I stood horrified at the $20 bill that stared at me, daring me to spend it. The work week had been long and particularly arduous, and after laboring in the office past 11 on a Friday night, I forwent my original plans for a home-cooked meal and fell back as ever on a neighborhood Chinese takeout. Nearly brain-dead after many nights of abbreviated sleep, I blinked in appalled disbelief at the obscene vision upon opening my wallet at the register.

Contained within, there were fewer bills than I remembered, and so even though I had more than enough to settle the bill, the sight of one particular note briefly had me pondering whether I was momentarily possessed of completely corrupted dollars. Once I had reasoned about the usable bills amongst them, my thoughts turned solely towards how to rid myself of the abomination that had somehow made a life in my pocket for untold weeks.

At once perfectly valid and legal tender, yet wholly at odds with decent usability, the bill’s very presence felt a blight upon my own self-assessment as a “good” person. Such a small-minded and misogynistic statement literally writ large upon a medium itself generally devoid of personal expression, making the impact upon its current owner all the more striking. I had not in some time made a cash purchase that would have produced a $20 bill in change, so I figured that this one must have come hidden amongst a stack procured from an ATM. Perhaps it was the one that hiccuped phenomenally, unfurling but a portion of the requested amount, then stalling without the option to end the transaction, detaining me with the fear that my departure would leave my accounts entirely available to the next passerby. Finally a second stack emerged from the slot, though oddly bunched up, in explanation for the delay— crisis averted, for the moment.

Back in the restaurant, I considered rushing to the ATM while my food was being prepared, divesting myself of the afflicted bill, and returning in time to pick up the order, cleansed in relief and abidingly pure of heart once more. One small deposit could restore some semblance of honor to these holdings, and put an end to this admittedly disproportionate stress. Once again I point to the lack of sleep and long hours undertaken for the antecedent series of days. However, I just as swiftly abandoned the plan, for fear of then becoming directly and unquestionably associated with all the ills the bill represented, when encountered by whichever teller processed the incoming envelopes at the ATM’s branch. No, some other method of divestiture would have to make itself available.

Failing to put the discomfort aside for any significant amount of time, I resolved on a new plan for settling it. The next day’s events would take me over public transit across the Bay, offering a natural opportunity to replenish both my Clipper card and sense of guilt at one of the many machines housed within the stations downtown. This was enough to placate my unease for the night, especially after I added a reminder on my phone to ensure that I would not forget to pay a visit to a machine no matter how rushed the journey might become at the whims of the reliability of transit schedules.

The act of creating the phone reminder itself was enough to spur me to rise the next morning accordingly, and I made it to Embarcadero station with time to spare. If excitement can be dutiful, that is what I felt as my mission neared its end, as I touched my Clipper card to the machine. Fumbling about, I realized an instant too late that I had inserted the mocking bill at the wrong orientation, and the machine rejected it. At least it didn’t raise any alarms. Even when a proper insertion yielded the same result, I remained undeterred, bolstered by the sure justness of my cause. When the next machine over also refused to accept the tainted tender, I was ready to simply ball up the thing, and toss it aside for some “lucky” finder to make use of it as he or she saw fit.

Any personal interaction involving the note seemed unacceptable, ruling out the possibility of simply leaving it in the violin case of a busker or handing it over to one of the city’s homeless. As had begun the night prior, my guilt compounded with the absurdity of this first world problem, of having perfectly valid money yet not wanting to use it. Worse, believing it to be an amount which I would have little problem simply losing, even though it was more than enough for a hot meal and a comic book besides— as fine an expenditure as any for my tastes.

I recalled a sequence I read in an Archie comic decades ago, in which Veronica enlists Betty’s help in teaching her how to act like less of a spoiled rich girl. Almost immediately, one of their classmates comes upon her and returns a $20 bill that she had just dropped. Veronica thanks the boy and returns the note to its place as a bookmark, to which Betty explains that most people would not use a bill of such a denomination for that purpose. While inflation has lessened the egregiousness of the interchange, its point holds up enough to mock my notion of literally throwing away the same amount, an even more callous usage than as a physical placeholder in a text.

And so rather than continuing in the effort towards immediate disposal, I latched on to the bill’s narrative value, buying myself a story to tell for a steal at $20. Admittedly, the next denomination up would likely be enough for me to have just gone ahead with the initial ATM deposit plan, though the stakes would certainly be raised in that case for me to track down just how I would have come into possession of such a note. The story as it stands plays on some favorite and timely personal themes— the fear of misread intentions, the guilt and tenuousness of middle class stability, the notion that conscience has a selling point, and more. In a sense all money of modern society is contaminated with evils far beyond crude defacement, our financial systems often relying upon the misfortune of others.

Retaining the bill for now, along with the opportunity to tell its story, also allows me to solicit ideas from others on what next to do with it. So far, the idea of dropping by a soup kitchen has been floated, with the opportunity to dispel the notion that personal interaction would assuredly end in an ill judgment for me. Dropping it somewhere it’d likely to be found by a person in need still seems promising, though even the most downtrodden fellow might find the bill as much a curse as I have, perhaps more so. I suspect that whoever initiated this scenario likely invented this “Ella”, perhaps as an experiment in the all-too-abused medium of performance art, to see what people like me would do upon receiving the note. That certainly seems likely, and would be a comfort in knowing that there is at least one person who has been even more frivolous with this money than me.

The age of cash is just about behind us, yet its exchange can still offer up human moments. As a physical manifestation of the imaginary sums upon which our society rests, these promissory notes and coinage are public works of art that have recently taken on literal lives of their own. The Internet has taken to tracking single dollar bills, producing national narratives around the exchange of small currency. As much value as we ascribe to them, sometimes the things we do against that value may increase it along other axes. It’s certainly a fitting expression for the current state of San Francisco, struggling to realign along a new definition of creativity and assigning to it the proper dollar amount. I hold my own leanings in such matters, and as with the dispersement of this modestly monetary albatross, I’m open to ideas in the meantime.