Margaritaville

You would think that growing up with ten brothers and sisters I would be able to live with only one other person in the house. The truth is that ten siblings will make you quite happy to live all alone when you grow up. Sometimes I just want everything to be quiet and Mark can make that difficult. Every once in awhile he will move on up behind me and scare the living shit out of me. Not on purpose. I will be so relaxed and into my own thing that all he has to do is say something and I jump out of my skin. He has a very loud voice that breaks the quiet of the moment, and startles me. And then there is this thing he does where he sits three rooms away and screams across the house for me to bring him something. A snack, a soda, a margarita, something like that. Once again, living alone would make that go away. But that's not going to happen. I am stuck with loud Mark, and two dogs who like to go out at odd moments.

Saturday I was up in Evanston, Illinois and I came across  a used stereo component shop. Back in the olden days everybody had component stereo systems. One piece would be a tuner so we could listen to the radio, another would be a turntable for records, another would be a tape deck, and in later days a CD player. If you are under twenty years old, Google those things. Anyway, I have had that whole bunch of components sitting in my office now for three years. The main piece that you plug everything into broke and rendered them useless. So I wandered into that stereo shop and walked out ten minutes later with what I needed to make all my stuff work. Now I can sit back with my headphones on, crank that stereo up loud, and ignore everything around me. It's as if I live all by myself, in my own little world. I can't hear a thing other than my music. Mark can get his own margarita.