Everybody loves a dead President Money changes hands, but hands change money.
Hands crumple bills in pocket or purse, smooth their creases and corners before feeding them into change machine slots: Hands scribble on slips, collect the carbons, tuck them away. Hands swipe the cards, or cut them in two.
Hands dump change onto bedroom bureaus at night, along with the keys.
Fingers flip coins, toy with them, toss them; or carefully place them, anticipating, on the silvery rail before the train comes. Fingers slip coins into piggy banks.
Fingers caress the milled edge.
The register slams: Coins wash metallic against their hidden jetty. Portraits of Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant, Franklin: sorted, aligned, stacked, banded: taped when damaged: pried inksmelling apart when new and stuck together.
Behind the O'ed glass of a
bureau de change the
caissier moistens her thumb and counts down bill, bill, bill. Does she transmute cash into hours and services, as I do?
I spend.
Note to self: Whoring the female equivalent of seigniorage.
{NA}
>> posted by John Psmyth
• 6/02/2005 06:01:00 PM
•
1 comments
1 Comments:
Brilliant.
I learned a new word from you today, John. Thanks for that.
As for female equivalents of seigniorage, whoring may be the simplest, most obvious, and most concrete one.
I suspect that wifedom is another but rather more complex and inflected equivalent.
I realise this as I engage in certain---and uncertain---calculations.
DTG xxoo
