Being Poor

My girlfriend and I are what some may call...poor. We both have decent jobs, but we are not good at saving money, we have a lot of debt to pay off and straight people get a 2% average increased income over gays (or is that men over woman). I don't know. The point is, we will have extra money sometimes and other times there will be a 2 day span of time where we have ABSOLUTELY no money. At times like these, checks come in handy.

We've written checks to Stop & Shop before for groceries and other things. But, Stop & Shop decided that we shouldn't write checks to them anymore. They actually suggested that we don't write checks to anyone ever again, but they only had it in their power to stop us from using this form of payment with them.

With this in mind, I want to take you back a few of weeks ago. The world was a better place...K-Fed and Britney were still together, Ed Bradley was not among the dearly departed and gas was 3 cents cheaper. My girlfriend and I wanted snacks, we had no extra money and we didn't get a paycheck until the next day. It was about 8pm (Eastern Snack Attack Time) and we were struggling for ideas on how to get food with no money.

After searching all of our old jacket pockets, dirty jeans and our neighbors trash can, we decided we would take the liberty of writing down on a piece of paper, "We owe you money" otherwise known as writing a check. The only problem was we only had a Stop & Shop card and they didn't allow us to write checks. A lightbulb lit over my head and I said, "Well that Gorettis supermarket isn't a big store...maybe they take personal checks without requiring some sort of fancy shmancy courtesy card". It seemed too good to be true.

We drove out to the store with my gas light on. We only had one shot to go somewhere with the amount of gas I had in my car, so we stuck with the plan...Goretti's or bust! We arrived and walked into the store.

I marched STRAIGHT to the customer service desk and said, "Excuse me, do you take personal checks?". The customer service man said, "uh...uh" (right then I knew I was in trouble)...he continued, "you need a courtesy card". I said, "How do I get one?"

He went on to explain that even if I signed up for one that night...it's after banking hours and they couldn't "check me out". Our hopes and dreams for nachos were crushed. We walked out of the store with our heads hanging low and bumped into someone we knew from our town. Let's just say it's VERY embarrassing walking out of a grocery store with NO groceries and then being asked WHY you are walking out of a store with no groceries by someone you sort of know. It is probably JUST as embarrassing as being a republican or worse...being a republican with a gay lover!

I guess we didn't really need the nachos after all. But at the time, it didn't feel that way. The next day we wrote a song about being poor and recorded it. You can hear the song at this link. There is no video...just audio, but we still put it on youtube.com. Tell me what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1lHgMjFC_o