Hello, hello everyone. I know I said I would submit new artwork to this website, but I never said when. I'll get to it eventually. For now, I'll post a journal entry instead.

Anyway, as some of you may have known, I just came back from Canada on the first of this month. During my stay there, I couldn't help but realize how amazingly convenient the existence of $1 and $2 coins is.

Fast-forward to earlier this week when I was rummaging through my dresser drawer to see if I had any unopened red envelopes lying around my socks. Next to my miniature toothpaste collection, there were two Sacagawea coins that I, like many other people during its advent at the turn of the millennium, hoarded.

Then I realized: I hate $1 bills.

So the answer is quite simple. The US mint recently launched a program to create $1 coins containing the portrait of your favorite presidents such as William Henry Harrison (whom many of you know from Simpsons as the guy who died in 30 days), Andrew Jackson. Even our dear ol' Richard Nixon is set to come out in 2016. (Why stop there? As a rule, the president in question has to have been deceased for the seemingly arbitrary duration of two years—robably because of Gerald Ford—before their likeness appears on our coin. This means that Jimmy Carter must bite the dust by 2014 if he wants to be released along with the other three presidents being released that year and both Bushs, Clinton and Obama all must die by 2015 for their scheduled coin to appear. And yes, the fat guy with the moustache that you know for having his picture appear twice on president posters—Grover Cleveland—gets two coins.)

You're probably wondering why they would do this; people will just end up hoarding them again and these coins will enter obsolescence, like the $10,000 Salmon P. Chase bill, the silver and copper-nickel piece of three cents or the twenty-cent piece that would have made that "one of them is not a nickel" riddle have a non-trick answer—neither the dime nor the twenty-cent piece is a nickel. Thankfully, that's where I come in.

My reasoning is this: people hoard $1 coins because they're not $1 bills; they won't dump them into a money bin and swim in them, the manganese brass cladding scraping against their epidermis. Instead, they purchase some ridiculous $1 coin book (using perhaps several $1 bills in the process) and fill up every single circular depression throughout the years with the smiling portrait of our deceased presidents. By the end, this person will have more coins in the book than the book's worth itself, at which point, he's likely to toss the book into an underground vault, which you could only find by reading the backside of the Declaration of Independence and deciphering a number of cryptographic images innocuously generated by various Renaissance-period artists.

Thankfully, there's a way to combat this sort of sentiment and that's through the desensitization of the general public to the idea that $1 coins are actually quite commonplace and ordinary. In order to demonstrate a method in which this would occur, I will create, for the purposes of this journal entry, a fictitious individual known simply as Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn.

Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn, who is completely fictitious and not to be confused with any other guy named Joe or anyone who works at the inn or the famous Joe the Plumber, is a guy who works at the inn. Occasionally, he happens upon the ungrateful teenager who forgets to tip him (sorry, Ernie) and makes up for it by throwing sarcastic remarks at his hotel's patrons. In general though, as Americans have come to expect, Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn receives tips, when not delivered through a credit or debit card, in the form of bills or even coins. One day, someone gives Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn a $1 coin. Having a familial history of hoarding collectible items, as indicated by his father's German stamp collection and his mother's Jesus-shaped vegetables collection, Joe places the one coin in with his pocket protector, effectively decreasing his whole tip amount of the day by one dollar. This is because Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn is not familiar with $1 US coins.

Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn will go home when his shift is over, perhaps, and he'll call up his friends. He'll talk about how he had to clean up the remains of particularly violent emesis in the hallway, perhaps, and then he'll mention this coin which, despite not having seen before, is apparently legal tender. Finally, Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn will place this coin in some sort of special storage where it's not just a coin but a Presidential $1 Coin. The next day, Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn is fired.

Luckily, Joe the Guy Who (Formerly) Worked at the Inn is also known as Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man on some days. Thankfully, a bunch of lazy Italians just moved into the neighborhood and want to eat pizza every single day despite encouraging obviously untrue ethnic stereotypes. Nevertheless, Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man can now pursue a full-time delivery job and delivers pizzas on a daily basis, except on Tuesdays and on President's Day, during which his family gets together to show off their collections.

As it turns out, the client who gave Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man back when he was still Joe the Guy Who Works at the Inn the $1 coin was simply there for a tryst with his best friend. Coincidentally, this person had pizza delivered every day that Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man formerly did not deliver to his home. As tips, he provides a nearly endless supply of $1 coins and gives him George Washington coins, John Quincy Adams coins and even coins featuring a president he doesn't recognize named Martin van Buren, as Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man flunked out of school and only got up to Andrew Jackson in the curriculum. Suddenly, Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man has a lot of $1 coins. Suddenly, Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man realizes that having five of each $1 coins "just in case the other four are stolen or lost" is pointless. Suddenly, Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man realizes why he seems to be getting no tips. And suddenly, Joe the Sketchy Pizza Delivery Man begins to buy purified water bottles from the local convenience store using coins bearing the likeness of John Quincy Adams.

And there begins the chain. Rolf the Guy Using the Cash Register at 7-11 begins having to take home these coins and initially hoards them but eventually opens up and uses them as they should be used—money. As this situation multiplies, more people will begin to use $1 coins simply because they have too many of them.

So, back to me. In the late morning of Wednesday, I went to the bank and had all my $1 bills exchanged for William Henry Harrison coins ("He died in 30 days"). Then I'll proceed to use my $1 coins whenever I would use $1 bills and continue to exchange any $1 bills I have for $1 coins at the bank until $1 coins have exited the bank and everyone is walking around with $1 coins in their coin purses/wallets.