Crowded Houses and How We Operate

(I am starting something new, not new for a blog in any way shape or form, but new for our website. I am going to rant and hopefully be interesting in the process. I want to encourage all of my writers to do the same and just send me things to post whenever you want to get something off of your chest or feel you have something interesting to say. Just have it be kind of related to music. As you will see shortly, I strongly emphasize the “kind of.” I want to add as much diversity as we can.)

I live in a very crowded house. A little over a month ago my best friend Aaron, his girlfriend Brittny and myself moved to Albany on not much more than a whim. We found a tiny little townhouse right next to the hospital where Aaron and I work and squeezed all of our shit and piles of vinyl records inside. Sound travels through the apartment seamlessly and I swear you can hear the TV louder in any other room of the house than the room it is actually being watched in. Needless to say we step on each others toes, or to be more accurate and honest, we annoy Brittny and she annoys us back.

You see Aaron and I are of a like mind, and this was never more apparent to me than yesterday. Things started when I was trying to sleep, and suddenly Brittny was stomping around the apartment screaming at the top of her lungs about bullshit and how fucked up everything was. I, of course, got out of bed and told her in the nicest way possible to stop her bitching and shut the hell up so I could sleep (or nice for me.) It seems Aaron and I had eaten something she had planned on eating and this snowballed into an argument between the two of us over about a dozen other things that had been bothering her. Most predominant of these incidents was the fact that I was single handedly ruining her and Aaron's relationship and secondly that Aaron and I team up against her during arguments or when decisions are made.

The first incident I mention merely because I thought then that it was ridiculous, still do, and include it for comic effect (and if you‘re reading this darlin’, sorry. You live with a writer, everything is open game. Luckily, I’m pretty sure nobody reads this shit.) The second argument I had to admit there was indeed some credence to. Why is this? Is it intentional? Would Aaron sabotage his relationship by siding with me instead of Brittny knowingly? Would I take sides against Brittny just to be malicious? No, no, no and yes, but only because she has been pissing me off since we moved, however this is far too much of a chicken and egg scenario for me to even ponder investigating.

So why the clashing, the inability to cohabitate, the weirdness, the seriousness, the bitching and complaining? Because we come from different worlds, and not Venus and Mars. No, Aaron and I come from the world that has been put on wax and spun in our rooms on dozens of lonesome nights, a world overrun by zombies (be it the flesh eating variety or the type who are slaves to the rules of society we stop adhering to when we type up a story or rant or get in the car and just drive,) or a world where a sword fight in the snow is a perfectly acceptable way to spend a Saturday morning. Brittny lives in world deep inside a Coach purse, a world full of seriousness to the point of absurdity (at times), and a world probably a dozen times harder than ours because in ours you can simply lift up the needle or shrug it off your shoulder. Neither is right, neither is wrong, we just see things differently. I’m sure if she were to write her description of our world it would come out looking ridiculous, irresponsible and absurd (much like the Monkey King.)

At the end of the argument, while still conceding that Aaron and I certainly did agree more often than she and I did, I attested that she was blowing things out of proportion. Later that evening I was at work with Aaron, and suddenly “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” by Crowded House, pops into my head as the two of us were standing around talking. Later one of the nurses walked up to us and asked us to go down the hall and help a patient in room 11. On our way to the room I overheard Aaron singing the chorus to the same song that had just popped into my head. “Was that just on the radio?” I asked him.
“Nope, just stuck in my head.”
“We’re you just singing it?”
“Nope.”
“It’s been in my head for a couple minutes now too.”
“Yeah, not surprising.”

And that’s just how we operate. My point in writing this is partly as a testament to the power of friendship and partly to just say that it can be hard to fit two separate worlds under one roof. Sometimes when living in a crowded house you just need enough space. So Brittny, again, if you are reading this we will try to be more tolerant of your seriousness if you can find it to be more tolerant of our silliness. And also, if you are reading this, why? Shouldn’t you be blowing your boyfriend instead of reading my rant?

Charles Hall

"All I can do is write about it."
Ronnie Van Zant