Old money

When he was cashiering, the Complete and Total Loser sometimes came across old coins and bills. He used to collect coins, so he has some idea of what to look for. Bills are different. Even old and uncommon ones aren't worth much unless they're in mint condition, and even then coins are a better bet. 
The Loser has about $5 in wheat pennies, which is worth maybe $6, and about $80 in old bills, which is worth maybe $90. 
This one dollar bill is a year older than the Loser. It's a silver certificate, meaning it was readily exchangeable for silver. Technically, all bills were then as quarters and dimes were made of silver. 
When the Loser was a kid, age nine or so, a friend told him that with such a bill he could go to any bank and "demand that they give you silver." The Loser and his friend liked that they could do that, walk into a bank with a special bill and tell a bank teller—an adult—what to do. It wasn't true as by that time the U.S. had gone off the silver standard (a decision under President Johnson many still bemoan) but boys need their fantasies.

Why the Loser Collects Coins

If you're young, or old and have good things going on in your life, the reason the Complete and Total Loser keeps the wheat pennies, silver dimes and quarters, nickels with a P over the dome, and aging bills he finds in his loser job as a cashier at a store that sells nothing anyone needs will escape you.
But if you're around the Loser's age (over 50) and have as few years left as he does (none which, it seems, will be particularly good ones), you may be getting a sentimental, uninformed interest in history and understand the Loser's coin pursuit.
The quarter in the picture below is a rare find. If it were in good condition, which it isn't, it would be worth around $4.00. The most it could possibly be worth, according to the coin website, coinstudy.com, would be $33, and that's if it had been minted in Denver (it wasn't) and was uncirculated (duh, nope).
Look at all the little nicks and scratches on it and how worn it is, though. This coin has been out there for all or most of its 72 years. It survived piggy banks, holes in pockets, cracks in decks, wishing wells, and America's going off the silver standard (bad idea, it turns out) and switching to copper coins in 1965. It may have traveled the world and been spent by war heroes and future presidents, used as tips by great artists, and flipped by murderers. After all that, it somehow found its way to a cash register drawer, unnoticed by the Loser's coworkers, and ended up in the Loser's back left pocket, taken to his house and separated from other change. 
It will be stored as a keepsake in a box until the Loser dies and it's discovered by the workers hired to go through and dispose of the material objects he leaves behind.

Body Bags

"I'm going to eat them," the Complete and Total Loser would say to his mother.
"Don't you dare!" she'd say.
They were talking about the koi in the tiny artificial pond the Loser's late parents installed in the 1980s, where five colorful, large fish levitated under water until a surprisingly small amount of food was flung on the surface of their home each day, at which point they'd lunge to the surface to eat as much as they could, not caring if their only companions starved to death right in front of them.

Dead fish in bags wait to be buried. Someday we'll all end up as some version of the fish in the bags in this picture.

Around the time the Loser's parents had the pond put in the Loser was living in China, where he taught English (a moronic calling he was well suited to, being a moron) and often eating koi, which when not bred for color is a common food there and goes by the humbler name of carp. 
The Loser's mother knew he was kidding. It was a joke he stopped making a year or so before her death a year ago. She no longer had the energy for mock threats.
Two days ago the man who services the pond came by to clean it out and ready it for the coming winter months, when the fish slow down and don't eat yet still use as much oxygen as at any other time. Yesterday morning, the Loser went to check on them before going to work. One of the five was dead, another was close to it and the others didn't look well. Of course, the fish guy screwed up and the bill (ha!) he left didn't have his cell phone number on it, no one at the company picked up and the website is useless and looks like a seventy-year-old designed it. The Loser finally got in touch with the fish guy around 11 and he managed to save two of the koi. 
Koi can live for decades (the oldest is said to be 226 years old) and these were just fifteen. 
The Loser's parents loved those fish. 
The Loser told the fish guy to put them in bags so he can bury them, which he's about to do. It'll take a large hole. They were as big as cats. 
That's how the Loser will spend a chunk of this Thanksgiving Day.
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The fish are underground now and will nourish the trees as they decompose. The Loser couldn't just cut the bags open and throw them in like garbage so he did it by hand. They were cold and covered with slime. Their weight felt like soft muscle. Their eyes were clouded over but their colors were still bright. 
Before he scraped the dirt back in the hole the Loser threw in some coins. A penny, a nickle, a dime a quarter. He did this so if some day in the distant future some digger found fish bones in an odd place he or she would know that these three fish lived with humans, that they were a part of our lives. 

Red Paint on Quarters

Since he was a teenager in the 1970s the Complete and Total Loser has noticed in change quarters with varying amounts of red paint on them. This always baffled him. Was it counting marker of some kind at the mint or a bank? Were quarters used in some kind of laboratory exercise by high school students in classes everywhere except his own? Did just one crazy person spend his days doing this?
This is the kind of thing the Loser thinks about, even today. When he finds one in the presence of friends, he points it out, only to be met with shrugs.
His curiosity led the Loser spend the late 70s and most of the 80s developing the Internet singlehandedly. "If I do this," he said, "I'll be able to one day use it to search far and wide from the comfort of my own apartment and find out why quarters sometimes have red paint on them."
Sure enough, after hours of hard work making the Internet what it is today, he was able to find, if not the answer, a possible explanation a few years ago: Hobbyists.
There are people in the United States of America who, when given free time, paint quarters and other coins with various designs. The Loser figures the red paint is the result of tests of paint.
But this isn't good enough. Why quarters? The Loser has half dollars, which provide a far larger canvass. And why red? A deep blue background would look as nice. All the coins he finds with paint on them are quarters from the seventies. And the one pictured has paint indiscriminately applied; note the paint on Washington's eye.
More research is required. Much more.