Sometimes I miss the barracks...

​I’m not going to lie, sometimes I miss living in the barracks. Now before you get started on inspections, cleaning, the lack of cooking methods, small ass fucked up rooms, the heat and AC being out, people being able to come into your room and fuck with you at any hour of any day, and idiots being idiots, and the general lack of freedom, let me elaborate on why.
I don’t sleep much. Even if I’m in bed before the sun goes down, I usually lay there until after midnight just staring at the back of my eyeballs. More often than not I opt to try to something proactive with my insomnia, usually something art or book related, unless I’m just not feeling it in which case I dive down the YouTube rabbit hole. I also like to drink. I’m perfectly fine either throwing them back with people in a bar or downing it while I’m alone at home working on a project. 
The issue is, I don’t have anyone to talk to around here. I live in a nice house, but it’s out in the styx. They just put in a convenience store, but besides that and the church, the closest anything is at least a fifteen-minute drive, and even that’s just gas stations and a McDonalds. There’s not a whole lot about the Marine Corps I really miss. I was there for the clowns, not the circus. What I miss about the barracks, the only thing I can come to think of, was going outside at literally any hour of any day and find someone in the smoke pit to bullshit with for a while. I love my wife to death, but I’m convinced she’s part Koala because she sleeps twenty hours a day.
I only have one drinking buddy that lives around here, and he comes over every now and again, but besides that most of my friends in the area are a two or three hour drive away. Then after that the rest of them are in a different time zones. It’s not that I don’t have friends, it’s that I don’t have any around here. And even if I did, what are most people going to do when you text them “I’m bored. You wanna hang out?” at midnight on a Tuesday?
I think that’s why I go live on Instagram so much. I just want someone to talk to about dumb shit in the middle of the night.
I do have my buddy Chuck coming up later this week though. He’s gotta be my favorite house guest, especially when it’s just him. We sit down in the garage, crack open every beer I could find within a thirty-mile radius, crank up the music and rock out until the some comes up. More than once I’ve only gone to bed because my wife comes down stairs at six am and tells me I need to be functional when she gets home from work in eight hours. Fun fact, if you take an electric guitar, that’s plugged in, and play music on your phone and stick it to the pickup, it’ll transfer through to your amplifier.