The Pilot Light: Knoxville, Tennessee’s non-profit venue for creative, independent, and experimental music and performance for over 24 years. I ♥ You, Knoxville. There’s a show every night. $10 at the door. The place is rarely full, but there is always a line at the bathroom.
I’ve sat in this bathroom many nights over the past six years. It’s both the bare minimum and the height of maximalism. A sink and toilet, nothing else. Neither of the bathrooms has a mirror, but every inch of the walls is layered with writing. Maybe the absence of a mirror is a choice, designed to shift attention away from the external setting and toward an interior world. Where I am surrounded by the marks others have left behind, and in their urgency to write, I find traces of lives briefly intersecting with mine. I have a thought and I wanna get it out! Without the chance to see your own reflection, one might come to understand themself through the accumulated voices that inhabit this small space. Everyone looks familiar. Maybe there used to be a mirror in here, maybe they were a pain to clean, or got so covered in writing that it felt pointless. Ouch! My spirit. Either way, there’s a comfort in it—reading the walls and finding yourself there, at least in pieces.
I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager— sitting in the bathroom while music thrums behind the doors, reading the walls. Rock n’ Roll. I wasn’t sixteen in Tennessee, but someone who sat here was. The walls of the Pilot Light hold twenty-four years of frantic, messy confessions. A human condition. Not all of it has aged well, some of it is barely legible—the kind of stuff people forget they wrote as soon as they leave—but all of it matters because it’s still here, overlapping in an inscribed record of time. Anger is an energy. Lately, I’ve been thinking about annotations as echoes—pieces of time that reverberate between moments. If music is a language. The hum of a delay pedal after the song ends, stepping outside for a moment of stillness, running to the bathroom between sets to steal a moment of time for yourself. In those pauses, we find our voice.
The writing in The Pilot Light isn’t profound, but it’s a kind of truth. The Truth. These walls don’t just document life; they play with it. Each scribble, confession, drawing feels like it simultaneously reveals and conceals stories not only of a particular place, but also of the individuals who passed through, leaving pieces of themselves behind in hurried gestures. End Prisons. Abortion: plancpills.org. Please Recycle. It’s a conversation that’s always happening, after the music stops, after the lights turn off, and the doors are locked. Everythings changed…. These stalls, like countless others, are accidental archives of all of the fleeting thoughts that people felt the urge to capture. Each mark is a gesture toward permanence, though none of it will last. They’re not timeless; they’re time-bound, unfolding, overlapping, vanishing, only to return again in the present moment, as we sit and listen to what they have to say. In my universe i’ll live forever.
