Lately it seems we've been consumed with numbers. There are demonstrators protesting on behalf of the "other 99%" of Americans. A politician espousing his proposed tax code policy of 9-9-9. A baseball executive who is moving from Boston to Chicago that made his career looking at statistics of players over their scouting evaluations and the movie called "Moneyball" from a book that inspired that type of thinking in the first place. There are polling questions, stock market projections, and fantasy football point totals just bombarding us everywhere. Why does my running back have to have a bye week and why am I stuck starting a third-stringer? Yet among all of that madness (and poor drafting) somehow the number I can't get out of my head is that damn Subway commercial "5 dollar, 5 dollar..foot looong".
Numbers are easy to grasp. They are constant and we'll always have them to gauge our success or failure. Our economy is healthy or deathly-ill by the numbers that shoot out of computers and evaluate our financial wellness. We get bills with numbers on them. Sometimes they multiply quicker than we could have imagined. We shoot for number goals. Be it a dollar amount we want to acquire, diminish, or spend. We calculate our rate of success by a figure that we imagine will get us there. Or in some cases (more so then ever) we try to make our figure last longer. Everywhere we look a new number is shooting out at us, and with it a number to tell us what that number really means. I wish I was good at numbers. I am a writer. Numbers were not my thing, but long-winded paragraphs don't hit people with the same truth as do numbers. Numbers to people equal facts..until they don't.
Then we want to know who was running the numbers..must be the top 1%.
I'm 14 blogs away from 100..that's the new number I am shooting for. Not sure what lies after that. I think I want to wrap up my blogging career as it has yet to bestow me with the millions of followers I anticipated. I know that today I feel like I got hit by a semi-truck and I can't blame any number of drinks or shots on this one, only the annual head flu that hits me once a year. I am calculating the number of DayQuil shots I can take in conjunction with my EmergenC vitamin packets. Not exactly Petron or Jager and maybe that is really what 3 out of 4 doctors recommend. I have reservations booked at Seven Feathers today to go lose some dollar numbers playing blackjack on the horizon so it would be awesome if I felt more human and less zombie-esque. Who knew the Walking Dead was Girard Dr on a Saturday in October.
Speaking of Girard drive, this is my new writing name I am introducing on my writing career. Jon Miller is becoming Jonathan Girard. So in ten to fifteen years if you see Jonathan Girard on a bookshelf that is me. Just a heads up. It was down to Jonathan Deane (the road I grew up on in my childhood) or Girard (the home of the walking zombie today) and zombie won. The only problem with Girard is it is pretty close to Joe Girardi, the manager of the NY Yankees. However, I calculate (doing the numbers) that by the time my books hit the shelves he will be long-gone as a Yankees manager and the added value of the few diehards thinking the former coach is now a fiction writer could only help my numbers.
In the spirit of wrapping up my column nice and tidy I'm going to throw out a few numbers I'd like to focus on this weekend. 21: as in blackjack and I hope I hit that a few times tonight. 40-21: As in 49ers over the Detroit Lions tomorrow morning when I am chowing down on a big breakfast and a Bloody Mary (make that 2 bloody marys). 111: the amount of points I want my fantasy football team to score. 121,000: the jackpot at slots I hit? Sure. Two friends, 1 girlfriend and one hell of a time. Is this too much to ask for?
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