9 to 5

Something rather alarming happened over the weekend. For many this wouldn't seem alarming, but for me, well, it's a different story. We ran out of beans in the cupboard. I being a crazy stockpiler of canned goods and former grocery store employee, maintain my cupboard like a grocery shelf. As soon as I buy a can of beans, it goes behind the previous cans so that the oldest can is at the front and will be grabbed first. This is something we called "Rotating Shelves" in my previous life.

Being aware of shelf rotation when shopping, I pull cans off the shelf and buy the cans at the back knowing that they are the freshest. I do the same with milk and almost everything I buy, digging until I find the items with the latest expiration dates.
These neurotic behaviors most specifically the stockpiling have been brought into question in the past. With slightly raised eyebrow and subtle smiles, my boyfriend looks at me with that adoring look given only to one capable of coupling with someone as neurotic as my self.

We went to the corner store to put a bandaid on the situation and buy a few cans of beans only to discover that the beans were marked at 95 cents a can. I was shocked. 95 cents a can, really? I thought for sure someone dyslexic must have just started working at the grocery store, switching the 9 to a 5 and vice versa. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Upon visiting another store I discovered an outrageous bean price of $1.29 a can, I accepted the sad state of affairs with a tinge of regret. If only I had bought more cans of beans 6 months ago when they were 59 cents a can. It's amazing that the price of beans, a staple of my poor man's diet has doubled in less than a year.

I hate buying dried beans, but it looks like I will now be stockpiling dry beans in mason jars.

As a child, I remember being at my grandparent's house on their farm in Oklahoma. They had this walk-in pantry with enough food to survive for months without going to the store. Something about it always creaped me out because half the labels were faded and tinted a shade of green. The brands were some I had never heard of and I even think perhaps some of those cans had been placed in the cupboard during the 1st great depression. We find ourselves on the brink of a possible second great depression. My grandmother, having been forced to move to California during the dustbowl (see grapes of wrath aka her life story) has been preparing all her life for a second great depression. Knowing it was only a matter of time, she has been patiently building her reserves.

I live a world away in New York. I was born into the commercial excess of the 1980's and the proliferation of Public relations and marketing to the masses. I was part of the MTV generation but grew up in a town that didn't have MTV. I didn't even see MTV until it had morphed into the epicenter of reality television, a plague that has swallowed popular culture and vomitted out people like Paris Hilton, Clay Aiken, and a heard of forgettable ladder climbers clinging to their five to fifteen minutes of fame. Despite the distance in time, space and generation, like my grandmother I find myself stockpiling canned goods, building my reserves and preparing for some sort of tragedy. Sometimes I wonder if this makes my cynical, practical, crazy or all of the above. No matter what it means, instinctively, like a squirrel burying nuts, I forage through the isles of grocery stores looking for choice nuts to bury until some sort of winter brings hunger. It is impulse. It is instinct. It is what needs to be done. The urgency for which this task holds in my conciousness is ever growing. It is this urgency which scares me most.

We Can't Have Nice Things

Photo by Carrie Thomas

I remember knocking over a china vase while fighting with my sister. It was probably the 5th grade. I remember getting super glue and piecing it back together to cover all traces of our sin. My mother used to say that we couldn't have nice things. I think that I was a big part of this.

I remember staining the carpet with bleach. I had white shoes that I wore to gymnastics and they had turned an earthy shade of brown. I took a bottle of bleach and cotton balls and sat Indian-style on the carpet, dapping the bleach on the offending spots. I was so proud of my accomplishment until I looked down at the half dollar sized circles of bleached carpet. I grabbed magic markers and shoe polish to try and fix the mistake, but I was found out. My mother was furious. I had to sit in a chair without moving until my father got home. I think this was the last time in my life that my father whipped me with a belt.

I was standing in line this week at the post office, listening to music when the sound stopped pumping into my left ear. I discovered that my nice headphones, a christmas gift had started to come apart due more than likely to the rigors of abuse that I have inflicted on them. For the last week, I have been listening to music through one ear. The strange thing is that I feel like I can hear what should be coming through the broken headphone, but it's just in my head. I'm completing a circuit like an amputee who feels the need to scratch a limb that is no longer there. Yes, We just can't have nice things

Life Was Simple

In the third grade I began to dabble in the planting and tending-to of Petunias and other girly flowers. The first signs that I was starting down the slippery slope towards homosexual depravity. It was around this same time that I built the protoype for my first time machine.

These simpler times are fond to my heart. I spent most of my childhood playing in the dirt, riding horses and creating imaginary worlds and languages that only I could see and speak.

Often, I long for the simplicity of a world where the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby and the strange behavior of overproduced washed up white trash pop princesses are not considered newsworthy items.

