I ripped up a $20 bill

This evening, something possessed me to rip up a $20 dollar bill, one of those nice new sherbet-colored ones where Andrew Jackson looks like a blow-dried romantic poet*.

Now this was done, of course, in error-- I'm not Paul Allen, for christ's sake. This stray twenty happened to fall out of my wallet and into a rat's nest of gas station receipts, which tend to collect like hare-brained schemes in a gummy, unused corner of my purse until I decide that it is time to rip them up all at once, in an attempt to foil would-be identity thieves from seeing the highly classified number of gallons it takes to fill up my car. This woeful twenty, which had probably avoided being turned into coffee for weeks by this point, was rewarded for its cleverness by being ripped into 8 pieces of approximately equal size and then dumped into the downstairs trash.

From the bottom of the garbage I saw the mournful left eye of our 7th president looking reproachfully up at me from a nest of shredded Shell receipts, and I uttered some sort of expletive before dumpster diving for all 8 pieces of the shredded bill.

Taping money is no cakewalk. It rips all cattywampus. There are tiny subliminal pictures of stonemason handshakes and stuff on the back that are impossible to perfectly align with Scotch tape. When you are done, it looks like you are about to commit a crime if you turn around and spend it.

I replaced the twenty, now resembling Bree Walker's face, back into my wallet, ruminating over the most clueless cashiers with whom I regularly transact. Stay tuned for a report of my success in fobbing this off on the public... or being detained in the breakroom of Starbucks or "What the Pho" in plastic handcuffs while the shift manager calls the police.

*It was a clever Seattle PI journalist, I think, who used this phrase