Cube Deconstruction

While demonstrating the mechanics behind the skeleton of a Rubix Cube, JD empties the contents of his pockets onto the table.

I offer to buy the 1963-D Kennedy Half Dollar.

Super Mario Lemonade Stand

True to their continuing commercial hustle, Mario and Luigi open Lemonade Stands to earn precious Coins.

A Harry Potter collaboration event sees Golden Snitches as a restocking currency.

Coin Stack

Every coin in this stack is over 10 years old:

- a Lincoln wheat cent

- an Indian head cent

- a shield nickel

- 3-cent piece

Too bad someone knocked the stack onto the ground and deliberately scraped the faces across the concrete.

Field Trip

Escorting children off the school bus at the Natural History museum,  Steve finds a roll of pennies.

Opening the roll, he finds a 1944 cent with the Lincoln Memorial reverse, and a 1924 Barber dime, both coins literal one of a kind unique impossibilities.

3-in-1 Show

Documentary on United States pennies mentions "zero-cent" blanks. One in our collection has a hole in the middle and is strung with fishing wire.

At a birthday party banquet, in a room with broken tiled-glass doors, there's a lenticular picture of me in a black sport coat, seated, and turning around from behind.

Attempt to distract Disney character enemies in order that the aggressor might kill the defender.

Backwards Memory

Suicidal depression.

Working backwards through the dream to the moment I lost consciousness.

Trying to compose the thoughts and feelings into a New York Times bestseller book's opening paragraph.

Spiralling blackness, then small figurines pressing against my face and solidifying impressions as my body unfolds from its fetal position.

Crawling backwards like a wounded animal through the shallow backwash of discarded anniversary gifts and a sandy market bazaar.

Two dollars to join the buskers' band.

Earlier remembering how TL had brandished the absurdly giant steel shuriken. Another middle school boy grabbed it. In the struggle it ended embedded in a girl's upper back, missing her spine by an inch, and grazing her shoulder blade. She was mostly unharmed (physically) but I still had to retell the story to her mother.

When I did, she suffered a heart attack.

The Quarter Thief

In a pink-shag-carpeted room stand eight Ms. Pac Man arcade cabinets (two rows of four).

Each of them has its back access panel removed.

You can reach in far enough to grab the key to the coin mechanism, but not the key to the coin collection box.

Each quarter stolen from the room full of games provides you with 10 seconds worth of power to an electric shopping cart go-kart conversion.

How many oncoming SUVs can you avoid before running out of power?

Business Trip Dad

(set to the rocking background music of George and Jonathan)

My dad goes on business trips but always comes back with presents for each of us.

This time he brought me an antique penny gumball machine. Instead of gumballs, it was filled with old pennies.

I glimpsed an indian head cent, but also a 1902 lincoln cent, which, I thought, was impossible since the US Mint only began producing the new pennies in 1909.

I am an Eye

I try to cash a check and attempt to make the irregular amount come out even by offering pocket change when the cashier refuses.

I mistake a toned Kennedy half-dollar coin for an older Walking Liberty half-dollar by holding the coin upside-down.

I ask to search the cash register for more coins while informing the clerks of United States half-dollar coin designs dating back to 1916.

I walk to catch a bus to the Los Angeles Convention Center and see AZ running to catch a bus in the opposite direction.

She fails.

In a Box in the Bed in the House

RF (Emilio Estevez) and Steve (Keanu Reeves) left the business seminar shaken.

"What's that you're playing with?" asked RF.

"It's a jingling ball," replied Steve, who rolled the reflective silver sphere in his hand. It jingled.

"Wanna school me at Guitar Hero? There's one standing next to the popcorn machine."

"Only if you're paying. It's a dollar huh?"

The pair strolled across the movie theater lobby. RF pulled coins from his pocket as Steve spied a stack of smaller coins - pennies and nickels - abandoned in a box on the side of the machine. He emptied the coins into his hand, and his lips moved silently as he added up the amount.

"I'm thinking there's enough here. Hey look there's more!" Steve muttered. He indicated with a head nod the paper bills of different denominations littered on the gaudy carpet.

He continued to mutter, and collected the discarded cash, then paused to pick up a business card.

"I can't make out the name, Charles Golding?" he said more to himself than RF.

A caterpillar-like elderly man crawled along the floor and addressed Steve, still puzzled at the appearance of the card. "I'll be having that," he crowed and stared indeterminately in a random direction, his eyes unfocused.

Steve noticed that the man pushed a red and white striped stick ahead of him across the sticky carpet.

"Are you saying the dollar bills belong to you too?" called Steve as the man crawled into a bedroom. "Wait!"

Steve walked through the doorway in time to see the man crawl into a pink bed between two elderly ladies who watched a silent movie screen opposite them.

"What's going on here?" Steve called as he examined the paper money. One bill had an inky shoe print on the back. On another, a note was scribbled:

'en la caja en la cama en la casa'

Stream of Unconsciousness

Waiting in line to buy a dozen tacos from Taco Bell, doing dips on an old wooden fence, an old guy found a 1943 copper Wheat Penny in the tip jar and handed it to me.