Critters

Photo by the gorgeous & Talented
Carrie Thomas

When I was in the 4th grade, my parents were called into my gradeschool to deal with the backlash of my hyperactivity. I had apparently become a distraction to the other students by making strange noises. Most of these students were probably so harmed by my noisemaking that they were unable to acheive success beyond the dead-end jobs they found in that small Oklahoma town.

I take full responsibility for their failure.

Of course my life of audio pollution didn't end in the 4th grade. I am a serial noise maker. I have always been fascinated and oddly connected to animals and as such have found the need to communicate with them. I used to spend hours in my apartment on 5th avenue in Brooklyn watching the pigeons dancing on the adjacent rooftop,studying their sounds and later calling them to me, much like a siren, though
I meant no harm.

The gravity of my noisemaking became undeniably apparent on a trip to Boston to visit Chan Chuy Yi or Chewy as I liked to call her back in the day when we lived in our first roach infested apartment,and I worked 80 hours a week for an entire summer.

We were walking through Boston Common when I decided that I wanted to chat with the squirrels. I started my little clicking/nibbly noises and it made chewy smile. Squirrels began coming towards us from all directions, not two or three but at least a dozen. Soon,We were surrounded by squirrels and they were closing in. I'm not sure what I was saying to them exactly, but it must have been quit intriguing.

Chewy clutched my arm and ordered me to stop.
I wonder what would have happened if I had kept talking to the squirrels.

Two nights ago, I was walking on Montague street at 1 in the morning, guitar in tow. I stumbled upon a churchyard where two rats were having a very intense conversation. I stopped and listened for a while. Sometimes, you have to have conversations with the critters or at least pay attention to what they have to say.

We all have to get along in this world, and I hope that by doing my part, the critters feel a human connection. I'd rather introduce myself to the rats and be on speaking terms than meet them in a dark alley when they're having a bad day. It's best to establish a cordial relationship from the get-go. Don't think for a second that rats don't talk by the way, if you piss one of them off, you are in serious trouble.

The Cruelty of 13

They say that 13 is an unlucky number. For some reason, it is a number that seems to always pester me. I had to work very hard to get around there being 13 tracks on my album, because 13 is just what it wanted to be. I reached into my bag of tricks to fix that one.

I was 13 years old when I lost my virginity. I was so in love with J. He was 6'4" tall and far too developed for his age(14). I had a secret crush on him and would steal glances when I thought no one was looking. I guess he was looking more than I realized because it was he that approached me. It was he that invited me to his grandmother's house to help him with his math homework. I lost my virginity in his grandmother's laundry room up against the washing machine. I know, it sounds like some sort of slutty pulp story, but it was not.

I was in love with him. I just wanted to hold his hand, kiss him, and have his adopted chinese babies. He was determined that he was straight. He would go on a date with a girl and tell me that things were over between us, that I should never contact him. I was crushed repeatedly by J. Yet I was always there when he came back around. Mind you, this was in a town of 1,000 people in Kansas. We were a dirty little secret.

13 was such a hard age. I was very very skinny and scrawny. I was always reading or singing or listening to classical music. I was overly sensetive and could cry at the drop of a hat. The brutality of 13 year old boys is the fiercest you may ever encounter. They look for any sign of weekness and they feed on it.

There was not a single day that I did not walk down the hallway to hear the word fagggot thrown at me, spat on me, or kicked against my shins.

I hit rock bottom at 13 when I contemplated murder. The torture had grown to such an extent that I was torn between two choices, murder of self(suicide) and murder of M.

M. led the verbal and physical assaults against me. I began contemplating killing him. I know. It sounds horrifying. You couldn't possibly be as horrified as I was at the time. I decided that first I would speak to M and try to reason with him. I had to try every alternative before doing something so unforiveable.

I approached him one day.
I asked him to please just leave me alone. I stressed that I didn't do anything to deserve the way he was treating me. I asked him why.

His response was that I was a faggot. That was the why.

As reasoning did not work, my next step was to speak with the principal. I told him how unbearable the torture had become. I told him that I dreaded going to school every day. He told me that doing anything about it would only make it worse and that I was a little old to be a tattle tale.

My final resort was to talk to my parents, but I was too embarassed to even tell them what people were saying. I couldn't talk to them.

My mother was going to nursing school nights in a town about an hour away. My father had feared for her safety so had purchased a hand gun for her protection.

There was a cabinet over the kitchen sink, the highest cabinet in the room. In it was the scotch my father would occasionally drink when my sister and I were in bed and the gun my father had purchased for my mother.

