i spent much of this beautiful day playing through the mendelssohn songs without words, a set i know fairly well, but i found a few pages in that volume that were new to me. i read once that a pianist, if s/he intends a career of it, should have read through the canon of standard piano repertoire by the age of… i think it was 17 or 18. the reportoire include the complete well tempered clavier, the 32 beethoven sonatas, the schubert sonatas (minus the early ones), the schubert impromptus, the chopin etudes, nocturnes, mazurkas, and most everything else by that composer, and a number of liszt pieces. i don‘t remember if mendelssohn was on that list, but the songs without words have been in my hands since forever, i think.
i went to costco for to get a prescription refill. i am becoming less and less enchanted by the megastore at the end of the road. while their products are not remaindered i find that they are seldom top of the line and the prices for stuff of interest to me are rarely bargains. i assumed no different when i signed on, but it‘s good to know instincts can be accurate.
i think i may have passed a bad $20 today. something about the bill was just not right. it looked like it was made of a paper very different from the other 20s that came from the ATM. i got $200 out of the atm and one of the 20s stood out as looking so different from the others. at the moment i thought nothing of it, really, since these newer $20 bills have some random inconsistencies about them. but this one looked smaller than the others, and just differentin odd ways. si when i went to buy a couple of hot dogs at the costco food court i was a little alarmed when the cashier held the $20 bill up to the light, holding it in varoius ways, then asking the manager if the bill was fake. that, i say, has never happened to me, though with 1% of all paper currency said to be fake it stands to reason that i, like anyone, have passed plenty of fake bills. i would think, though, that the fake bills are clutered toward the bigger ones, which i seldom handle, except for to wipe my ass. the cashier handed the 20 to th emanager who held it up to the skies and pronounced it good. “it‘s good.“ i don‘t know what these cashiers know about these things but i admitted to the cashier that i thought the bill looked weird, too. it made me nervous because i thought that passing a bad piece of currency was punishable by a trip to guantanamo, regardless if the paying party knew the bill was fake. i had plans for the day which did not include 9 years in captivity with al qaida terrorists on account of passing a bad $20 bill dispensed to me by a bank ATM. for 2 hot dogs.
i reminded me of a time i got a new scanner and tried to use it to scan a $20 bill. this was for my stuff written on money web page, which i‘ve been doing for a long time, in fits and starts. the new scanner gagged on scanning the $20 bill, which was one of the newer bills with a blizzard of gold 20s on the back and other intricate subtleties. the scanner simply refused to scan the $20 bill, and i eventually learned that this was a“security feature“ found in many new scanners intending to prevent counterfeiting. i do not have a problem with the “feature“ so much as the fact that canon would not document it or even acknowledge that this was happening, forcing me to waste a couple of hours thinking i had a defective piece of shit scanner.
when i worked at the record store someone paid for a pile o CDs with a fake $100 bill that looked like it had come off a ditto machine. that cashier was ridiculed for months. it was his first day on the job so he got a pass, but you wonder if collusion goes on with these little scams. as in, you‘re my friend and you work at a retail store, and i pass hundreds of dollars in bad bills knowing you‘ll accept them. these days, with surveillance everywhere, i think you‘d get caught more quickly than in the past, assuming you were not greedy about it.
that little encounter with the hot dog cashier today had me thinking about the world of fake money and counterfeit bills. and coins. at the record store the security guys talked about all the scams they knew about, though i can‘t remember too many now. there are so many of these underground economy scams you can get away with forever if you don‘t get greedy.
at the supermarket later today i spotted a wistfully beautiful woman in the cold cuts department. i was mostly checking her out as i stepped through theaisles, passing her several times as she stood in the same spot, until i realized she‘d been standing in place for 10 or 15 minutes, studying every package of baloney on the rack. she may have looked at the back of the packages, with the nutritional information, but i never saw her do that. she simply stared at the front of the packages, looking at the shrink-wrapped baloney, her mouth slightly agape, her mind going somewhere but where i could not imagine. one time i passed she had a jumbo package of oscar meyer baloney, close to her face, her eyes clamly considering the language written thereon and the contours of the baloney. the next time i passed by she had a smaller package of store brand baloney, held similarly close to her face. she needed this time, it seemed. she needed 10 or 15 minutes of solitude in which to make a proper decision about which package of baloney to take home. i imagine it was not about the baloney but the solitude. the alone time. the escape. escape from what i do not know, but maybe she had innocently passed a fake $20 bill and this was her first foray into civilized society after 12 years in detention among terrorists. i looked for serial numbers and prison tattoos on her beautiful body but saw none. her feet were JUMBO compared to the rest of her, suggesting babies, baloney-craving babies, but no rock on her left ring finger, though that means little, if anything, that old-fashioned bridal crown shared by the child-bearing and their confession-recepticle nuns alike.
