Just a reminder, if you haven’t yet entered the contest on Fresh Squeezed’s Facebook page rush on over there and tell us your best stupid criminal stories. Then get your friends to like the page and vote for your entry. If Bonnie and I like your story you could win a free book. If everybody else likes it, you could go home with the grand prize of your choice of a Nook Glowlight or Kindle SimpleTouch. Only three more weeks.

I’d rather that one of you won the prize than some random Internet whack-job who wants the eReader to help pass the time he is serving for his attempted car-jacking on the “Enter” side of the car wash. The cops were waiting at the exit and forced him to come clean.

See how easy it is?

On with the blog.

I must admit, I have a thing for numbers. Fractions and decimals are okay, but I just adore digits. Not math. Not arithmetic. Integers. One, two, etc.; zero to (2N+1). Okay, math’s okay too. And I’m not sure where this particular psycho-addition comes from. 

In school I was never very good at math. I just couldn’t get the rationale for learning something that is 1) esoteric, 2) abstract, and 3) completely impractical. So I bumbled through calculus, took a pass on differential equations, and focused my efforts on advanced study in fields that interested me, like chemistry and geology and physics. All of which, I later found out, would have been much easier had I not given short-shrift to those math classes which required more caffeine than the cafeteria urn held just to get up to the same buzz-level as the grad student running the labs.

I’ve heard differential equations were tough enough if you got higher than a D in third-level calculus. I know how unfathomable they are when the last math class I kind-of understood was algebra as a high school freshman.

But numbers? Yeah, I was down with numbers and geology was great for a numero-addict such as myself. Counting crystals in granite thin-sections? Yeah, baby!Chips of sandstone in drilling mud? You betcha! The ratios of rubidium⁸⁷ to strontium⁸⁷ in a focused, accelerated plasma beam? OH. MY. GOD!

And years? Forget that piker James Ussher and his paltry 6,012 years since his God started playing around with clay. In real geology, there are billions of years. And then billions more. Each one of them special, unique. Hear “Jurassic” and you might think of the semi-eponymous movie. I visualize the breakup of Pangaea. Say “sixty-five million years” and my mind drifts to the asteroid that slammed into the Caribbean and the worldwide, millimeter thick layer of iridium marking the end of the reign of dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals. Unfortunately culminating in us. In geology it was all there: years, crystals, strikes, dips, and all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world crying out, nay begging, to be counted. By me.

But then geology let me down in the Reagan Recession (forgot about that one didn’t you) of 1985. I was forced into a corner with only two options to support myself. I could go out on the streets and sell myself in tawdry transactions. Or I could take up computers.

In computer science I found, perhaps, the mother-lode of counting. A numeric vein as dense as a poorly-baked pie, as thick as the Greenland ice sheet of a hundred years ago, and extending over the horizon in all directions.

Digital delight.

Because, as we all know, computers run on numbers. These words you’re reading? Inside the box they’re numbers. Being unfriended by your ex on Facebook, the pictures in your camera, the digits on your thermostat, how far down you’re pushing the gas pedal or brake on your car, and on and on and on – just numbers.

But it gets better. Those numbers are built into those wonderful practicalthings by counting them up!  Oh, bliss! And it’s not just the same old 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 that we all learned in diapers – or whatever culturally specific undergarment you were swaddled in. It’s also the 0, 1, 10, 11, 100 of binary. The 0, 1, 2, 3, 10 of quaternary (coincidentally, also the name of a geological period). There’s octal with its clever omission of the numerals “8” and “9”. And hexadecimal – base 16 – which substitutes A, B, C, D, E, and F for 10 through 15. Oh, joy!

I was the luckiest guy in the world. Not one but two careers where I could float on an ocean of digits and count to my heart’s content.

But then I walked away from computers and sailed off to become a writer. The numbers all went away. In the stroke of the pen on my first contract to write a magazine article, every number except the word count at the bottom of the screen vanished from my life.

