Internal Control & Misc. Axiology – Jiv Johnson

April 8, 2026

If the check to be disbursed exceeds $5,000 I need to provide my signature. I perform
a comparison between what we got billed  and what we ordered and what we have: 
the “3-way match.” Historians of commerce claim that this is common sense: ancient 

merchants in Mesopotamia understood how to avoid being fucked over when buying 
clay or wheat. This protective business maneuver I perform is older than the entirety 
of Chinese civilization or the handshake. When I’m off work today, I’ll be at a different 

desk, at home. Desk-job, desk-life, desk-desk-deskdskdskdsk Well, common sense is 
self-explanatory. Still, aren’t there an endless series of acts I commit daily—laying around,
forgetting to eat, never answering calls—which constitute a denial of that statement? Why is it, …, 

Is the execution of an ancient accounting control more inherent in my waking life 
than experiencing the day? My head hurts, on the inside on the inside of itself, because 
of some mold in the walls at work. On the inside on the inside of an inside on the inside 

of some walls on the inside. Nowadays when I’m alone, I no longer talk it out. It wasn’t 
productive, a reputable academic journal confirmed this much. Then, when I was talking 
with a therapist at my home-desk, he didn’t know what I meant by a fourth kind of tense, so 

I dropped it there, too. And, when I was talking with the guys, we all shared a quiet 
hegemony marked with usual things: some married, some in love, some neither or one 
but not the other. The limit of any number series is represented by the symbol L. Photos 

from my childhood, at the turn of the millennium—the old I enjoyed tossing an L 
on his forehead when he looked into a lens, big buccal fat smile. Then, the century 
carried on and every alley and pothole filled with concrete at the same time the world 

grew big. When the wind had thrown me, like salt over its shoulder, I don’t recall 
slamming into a wall or floor or anything. My eyes project a little film which everyone 
except me happens to appear in. And they announced the treasury was getting rid of 

the penny, since it cost two of itself to make one. There are various other things to rid 
the world of, if that’s the threshold for an unacceptable loss. For example, fifty cents 
or a new person. Throughout One Thousand and One Nights, the Golden Age spans 

across what effectively is an unlimited series of lives, since one thousand and one
practically translates to forever-and-a-day, but forever-and-a-day nowadays is only a period 
of three years when you break 1,001 days down. And why call it Golden of an Age? The invention 

of suftaja, letters of credit; mudaraba, venture capital vehicles; al-mal, the earliest forms of capital! And 
what’s gold aside from boughs, the past, or that strange paper hidden inside ancient ledgers? Gold is after-
the-fact, a retrospective, a series recap. And, I guess, what’s common sense besides the same? If a weightless

yet financially binding letter, which can fit inside one’s pocket, exists—why care about what gold means
or where gold is or, especially, when is it something or some time is gold? Well, I’ve thought about control
and the risk assessment applied endlessly to the tiniest objects I manipulate each day, such as my cellphone

that, like a letter of credit, weighs little yet contains many types of realities. At best, in an action, 
it’s just three parties: my two hands and my phone, two lovers and their baby, two forms of capital
and one of labor. I’ve digressed…, There are many types of three-way matches, even Hegelian ones.

Not very long ago, there existed men who sought gold from iron. They adapted their tria prima in the form 
of salt, sulfur, and mercury. Well, common sense is really just two words. In the Arithmetick of Hodder,
he branded the then-dominant mathematical, mercantile “Rule of Three” instead as the “Golden Rule,”

for as Gold transcends all metals… so does This Rule all others in Arithmetick…and common sense
forces one to imagine a rule involving three, which would be incomplete an assessment. The “Golden Rule” 
which dictated all mercantile accounting and trade for forever-and-a-day, is what we’d now 

describe as a basic proportion: the lining up of three related numbers in an appropriate manner to solve
for a fourth unknown number. If three eggs cost three coins, how much would six eggs cost? There,
in the answer, is what’s Golden. And so, the “Rule of Three” is concerned with this secretive fourth value 

which happily floats somewhere in an outside void or some childhood dream. Psychoanalysts call this 
a type of rumination, but what I mean by performing a three-way match or watching myself perform 
a three-way match, isn’t in the past, so how could I mourn for it? How is it, when I am reviewing these 

for final approval, I am also always with the mold inside of the inside of our walls? Well, Scheherazade spent 
one thousand and one nights orating a story that was on the inside on the inside of an inside on the inside 
of a state in perpetual deferral, always becoming Gold-in-suspension faraway from the safety of three tenses

and,…Wasn’t the French Revolution, in a sense, just the eruption of a surplus-anger around the issue of State
accounting practices and procedures? Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s minister of finance, issued 100,000
copies of the French Account—the budget of the Royal treasury, an act of fiscal transparency! This was a lie.

None of the three estates: the Clergy, the Nobility, nor the Commons had considered national expenditures
or deficits as a primary political concern. And yet, Necker’s publication created the Fourth Estate, the media
and the journalists, who exposed the fraud of the French Account Surplus (which was, in fact, a severe Deficit).

And wasn’t it three questions published and answered by Sieyès, on behalf of the Commons and the new Fourth, 
which reconciled to the entire world and the Gods above what a nation claims to be versus what a nation truly
is? Well, everyone has to have their own set of books to prepare entries of personal losses and gains into, across 

a ledger an infinite series of complaints about life and death, individualized and sacred cahiers de doléances! Inside 
the financial accounts of grief and mania, I am unaware of any internal controls over reporting, not least 
a three-way match or a signature verification. Still, I only identify patterns and relations within a personal bias,

and I’ve digressed. What I meant to fully cover earlier, involving the history of commerce—a history including
the history of threes, of Gold, and a forgotten, ancient fourth thing—is that it fails me every time. What
is billed, what is ordered, what is received; what is it about seeing the workday with an indifferent stare

which entangles the mind into a tight knot, an image of an image bound and struggling against itself? Well,
I wanted to be a writer and a historian when I was young, but I learned to live without wanting fast enough!
The documents I see today match, appearing to me as my burning and gold-trim triangle, a signature asleep inside.