I'm Going To Live In Margaritaville

I’m angry.

Why does nobody work as hard as I work? Why do other people get to watch TV and read books and go places and take vacations and sleep? I can’t do any of those things! I have to WORK! I can never stop working!

It enrages me when my boyfriend texts me about some television show he’s watching. Can’t he see (from his house which is 30 minutes away) that I’m WORKING? How dare he relax! What a slob, what a loser, what a maroon.

I work every waking minute because I have a dream.

And that dream is to one day live in Margaritaville.

You see, I’m obsessed with the chain of retirement villages owned by Jimmy Buffett called Latitude Margaritaville. I saw them for the first time when they were a prize on Wheel of Fortune. Which feels appropriate somehow. It’s definitely the kind of place you’d expect Pat Sajak and Vanna White to shill for.

I looked them up online and was sucked into an aqua and seafoam world from which I shall never emerge. The homes are the kind of exquisite dollhouses surrounded by palm trees that you just don’t see in places like, oh, say, Ohio.

I must have one. As God is my witness, I will one day own a home in Latitude Margaritaville.

I watch the promotional video and cry like it’s an ASPCA commercial narrated by Sarah McLachlan. Go. Go watch one of their promotional videos and tell me you don’t well up a little. I’ll wait.

So do you want something from the Beach Collection or the Conch Cottages Collection? I’m partial to the Dreamsicle, mostly because it clocks in around $250,000 (not including taxes, insurance, and HOA fees to cover all the free liquor and bar snacks).

It has a Den/Hobby room. I don’t even know what that means. Someplace to keep all of my jigsaw puzzles with one missing piece?

Latitude Margaritaville. Your new home in paradise!

“You never know when Jimmy Buffett will show up!” the website threatens.

Because let me be very, very clear about one thing — I cannot stand Jimmy Buffett. I don’t like his music, I don’t like his face, I don’t like that his acolytes are called “Parrotheads”. I’ve never even had a margarita. I hate the sound of steel drums. I don’t own anything that’s pastel. And yet…

And yet I am laser-focused on living in an entire community that is devoted to the man, the life, the legend: Jimmy Buffett.

I have clearly lost my mind.

Not least because retirement villages like Latitude Margaritaville and the weirdly named The Villages (also in Florida, God help me) skew heavily Republican. I’m not going to get along with anyone who lives in any of those places. My conversations will of necessity all be weather and food-related. There will be no other safe topics. Even food is probably skating on thin ice.

I work and I work and I work. I’m working now. This doesn’t look like work, but it is. Writing is just as compulsive and exhausting as anything else I do.

I identify heavily with the character Ellen Burstyn plays in the movie Requiem for a Dream. That’s me, chewing caffeine pills and grinding my teeth, dreaming about a glorious future that will never come.

I wish I could really explain what Latitude Margaritaville represents for me. It’s not just the new, clean, not-falling-apart homes that each have two (count em’, two!!) bathrooms and enough electrical outlets. It’s not just the fact that you don’t even need a car because you have a golf cart and you can go everywhere you could possibly need to go in a golf cart. Grocery stores are right there! Clinics are right there!

Apparently the place is 90% pool. I can’t swim, but I like to dangle my feet. And the ocean is only 20 minutes away (by car, so you still need a car, and if there’s an ocean I assume there’s probably hurricanes, but we’re not going to talk about that right now).

I am drawn like a fly to a lightbulb by the idea that if I lived in Latitude Margaritaville, I would become one of those people. I would be the kind of person that enjoys socializing. That actively seeks out other people. That tries new things (line dancing! water aerobics! pickleball!). Surely, I would have no other choice. I would be incorporated into the hive mind and finally, finally be happy.

When I told my boyfriend that I wanted a sense of community, he said, “Since when?”

Look. People can change. And if I work hard enough and long enough and deny myself every last little sliver of enjoyment, I firmly believe that I shall one day achieve Nirvana.

Which in this case is called Latitude Margaritaville.