Tonight while I was out adventuring, I found a $20 laying on the sidewalk. Or so I thought, for a moment.

I picked it up and put it in my pocket, amazed at this turn of fortune, and thought, "Wow, I guess I won't have to go to the ATM for grocery money this week."

I couldn't believe someone would have just left a 20 dollar bill laying on the sidewalk. I have, on a few occassions in my life, found smaller denominations of paper currency on the ground, but never a 20 before. After walking a little ways, I took it out of my pocket again to look at it under the street light.

Something wasn't right about it. The top edge was cut too short. Also, I could see that it wasn't just a single paper, but two stuck together. No, there couldn't be two bills here, could there? I looked closer. In small red lettering, the word "Specimen" was printed on the front. Also, the Andrew Jackson face and other printing was slightly blurry. An obvious forgery.

With a little effort, I managed to separate the stuck together pieces of paper, to reveal an inside consisting of plain white paper, stuck together with scotch tape. (My fingers were too numb from the cold to really feel the texture of it, or I probably would have known the instant I picked it up.)

Questions danced around my mind. Who left it there, and why? If I was able to detect the counterfeit with the naked eye in the middle of the night under a mere street lamp, surely whoever made it couldn't have thought they were going to fool anybody with it for very long. A prank? A warning? A signal to say that while this one is obviously crap, it wouldn't be much harder to make other copies that aren't so obvious? (Maybe they wouldn't get past a professional examiner at a bank, but being accepted by a random cashier is all that's really necessary.)

Looking at it at home under the light, it's even more apparent. I can see the color lines from an inkjet printer -- a pretty cheap one, apparently.

Were it not for the fact that I hold the evidence of this event in front of my face, it could almost later be mistaken for a strange dream.

Who knows? It could have even been an attempt to induce gnosis by chipping away at our false faith in the monetary system. Or a signal from on high of stranger events to come. Or maybe I just have an overactive imagination.

Still, it is quite the "specimen." I think I'll hold onto it for a while as a souvenir.