Poof!

But my need to count did not. (At this point I’d like to pause and invite my readers trained in the psychological and, more particularly, psychiatric arts – of which I know of several – to weigh in with a diagnosis and/or treatment plan.) So now my arithmomania, once a disorder cleverly hidden by my career choices, is a demon I must confront day-to-day in the real world.

The odd thing about the whole counting nonsense is that I don’t care about the results. Even when the counting is eminently practical, like the number of shovels-full of cow-poop it takes to fill the wheelbarrow (twenty for the curious among you), I don’t remember any of the results. The wheelbarrow is the lone exception that proves, as I have loaded so much into so many for so long that the number is etched into my brain for all time. By and large, the reason I count, is that it’s fun counting.

Much like having a hobby or playing a sport at which one has no hope of improving in or winning at – golf in my younger years, or gardening against the gophers now, for example – I find myself counting, just for grins.

But I realize that counting is just a symptom; the underlying disease is my overriding obsession with numbers.

Which is rather long-winded by way of introduction, but I thought it necessary to give you a brief look at how numbers jump into my consciousness. Because that’s exactly what happened this week. My fascination – once again – in the Florida vote tally was swept away as chaff before the wind by a single number. And, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you already know what that number is. 

Thirty thousand.

Well, it’s really twenty to thirty thousand, which, technically, is a range of numbers. But either end of that range is an unbelievably large number for 1) a writer’s earnings or 2) the number of emails sent between Jill Kelley and General John Allen.

Of course, I am referring to the investigation and subsequent collateral damage resulting from the former four-star General and CIA Director David Petraeus’ scandal-soaked exit from government service and into the land of mega-buck memoirs. Apparently, for the last year or so, and this just to give future readers an historical perspective of the issue, Patraeus had been bivouacking with fellow ex-Army officer and biographer Paula Broadwell – a name awfully close to something from a James Bond movie. Anyway, Broadwell, twenty years Patraeus’ junior and, judging by her Daily Show interview, very fit, had a thing for men in uniform, and they were involved in a year-long field exercise, so to speak.

Well, Broadwell apparently caught wind of Jill Kelley, a Florida socialite – whatever that is – and “social liaison” (quotes courtesy of the BBC) to the troops at nearby MacDill Air Force base which is home to CENTCOM (soon to be renamed SITCOM) where Patraeus was stationed while he was running the current wars. Broadwell didn’t like Jill Kelley liaison socialiteizing wit’ her BGF and started sending emails to Kelley which Kelley found “threatening”. Unaware that socialites have connections the rest of us can only dream about, Broadwell did not desist and Kelley brought in the FBI. Most of us in a similar situation would end up with a beat cop yawning and spilling coffee as he filled out our complaint. But Kelley got the Feebs.

Who started reading her emails to get some context, which is where both Patraeus’ and Gen. Allen’s names came into play and the whole thing got elevated to the level of Matter of National Security.

And the FBI started counting.

And gave up somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand.

Which is where I got interested.

Because that is more emails than I’ve exchanged with all my correspondents in the last twenty to thirty years.

My geological training kicked in and I tried to find out how long this communication has been going on. Allen moved to Florida in 2008 but the email exchange didn’t commence until 2010. Two years. Twenty-plus thousand emails. Count. Count. Count.

That works out to twenty-seven emails per day, forty-one if the count is thirty thousand. Each and every day, for two years, between a four-star general and a “socialite.”

Who, no shit, weren’t doin’ the nasty.

Talk about suspension of disbelief.

Of course, we’ll never learn the full story. We’ll never get the libidinous particulars which the BBC are just salivating for. And anyway, in another six weeks, it’ll all just go away as the country tumbles over the fiscal cliff.

But it gives me hope as a writer. Hope that I can come up with characters who are half as stupid, in situations that are half as ludicrous, and invent a story that is half as tragic.

And twice as believable.