The 2013 Toyota Camry is my chariot.

This is not my soul-mate, this is not what I would choose to drive if I lived in a world in which I was fabulously wealthy, cars didn’t deteriorate over time, and they still made Geo Trackers, but The Camry is what I drive nonetheless. It serves me well, it’s held up over years, still gets good gas mileage, and still has a CD player. I’m a bit worried about the long-term viability of my CD player, given that it relies on a mechanical hinge behind my infotainment screen, but it functions for the moment, which is more than I can say about any other car on the market currently with regards to the playing of CDs. The thought of one day having to own a car without a CD player worries me more than it should. I know that I’ll try to piece together some half-measure solution for it, like I’ll buy a CD player specifically intended to be used in new cars off Amazon that only works some of the time, and it will only work some of the time, and this will frustrate me, and then I’ll complain to people for whom this is not a problem. That is an issue for another entry.

The issue for this entry rests above my left knee. In fact, the issue for this entry, or moreso the vessel which contains the issue for this entry, is routinely struck by my left kneecap when I get out of the car too eagerly. This happens more often than you’d like to believe and more often than I’d like to experience. I start far too many excursions with a limp towards my destination, struck sharply by the little driver-side coin-holding drawer-thing.

Knee, pictured, in khaki, inches from little handle that digs into the soft tissue of my kneecap

There will be coins. There will always be coins. 

I envy those who lived during a time in which the coin was less of a burden. When the humble coin was given the respect it deserved, when its metal makeup and heft delivered it a more quotidian use case than the exorbitant dollar bill. I hear of children during the sepia-tone period of life and history taking a nickel to the five and dime for a sack of Bit-o-Honeys and I envy the sensibility of that era. I should be able to hand a shiny coin over to someone and be able to receive a full something back. What I have now are little nuisance circles, and so damn many of the second-littlest and most nuisancitic circles take up this little drawer in my car.

I was a bit overzealous in that prior paragraph. I have usage cases for coins. I still pay for parking meters with coins. I could use the app but I don’t use a phone that does that, and I even kind of enjoy paying with coins. Makes the trip feel real. I also pay for items in vending machines with coins.

I even hold a strong love for certain coins: The quarter, so humble and straightforward of an item, emblazoned with the profile etching of our first president, the same first president on the other foundation of our economy: The Dollar. The quarter, for all of the inflation and bullshit and Jim Cramer yelling, still gets me the same fifteen minutes of time to park in downtown Lawrence that it did the day that I first set foot here in 2013. The tickets for letting my meter expire have gone up from $3 to $10 in the ensuing decade and change, but the meters themselves have retained their dignity. Gold dollars still work in them, as well, and I appreciate the gold dollar, no matter whose visage graces it.

The greatest piece of currency in the American arsenal is the fifty-cent piece, which is too big in size for most coin slots, too small in value for individual transactions, and too rare to occupy any space in your typical cash register till. If I end up with a fifty-cent piece, I will do two things with it:

1. I will try to put it into a parking meter or vending machine, fail, then put it back into my wallet.
2. I will carry it around in my wallet as sort of a recurring practical joke on myself. I will sense that there are coins in the pouch bit, feel some relief wash over me that I have coins to use, only to remember that one of them is basically useless.

This goes on for months until I absent-mindedly dump the contents of the pouch bit of my wallet into a receptacle under my desk. It’s a joyous part of growing up, being able to recognize that years pass between being graced by the overside profile image of John F Kennedy. I may have only possessed something like eight total fifty-cent pieces in my nearly 29 years, and I think I’ve done the same thing with each of them every time. What a beautiful coin. And what an oddly fitting tribute to the legacy of Mr. Kennedy.

The nickel and dime are both accepted by the parking meters. Nickels get you three minutes, dimes get you six. I feel like a rube, digging into my wallet, or alternatively going back to the kneecapping drawer in my Camry in a search for more of them, but they have their jobs and they fulfill them.

Meters do not take the pennies. This is key to understanding the problem here. Vending machines don’t take the pennies. Nobody on the campus I work on even takes cash anymore, let alone pennies. Pennies accumulate, not unlike straw wrappers or spent Altoids tins. Pennies take up space and do very little else. My car was built with a space for them to take up in mind, and in that space, they do so.

The state of the kneecapping drawer is not always exclusively penny-laden. Often, I’ll get some change from a cashier at a drive-thru and immediately drop it in the drawer. I have already explained, though, that the parking meters will eventually siphon off the silver coins in quick succession – quarters, then dimes, then nickels. If I receive 94 cents in change from a cashier, I will place the three quarters, one dime, one nickel, and four pennies into the kneecapping drawer. Over time, those silver coins will turn into fifty-four minutes of parking, while the pennies will continue to accumulate in the kneecapping drawer. I have yet to find a situation in which I have any reason to remove the pennies from the drawer, and at this point there are so many in there that removing them for the sake of removing them would feel like an unnecessarily arduous chore.