I was in the house alone one afternoon. I climbed up on top of the sink and reached into the cabinet pulling out the gun. I just stared at it for minutes. I thought about what would happen if I shot M. I thought about the fact that I was 13. Would they try me as an adult? For a few moments I was sitting on the witness stand explaining that it was self defense, that I was being tortured and slowly killed from the inside. I had no choice. Then I saw M's Mother, crying, staring at me with such anger and loss. I knew at that moment that I couldn't murder another human being. I didn't have it in me.

I put the gun in my mouth and held the trigger. I saw my mother, walking in to the house, finding my body in the kitchen floor. I saw grief like I had never imagined. I pulled the gun out of my mouth and put it back in the cabinet.

From that point forward I decided that I would let them hurt me. I would take their anger and their insecurity into me. I would feel it surge through my body. I would let the tears flow down my face. I would let them tease me for crying. I would just let it happen. There was no choice. I never stopped crying. I never became numb. I spent the next three years taking in their rage and letting it out in the form of tears and poems. The poems slowly turned to songs.

At age 16 I petitioned the board of education to let me graduate from high school early. I had been taking classes through correspondence to fulfill the credits I needed to graduate. I had been planning my escape. When my request was granted, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief and a lifting of so much weight. Yes, 13 is a cruel number indeed.

Just a note: I feel that the work of organizations that provide a supportive environment for GLBT youth is so important. I didn't have that support when I was growing up, and I know that it would have helped me so much if I had.

Here is a list of organizations that provide that much needed support.

The most popular coaster in all the world

I fear rejection. I can't help it. I was teased horribly growing up and I am a sensitive person. I was the kid that nobody would sit with in the cafeteria. I spared myself from feeling rejection by just not eating lunch. I was a long distance runner, so I would do laps around the track after classes and then scurry off to my voice lessons. After that, I would rush home and eat an entire box of cereal in one sitting. God bless my mother who had to do the grocery shopping. I was this extremely skinny boy with twig arms and when I graduated from high school I weighed 134 lbs. I am the same height now and weight 160lbs if that gives you any idea of how tragically twiggy I was.

I was called a faggot on a daily basis in high school and unlike some people who can develop this tough skin or retort with some witty comment, I would cry. Once the tears started to flow from my eyes, I would cry for hours and I would be called a faggot once again for crying so, I would just cry that much harder. Slowly I would drift further and further into myself where everyone and everything around me was nothing more than distant echoes.

Something happened when I turned 13. The girls began to bleed. The boys began to grow stubble and somehow when the hormone button was switched on, it just all went wrong.

Rejection and fear of it... I carry them with me even today as I am in the final stages of completing my first album. I think of disappointing albums I've purchased where I ended up finding some alternate use for these cd's. I once scraped ice and snow off of my car window with a cd. I won't say whose album it was so I don't ruffle any feathers. I just hope that my cd when completed doesn't end up being the most popular coaster in the world.

Attached to my meals

Barely an eyebrow had lifted when I turned around to the woman and told her
that she should shave her legs more often. Mind you, she was not a stranger. We had become familiar enough that I could tell her these things. After all, my hand did graze her leg and I did lose a layer of skin. There was justification no chauvinistic malice involved in my statement. So, please forgive me if I have offended your sensibilities.

We forget at times that women and men are both just beasts, groomed and polished for a walk through the park and then down to the meatpacking district. We can pretend to slum it like the people who actually have money, but want to look like people who are barely getting by. We actually don't have money, and we wear no pretense.

I've never been one to even desire having lots of money or fame or any of those things that constitute some sort of American dream. I just want to know that the next meal will be coming and that I have somewhere to rest my head, even if it is someone's couch. I just want to be happy and maybe to be loved and held. These are simple desires.

I like dives. I like motels with missing letters and movie theaters that play only one movie about a week before it comes out on Video. I grew up mostly in Kansas and Oklahoma in small towns. These are the towns that have been forgotten by the rest of the world, in dire need of a new coat of paint, but barely getting by. These are towns where people "come to town" from their farms actually wearing cowboy boots crusted with cowshit, not a fashion statement.

We milk cows not because we're Paris Hilton doing the simple life, but because we need milk for our oatmeal. We slop hogs from a bucket of odds and ends leftovers kept under grandma's kitchen sink. We go into the dark creepy chicken coup and remove eggs from underneath angry hens as they peck our hands. We fry those eggs in a thick black cast-iron skillet with the grease from bacon that came from a pig we killed with our bare hands. We are closer to nature and family and life and poverty and God, than many will ever be.

The older I get, the more I miss this kind of simple existence. You lose respect for the planet and for life when you buy your food from a grocery store. The first time you eat the meat of an animal that you raised and loved and became attached to, is such a life changing experience. Maybe it's why I was a vegetarian for 4 years. I became too attached to my meals. I wish I were more attached now.



photo credit- Carrie Thomas