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Monday, March 23, 2009
I don't post a lot anymore. In fact I really don't blog that much anymore. I just tweet and poke. Actual sentence structure seems to have eluded me. I don't know why, after months away and at 11:23 at night I decided that now is the time to start. I'm a little wired from today. I tend to be a little wired from life lately. I am still fat. I am in a job I hate, working for people I despise. The worst part is that I don't see a way out of it. I am trying to get ahead, but my fate doesn't seem to be in my own hands anymore. There's so much more that I could say about it, but I lack the skills. I lack the practice. I slip on the discipline of keeping myself fresh enough to express myself coherently. But I have to start somewhere. What fired me into action tonight was watching a local news story. It seems that a jogger in an Atlanta neighborhood was stabbed in the past day or two. The person was just jogging, and some unknown assailant jumped out of a shrub and attacked them. That was not the focus of the news story. The story was about how the police had gone into the neighborhood to a community meeting, to tell the residents how to protect themselves against such crime. A quick shot of the crowd showed that it was mostly older people, gray-haired residents. It occured to me that I moved here from a place where crimes like that one are really few and far between. I do not think for one minute that the rural area I came from was any kind of an oasis from crime. Plenty happened there. It ain't here, though. I moved almost a dozen years ago to an area with crime rate that is read about nationally. The numbers here are compared to cities across the nation and around the world. The crime statistics in Wilkesboro, NC are not. I didn't start writing this because I'm outraged and incensed and all up in arms over the crime rate. I started this because I wondered why I came here. I wondered if I knew that this was part of the price I would pay for living in this city. (I should probably point out here that I do not live in Atlanta city proper, but that I live in a suburb. I live in Metro Atlanta. Atlanta itself is actually not that large. Metro Atlanta is one of the largest and most populated areas of the United States. I live in a mosty white northern area, with an ever-growing Hispanic population. And I use too many parenthesis when I write.) Large-scale crime has not spread to this area. My neighborhood is definitely a breeding ground. It's only a matter of time. There is a local association here that has a website. This association was started because the spread of methamphetamine in this area is growing. The association also promotes growth and business in the hood, which is good, but if you get on the website, you'll find that they mostly promote programs to eradicate drugs and slummy housing and garbage and unsightly illegal dumps from the neighborhoods and housing developments in the area. We live near a lake. The Allatoona Yacht Club has their clubhouse and docks not more than three miles from my house. Between here and there is a neighborhood with some large, expensive homes. There are also about ten trailer parks in that span. The trailer parks have become filled with deadbeats, drug houses, and unemployed people of less than stellar reputations. How do I know? I'm dead-smack in the middle of one. I have to admit, I think most of the local meth labs have been run out of business or burned down. We kind of have a lull in the action around here. I am convinced that someone, sometime in the not-too-distant future will break into my house. I don't have guns around. I am beginning to wonder why not.
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