infinite eights

Upon leaving the coffee shop earlier tonight, I noticed that my car's odometer read:

0888886

Meaning, it's just a few miles till it reads all eight's. I had my camera with me, so I decided to drive around until it did. I saw it as my job. I went east through Congress park, down Eighth, coincidentally, and then south on Washington.

I began to wonder why this was such an interesting event for me. I thought of an old Married... With Children episode where Al Bundy continuously drove his car back and forth in his parking lot so that the odometer would read 999999; Dodge was going to give him a Viper if they could document this final turnover.

I then realized that this number I was about to hit was just an arbitrary number, and that it was a no event. I then realized that we, as humans, make all sorts of non-events; New Year's eve, the Full Moon, lucky numbers, star constellations - they don't really mean anything outside of our minds, but we insist to give meaning and order to anything we see.

Part of me thinks that this is just a primitive condition; 'Ugg' the Caveman probably had the instinct that anything that didn't look like jungle was either an enemy, or, food and evolution made this instinct stronger. Now we're out of the jungle, we still take note of what seems to be interesting coincidences of organization.

Even though, a string of eights on my dashboard has to be more than mere Gestalt, it seems to me that I have attainted a specific number towards... some sort of goal - I will never be able to, in this car reach that specific number, but then again, every number that flips on the odometer is a unique and specific number that will only show once and in order from least to greatest. A full moon is just one step in a continuous process of it waxing and waning, why do we specifically look for the center of this process?

Am I, whilst choosing one single number, celebrating every single number? It's sort of like the tomb of the unknown soldier. There are many, many, unidentified corpses, yet we only have a few monuments to iconify this fact. And if so... why? Why am I celebrating my set of specific numbers, when there have been millions of cars produced, each counting the miles traveled.

In that case, am I extending my idea of my own uniqueness on a possession that I have? "This is my rifle car, there are many like it, but this one is mine".

I guess to me, all eights on a dashboard looks like a nice continuous line, and I guess as a human, I like lines: text in a book is in a line, gravity falls in a straight line; a line denotes assurance, even though different lines can define different things, like pensiveness (a horizontal line) or alertness (a vertical line!) - the line is "sure" of this thing it is.

So I don't really know for sure, but it's quite nice not to even fully understand something simple as to why I take pictures of a line of eight's on my odometer, when at night I gaze up into the Milky Way and wonder... It makes me realize that I will never really fully understand anything, and that the point isn't to understand by to keep wondering to find interesting questions.