ok wow. so looks like i fixed some of this.

1. i put the old bowed-in-the-middle glass plate back on - instead of using the mirror which i know to be flatter
2. i re-leveled the glass plate and as expected the center gap to the nozzle was very tight, so tight it scored the piece of paper when i tried to pull it out (yes, i put paper there and let nozzle settle down onto it when leveling moved to that location)
3. i lowered the two front corners of the bed so that i could get the piece of paper out from under the center point where the nozzle was
4. i made a mental note of how tight it was in the center
5. i loaded up Benchy3d boat gcode and printed

well guess what? that little thing dead center, printed just fine

6. i removed the glass plate and replaced it with the mirror
7. i re-leveled with the mirror in each of the corners, i really reduced the gap such that the paper had about the same amount of drag on it as it did with the glass plate in the center - which was a lot of drag! i mean, the paper had to be slid diagonally with two hands so it would fit under the nozzle, then there was a lot of vibration and drag
8. i updated my model in the slicer so that it would print the lines at 90 degree instead of 45 degrees as seen in the pictures above (this may or may not have contributed - i was willing to do more than one change at a time at this point!)
9. the center of the mirror has a lot less drag on the paper than the corners, but i can still kind of feel some "light scratchy" feeling in the center
10. so my mirror is obviously concave in the center - then i went ahead and printed the actual model above (i did not test the benchy3d boat because i wanted to get things going)
11. the print started and primed a little goofy on the first pass, then went to town printing my model and so far perfect! the lines are going the long way left/right. it's not lifting up or curving
additional info: i can see the nozzle head impression in the hair spray layered on my mirror in the four corners, that's how tight it is.
additional info 2: i put glue stick down on the glass plate print and on the hair spray covered mirror
additional info 3: my PLA temp is back to normal 200deg and the bed temp is back to normal 60deg

two take aways:

1. i will have to try the diagonal again
2. when people on the internet say "raise the bed just so that there is a little scratchy feeling on the paper" what they must really mean is: raise the bed so the frickin paper is held in place damn tight to the point where it scores about half-way into the paper when you pull it out ha!

i did see a video somewhere where someone did not use a piece of paper when leveling the bed, the person got a vibration when the nozzle hit the glass, then backed off a tiny bit.

so we will see. almost done with bottom layer at 47mins and no lifting etc...