"Lemme talk to you about a Dinner Party Action show," he wheezed.

"The worst feeling is knowing you could have won but didn't say anything," he wheezed.

"They wanted me to be a writer," he wheezed.

Threes

Lions in Awesometown.

Stolen money in a couch cushion, in a suit, in a church, in the left hand aisle, in the middle of a devotional.

School kids in a pew play a mobile phone Apache helicopter war game.

Apprehension, interrogation, confession.

Movie shoot on location: a Blackhawk helicopter destroys a Coast Guard helicopter and an 18-wheeler.

It All Ends With No

As my grandfather sorts rare proof coins onto photocopies of the Seven Dwarfs I ask him whether his stepfather was ever impressed with my grandmother's knack for fixing television aerials.

He replied, "no."

Vegas Story

Trying to fool an ATM outside the Excaliber casino lobby, JS draws pennies onto slips of paper and feeds them into the deposit slot.

When that doesn't work he iterates writing out more digits of pi on the slip.

Back to Fontainebleu

Steve enrolls at the University of California Santa Barbara campus after a twenty year leave of absence, taking up residence at the Fontainebleu apartments in the exact same room he lived in so long ago with EB, DH, TA, and DZ, and recounts some of his teenage exploits:

- jamming beer bottlecaps into the living room ceiling

- running a bathroom distillery

- dancing to Rock Lobster in the courtyard

- conducting unsuccessful botany experiments in the hall closet

- running barefoot and bloody across the second floor walkway

- playing Shinobi and Nobunaga's Ambition on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and Pirates! and Dark Castle on the Macintosh

- stealing laundry and snack quarters out of the Shinobi and Heavy Barrel arcade machines

- picking the lock of a bedroom in apartment 303

- setting off a homemade explosive comprised of powder, paper bag, and a nickel coin. He shows where the nickel ricocheted through the bedroom window, grazing his cheek and causing glass fragments to embed into his neck.

Grenades

(characters finding strangely-decorated grenades is a recurring theme in this show, however, none have yet exploded)

Steve and Mr. G stood at the head of a line of middle school children practicing a ritual of handing over and back a large handful of nickels.

Mr. G asked how long it took to set up the lighting in the room.

"It took UB at least thirty minutes," Steve responded, noticing that the child walking away had just pocketed six or seven nickels in his back pocket - enough for a free haircut and style from JL.

It was then that he also spied something like a fruit on the linoleum floor.

Steve picked up the object and studied it. It looked like a pineapple grenade made by carefully sculpting several strawberry popsicles. "How serendipitous," he thought to himself, "that I have yet to view the 'Chowder - The Blast Raz' episode on Cartoon Network tomorrow."

BF emerged out of a broom closet; he had to change clothes after falling into the pool. Mr. G commented on how the Native American headdresses were backwards.

Friday Night Dualism / I'm asleep

How To Win Friends And Influence People / Making people scared won't get you very far.

The Band meeting / The Smoke Break
---
In a driveway in Wichita, Kansas / In a green field in Edinburgh, Scotland
a lead guitarist, / an ROTC dropout,
rhythm guitarist, / hairdresser,
bass guitarist, / astrophysicist,
mandolin player, / roadie,
and a keyboardist / and a numismatist
discuss their next gig's song list. / discuss tomorrow night's D&D session.

Dinner / Political Positioning
---
At a round table in Round Table / At a rectangular table in Sirius Black's dining room
a CEO, / a Doctor Who fan,
Lead Engineer, / Goalkeeper,
and a Lead Designer / and a Parasail instructor
catch up on their careers in the video game industry. / play an electroshock party game.

The Raid / Easter egg hunt
---
At the bottom of an exterior wall inside an unfinished spare room made from a cardboard refrigerator box/ In the grass
granite spheres / dinosaur eggs
were stolen. / were moved.

Bowling Alley Smell

In a bowling alley in Honolulu, Hawaii, Steve chats with the shoe rental clerk about the state's new dollar coins. Steve decides to take a few home as souvenirs and changes his mind about changing $20.00. He gets only 4 of the coins as change after paying his rental shoes.

The bowling alley features a restaurant and an arcade, Steve notes as he takes in the signature smell.

The arcade features ultraviolet lighting which accentuates the bright orange and green patterns, as well as his white Calvin Klein Underwear against the dark walls and floors.

"No pockets for tokens," he mutters.

Plates

An ex-con and his two teenage boys run a mobile license-plate customization service.

Returning with lunch, the father sifts through his change of quarters and nickels, noticing each one is older and rarer than the last.

Dad & Son At The Movies

Today's feature is a 30 minute Alice In Wonderland spoof.

Dad pulls out pocketfuls of quarters and dimes, and arranges them in two dollar-sized piles in order to buy nachos. The cashier stands inappropriately close.

After the show there's always an arcade game to play. Today it is a first-person virtual reality helicopter simulation flying over battlefields in World War II. Dad scoffs at the historical inaccuracy as Nazi machine gun nests open fire on his sickeningly circling gunship. In the next scenario the helicopter is circling inside a hotel courtyard as enemy soldiers stream from inside the rooms.