And so, they sit there in the kneecapping drawer. They will continue to sit there in the kneecapping drawer.

I am not one to complain without a plan for the future. I no longer have patience for this in myself or others. Ergo, complaining about pennies — which I realize gets me to a point that James Rolfe hit a decade and a half ago — can only be but one part of this entry. These are the humble solutions I’ve developed through very limited thought over the past five minutes:

Heavy Reinvestment in Those Penny-Smashing Machines that they Have at Museums and the State Capitol Building.

I will preface this point with the knowledge that I went to the mall a few years ago and saw a Lorde album for sale with a sticker on the cover explicitly stating that there was no CD within the CD case, only a code to download it online within the CD case. This seems needlessly convoluted and not all that beneficial to either the label or the consumer, let alone Ms. Lorde herself. It also reflects that there is a desire for physical souvenirs which exists within the populace even during a time of Spotify and TikTok and the sounds of birds chirping and leaves rustling as you walk outside. The people want physical souvenirs.

The beauty of the penny smasher is that it turns something basically valueless into a little souvenir that you can take home. The problem with the penny smasher is that they are bulky and typically cost something like 75 cents. I refuse to believe that the federal government cannnot infuse funding both into the production and operation of penny-smasher machines as a free public good and research and developmet firms for the creation of less spatially intensive penny smasher machines. Think of this – We used to have ticket stubs to commemorate events. Now it’s a thing on your phone, which is probably more convenient for 99% of people, but you don’t get a ticket stub to take home at the end of it. I went to a middle-tier college football bowl game in 2022 that sold souvenir ticket stubs for $100. There is a market for a thing to take home from the game, or the theatre, or the cinema, or the concert, or what have you.

A free service that smashes your valueless penny into a memento could fulfill this void. Imagine it: Souvenir smashed pennies whenever you need a memento. The Super Bowl, the premier of the next big Marvel adventures movie, an AC/DC concert at a hockey arena, the second game of a mid-season series between the Rockies and Brewers, a local cover band’s Wednesday night show at a dive bar, the demolition of a decrepit old student dormitory, your daughter’s piano recital, Monster Jam, TNA Impact, the Dew Tour, your girlfriend’s older brother’s wedding. The possibilities are so vast. This would be tremendous for morale and would fill a void in the American soul.

Revitalization of Penny Racers

The bullshit about Penny Racers, which I could suss out when I was a kid, was that they worked perfectly fine sans penny. They were supposed to do turns and flips if you put a penny into them, but they were fine if you didn’t have the penny. This was the central issue that I believe led to the downfall of the Penny Racers empire.

Now, this would be a problem for research and development at whichever toy company owns the Penny Racers branding and operations at the moment, as I’m no engineer, and certainly no imagineer, but if we could somehow figure out a way for Penny Racers to firstly take up some significant social clout, to become cool somehow, like Champion Brand sportswear did for a second there in the late-2010s, and then come up with some way in which the Penny Racer not only requires a penny for any functionality but also ideally depletes the penny in its use, thus diminishing the number of pennies in existence over time, I think we’d have something on our hands. Imagine that, thousands of youths going to the mall to buy Penny Racers, putting penny after penny into said Penny Racer, and then… I don’t know what would happen after that. That’s, again, for R&D to figure out. I’m just the ideas guy here on the website here.

The Government Gets Rid of the Pennies Entirely

Canada did this a while ago, and while I think it was a good idea, I don’t like taking ideas from anybody. We’re Americans, we must come up with our own solutions to our problems.

I Get Rid of My Pennies Specifically

What the hell am I going to do with that? Just put them in a Snapple bottle and try to put them into the Coinstar machine at the grocery store? There can’t be more than a dollar in there, and even if there is, 7% of that goes right to the Coinstar people anyway. Now, of course, I can hear you saying from behind your monitor – Joe! They don’t take the percentage off if you get it as an Amazon Gift Card Code! You are correct, but again, at most, I strive to live a life with more shame than to enter a fifteen digit Amazon Gift Card code for what can’t be more than $1.34. What will I buy with that? One MP3? I suppose I could do that, but what MP3, then? I already have so many of them. There are so many wonderful songs that I own, and so many wonderful songs that I could buy! The thought of potentially buying the wrong one would paralyze me into inaction, I just know it.

There, four solutions is enough. I will probably not do anything about these specific pennies. They have brought me the most valuable thing of all: Something to break a six-month streak of not posting on this website with. I will continue to let them fester in there, and their presence will continue to fester in me.