Dante’s Slope (David Glenn Cox)

[Tace]

David Glenn Cox -- World News Trust

July 17, 2011 -- I have been at loose ends now for two, could it be going on three years?

Without a phone or an address to call my own, I have access to these things, but they aren’t mine. For the last six months I have been staying like Dick Cheney, in an undisclosed location. I wonder now, if I’ve become a gentleman of the road? I’ve been placing an ad in Craigslist offering to do day labor, I’ve built fences, stained decks, built brick retaining walls. No job application, credit check or drug testing needed. We talk, we meet, I do the job, I get paid and I go on my way.

I no longer have a sense of normality, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. None of my employers have tried to cheat me out of my time. No one has made the type of demands on me that conventional employers have made. No one has been disappointed in my work or made any complaints about either the caliber or quality. I could not have done this when I was living in Atlanta because in Atlanta, the economy there was prostrate. My ad offering labor for $12.00 an hour would have been ignored. It is only because I am in this enclave that there is work for me.

It is in a beautiful river valley, in a historic little town where the antique and boutique homes have been meticulously restored to an amazing degree. This is due to both the character of the people and the prosperity of the little town. It is both a bedroom community and tourist destination and as I jog through its tree lined streets I feel as if I am in Disney Land. It has a feeling of the unreal. It is all too perfect, my senses still can’t accept what my eyes see as normal because it’s not normal. It is an enclave and as I traveled out to meet another respondent to my ad I was reminded that it is an enclave. I saw in a little town just a few miles down the highway, the signs of which I was all too familiar in Atlanta.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/dantes-slope-david-glenn-cox.html

[bemildred]

1. Normality is way overrated anyway, just don't tell anybody where you are.

Abnormality can look pretty good when normality sucks.

[Demeter]

2. Second that