Count der Feet

Last night I got to thinking about easy money. As an erstwhile writer one of my holy grails is the perfect crime. Perfect being defined as undetectable, victimless, and surviving long enough to savor the fruits. Sadly the victimless caveat is the real bear trap. What kinda master criminal bozo would consider such a stupidly counter-intuitive ethical stumbling block? Yeah, I know. One like yours truly. Anyway it doesn't stop me thinking. It takes most people a whole day to make between 50 and 150 pounds. Over that range? You are in the top echelon, mate. Above the 90th percentile. You have to work hard for the money ... I never believed all the crap and Mark Knopfler was definitely in danger of chewing off his own tongue when wrote Money For Nothing. So I was musing on the level of effort involved in making my own money. I overlooked the problem of the hypothetical victim because I wasn't gonna take the idea beyond the intellectual process. The first step, in the chaotic mish-mash that is what passes for mentation in my milieu, was to speculate on mass production. There being no good reason, that I could think of, for having to do a thing over and over if it could be safely be done in larger batches with more opportunity for R&R within the schedule. It was at this point that Her Royal Highness emerged, blinking in the unaccustomed harsh halogen glare of my desk lamp. Quickly and guiltily her slid her out of sight beneath the lid of a nearby handy device. The device had the letters HP emblazoned upon it. Boldly, I depressed a button. The button was marked with the word Color. The button had a neighbor mark Black and between them were the words Start Copy. You know, I was startled and amazed by the realistic quality of the "twenty pound note" that emerged a few moments later. Nervously I turned the real McCoy over and replaced the printed sheet in the paper feed tray. Press. Five minutes later, after some squint-eyed action with the kitchen scissors I held a newly minted twenty pound note in my greasy fingers ... (I had been forced to extract the scissors from the half-loaded dishwasher. The scissors has last seen action at breakfast cutting the rind from bacon.) The grease helped to distress the note. Distress is a technical word employed by we professionals of the forgery world. A new made reproduction must be distressed, whether it be a Louis XIV escritoire or a bearer bond for mineral rights in the Patagonian Steppes ... the patina must be consonant with the article's supposed age, history and purpose. I began to crease and crumple my new money. Soon it resembled something I would expect to find in a trouser pocket after laundering. I wondered what a cycle of crumpling followed by pressing with a hot steam iron would achieve. I am still wondering this morning. I looked at the fruit of my first foray into forgery and I realised that I could do a lot better. The color copy cycle on my HP printer scanner is, well ... slack. The scanner can make an image up to 1,728 dots per inch. That would be pretty darn near photo quality. I suspect that the cheap old 11" by 8" paper I get from Staples by the ream could easily be made to resemble the high rag content paper used in money by repeated crumpling and hot steam pressing. But there remains that victim caveat of mine. Oh if only I weren't so damned principled! Meanwhile, yesterday I had my first group therapy session in anxiety management. There were many things that occurred to me as worthy of a specific mention, but in the cold light of day only one remains fresh. The others are not forgotten, they just don't seem so vibrant and important. Naturally, throwing 10 chronically anxious people into the same room isn't going to be any kind of picnic. However, as mature adults, we all strove to at least try to appear interested, awake, and willing to consider the possibility of maybe entertaining the notion of soon (but perhaps later ... no sense rushing things) contemplating actually saying something. One or two of us did. Me? What do you think! It was a 90 minute session. Halfway through we were told that we would take a break for a coffee and (or) a smoke. If I still smoked I wouldn't have been there. Anyway I joined a small huddle at the coffee machine. Inevitably we talked, inescapably -- perhaps -- we fell to comparing neuroses. Why is it that we too often feel compelled to indulge in the "I've had that, only worse", syndrome? Soon the hot brown liquid had been consumed and we filed back to the meeting room with its Swedish warehouse furniture. Someone had opened a window (British public buildings are rarely air conditioned and yesterday afternoon was warm, too warm for the heating to be on ... but British public buildings have the heat on from September 21 through to April 30 and the good ole long-shuffering Joe's Public must either shiver or perspire and like both discomforts with the equal-minded fairness of a true Brit.) In spite of the shared confidences around the god of office refreshments we reassembled in silence and waited in patient contemplation of the floor for the group "facilitator" to return from her cigarette break ... I guess even psychotherapists have incurable hang-ups then. I wonder why I am bothering. Even I managed to quit tobacco! For two minutes, I counted feet. There were 20; two of those were mine. I also wondered what thhose two minutes might have been like if some eldritch wizard were to appear and with a wave of a spangled stick revert us all to the age of 4. We would not have been counting the feet, that's for sure.