collapse. These kinds of people eat a lot of local wild animals for sustenance, but there are certainly vegan options as well, such as poke salad picked from the ground and sassafras tea from freshly sliced wild sassafras roots. Most rural Tennesseans who grew up in the area survive off of fast food and dollar stores. If wild greens aren't filling enough for a vegan in the hollers LARPing as a forager, there's sure to be a Papa John's nearby to fill up on bread sticks. Many Taco Bells and Burger Kings pepper rural Appalachian towns, with items that can be veganized as long as the meth head taking one’s order gets the specifications right. Chattanooga is an hour and a half South of Knoxville, with high elevation hiking trails that'll take one's breath away. The Cumberland Gap State Park is a little bit over an hour's drive North of Knoxville. It's easy to see bald eagles soaring in the clear blue skies at the state park, smell the mysterious moldy cedar aroma that encompasses Tennessee and The Smokies, and just weep at the majesty of it all. There is an abundance of hiking opportunity at Cumberland Gap State Park. Two hours South, opening up into the darling town of Gatlinburg, is Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s easy to find wild black bears around there, and they are awesome.

Passing Eastward through the woods, one will eventually end up in Western North Carolina. North Carolina has a lot of conservatives, anti-union pieces of shit republicans and libertarians, but also a lot of transient communist hipster types, who are attracted to the same romantic ideals of Appalachia that I was. Asheville is expensive and reminiscent of a miniature, Southern version of Portland, Oregon. Nearby Maggie Valley, NC, is a quaint and enchanting small tourist town with cuteness everywhere, including a roadside gem shop reminiscent of Colorado during the 90s. It has all kinds of geodes, amethyst cathedrals, and rose quartz. I bought some rose quartz at the Maggie Valley roadside gem shop, and used it to my advantage later at Mouse's Ear.

Late one night when I was driving from Maggie Valley to Cherokee, North Carolina, the fog was thick like milk against my windows. I couldn't see anything out of my windows except for the fog, and I broke out into a panic, unable to stop trembling as elevation suddenly increased. I took a narrow side road and sat there in park, trying to calm down and adjust my panic attack pinhole vision. I didn't realize how smoky everything got at night time up there, didn't want to continue higher up the mountains, but I also didn't know how to turn around on such a narrow road to get back down, so I just sat in my car for a while, hyperventilating in the fog. I'm not sure if I sat there for an hour. Eventually the fog thinned out and I was able slowly inch out in reverse to turn around and get back down. All of my subsequent trips to the mountains were during bright daylight hours.

The Eastern Band Cherokee of North Carolina are descended from a small but brave group of Cherokee who were able to resist being forcibly removed from their historical homeland by the disgusting United States military and sent on a genocidal death march called the Trail of Tears, through Tennessee and neighboring states, to Oklahoma, where most of the Cherokee were made to live at Andrew Jackson's orders, making way for the imperialist growth of the United States of America, a country which later sent imperialist baby killer soldiers, some of whom were recruited from Native American communities, to countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite their many shortcomings, I can’t help but admire all the Pashtun Taliban studs on their recent guerilla victory, considering the broader scope of their opponents. Whenever visiting Cherokee, I made sure to give as many of my Mouse’s Ear dollars to as many Cherokee stores, museums and cultural centers as I was able. It's a very special place.