True Story: The Trilogy of the Dollar: A Catastrophic Sweep Of Ontology: or: how silver one random fucking morning ended up in an offering box in Milan.
True story: while I was walking back in the break of dawn in Florida after having just turned up on the wrong side of the Atlantic and feeling that her reaction was all wrong — in the distance I had seen her shoulders slump, ever so slightly, and as a lesbian friend of mine remarked when I related the anecdote, all she responded was “oof!” — I stepped on something hard and unexpected in the grass sidewalk (I later discovered there were pumas in the area I had blitheringly ignorantly walked across as I made the big pulsing blue dot converge on the pale blue dot of hers on Find Friends… and it was a silver dollar. And I picked it up and held it and took stock of what the universe had just displayed in front of me, and I thought “ah… silver has crossed my palm, a transaction is now complete”… some confused association with Judas and his thirty pieces of silver… and I placed it in my Buzz Rickson’s MA-5 side pocket. And much later, when I next put on the jacket, the slightly altered angular inertia led me to believe there was some extra mass far out on the circumference, and sure enough, my left arm felt slightly heavier than the right one… and in the pocket, yeah: there was the silver dollar… coined in 1998, because of course… and I already had one, and I felt that it was a cursed object, and wished to rid myself of it, and after thinking I might sneak it into her letterbox as a baffling artifact that had to have something nebulous to do with James because he’s the only freak who ever does these inscrutably symbolic things… I settled on using it in the honour box system of electric memorial candles in the Milan cathedral, and after being pinged and ponged between different ushers who assumed I was a tourist or a ‘credente’, and that it was better to pass as a credente than have to pay a tourist’s fee and be herded in a crowd, I chose to enter on that side. And I dropped that cursed symbolic silver coin in the wooden slit of the offering box.. and I paused ever so slightly to feel it for the last time, and then… gasp! Irreversibly… I realised my grip on it, and I heard it plonk onto other change, sure to truly confuse a local treasurer and some manner of hierarchy of minor church figures who will have to figure out what to do with this damned silver dollar that isn’t even legal tender anywhere but worth definitely more than a dollar… and then I picked up a candle, and I lit it, and I set it down aside the others lit by genuine catholic credenti, and I beamed up a quick notional EOL to the Invisible Book-keeping Software In The Sky That Definitely Isn’t Karma Because We’re Too Cynical To Believe In That, acknowledging that the transaction had been concluded and that the books now balanced.
And if I square my Theory Of Mind of Gaia with what was actually within her information horizon, she knew nothing of the silver dollar, because I never told her nor her family or friends… she never knew I found a dollar while walking back to my place from her place. The whole symbol of the dollar was attached with meaning by me, and it would’ve made no sense to her. She would’ve obviously intuited some kind of weird thing from me, but as I mentioned it would be inscrutably symbolic and cryptic as to definitely be an artifact of something involving me, especially because of my old-school ways obsession with paper letters, usually written acknowledging that they’d likely never be sent, and she looked upon them, piles of them, and looked at me with severe scorn, and yelled that what was the point of writing them if I had never told her? and me in a “well akshually” moment was explaining that the only reason she was now screaming about me admitting to having feelings for her earlier was only brought about because I was, in fact, coming clean at the earliest possible moment, i.e., right now, whenever that computation actually got scheduled and executed, so well, er: yeah, this is now. And it was also before, but you just didn’t know. <Shrug>
There would’ve been some kind of unpredictable elastic reaction, “la meno governabile dei fenomeni: l’elastico as Lucia and I chortled in mathematese when were being smart-asses from the background in hard sciences of mathematics one and engineering the other, we were amongst the intellectually stunted cretins, and we combined, as another bloke who liked to have himself called FdP, which entirely uncoicidentally summarised both his actual name and Super figlio Di Puttana… “hanno un valore combinato altamente deterrente”. There would’ve been a commotion, an unpredictable wave-function collapse in the meta state of possible sequences of symbolic interpretations lead back incorrectly in method but randomly correctly in imputation, back to, well, me.
So I thought backwards from that mental impasse, and found where I could branch off into a symbolic space I was more comfortable with, and so being inherently “brass and incense” Catholics, as I and Rachel chortle about, I automatically reverted to that most unequivocally symbolic structure that took best part of a millennium to build… holy fuck now that’s a project management disaster on the order of generations… so the solution plopped out from the matrix of possible states up there in superposition, and plonked down on the centre of spiritual gravity that biased me into the central location in Milan, the very symbol of the place internationally.
They didn’t even start to consider what the facade would look like, on the order of magnitude of an actual generation-ship duration of time flight time to Alpha Centauri or Trappist-1 with some crazy future fusion impulse drive of unfathomable specific impulse such that the cumulated time dilation would make the whole universe in front of them bright and concentrated along circles of sudden Lorenz symmetry that would make no sense to the ape-minds in a state of panic, blaze through its whole history and suddenly be a cinder of heat-death with a burning blast of Uhru radiation hitting on the rear.
As to your earlier suggestion that you unctify this event with an epithet of Latin, well akshually, it already has one: “Post Tenebras, Tenebras”.
Anyway, it’s syndevs all the way down until they’re looping around in a hoop, syndevs all the way down and all the way up, reflecting just because they’re mirages looking in a mirror of liquid mercury.
