12/07/2022
God Willing, I’ll Find The Perfect United States Belt To Move My Family To
By Charles Richardson
I’ve been slaving away here in Detroit as a General Motors Sales and Design Consultant for about fourteen years now, and let me tell you, it’s been a whole mess of ups and downs, bitter and sweet. However you prefer to express a balanced mix of good and bad, that’s what it’s been for myself and the rest of the Richardson Family. Now that my “higher-up”, as I’ll euphemistically put it, has threatened me with potential layoff, I think it’s high time I assessed the benefits and detriments of the US belt in which I currently reside, and, upon a finding of a preponderance of detriments, migrated to a belt more rife with opportunity, natural beauty, and an overall sense of peace and comfort than life in the Rust Belt has afforded.
The problem is, which belt would we move to? It’s not like life comes with an instruction manual for leaving your home belt. Additionally, wandering into fresh belt-territory could introduce all sorts of unexpected uncertainties. Say we hightailed it down to the Banana Belt, and found that simply living in a milder climate did nothing but produce homesickness for our original belt? We could attempt to settle in the Borscht Belt, but to me that’s too close to our home belt for comfort.
Honestly, since myself and the wife and kids have been subsisting okay just adjacent to the Grain Belt for years now, I see no reason not to take a swift drive south to visit Uncle Cornelius in the northwest section of the Indiana Gas Belt, before heading down and beginning a cozy existence complete with the Southern charm of the Cotton Belt. This might mean co-existing in the Rice Belt, but thank God Almighty there’d be no overlapping with the God-forsaken Lead Belt, where my cousin Julius died in the lead mine collapse outside of Jefferson City. Talk about a belt attached to melancholy memories.
I’m really not dead-set on any particular belt at this time. I mean, what if we picked up and made the move to the Cotton Belt, and then we suddenly heard the rustling of a better life wafting toward us from the Unchurched Belt out West? Sure, moving there might also mean concurrent life in the Fruit Belt, but I can see it now – suddenly I’d start receiving funneled information on the Pine and Salt Belts, which I’m sure grow grass richly green when you’re living on the other side of the fence.
I’ve discussed the matter with my family, and they’ve kindly told me to fret not, for we’ll remain a close-knit bunch wherever the wind may blow us belt-wise. Nonetheless, I can’t stop spending six out of every eight hours in bed going over my mentally stored belt-accurate map of this great nation. That’s probably why I keep hallucinating at work when I try to convince the Chevrolet crew that rust-proofing is a dead-end idea. When they start humoring me, I simply say a silent prayer that those drips find their way to the Stroke Belt. I could just dangle some peaches in front of them, and Southeast bound they’d be.
Ultimately, I’ve decided that as long as I end up near the Bible Belt, I’ll be close to Utopia. It seems to overlap with all the other belts, and chances are wherever the Richardson Concern moves, we’ll be within an arm’s reach of a church prone to bible-banging. Hell, that might even mean getting to stick my tongue out at the folks over in the Jello Belt, while almost choking on the mangos I’m force-feeding myself while on vacation in the Fruit Belt.
God bless all belts of this great nation.
