Here’s a dumb story about discernment as the world’s most boring Mythbusters episode

I kept seeing 4:44 when looking at my phone.

Obviously I was seeing other numbers, too. Normal times without repeating numbers, and a handful of 2:22s and 3:33s, and a stray 5:55. But 4:44 was the most common repetition. Between this and the Instagram algorithm shoving a lot of far out new age shit that was legitimately difficult to distinguish from well researched parody (and I know a thing or two about well researched parody), I was more annoyed than anything else. If there’s anything to this, if, then shouldn’t whoever is behind it go bother someone else? Because I don’t do angel numbers.

Notably, neither does Doreen Virtue, who came up with the system in the first place. Her 2017 disavowal of her entire brand and downgrading to fundamentalism will never not be funny to me and I’m not sorry.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to shove it through a Heathen filter. The actual Norse names of numbers aren’t very exciting. “Fjórir” just means “four” and it seems nobody was creaming their buxur over the number four in the Viking age. (Threes and nines, though. Those bitches loved threes and nines. Somehow no love for 27 or 81, though.)

Great! I thought, a dead end! I like dead ends. Myth(?) busted. But since I did in fact grow up on Mythbusters and I like the second half of the episode where they figure out how to force the outcome of an urban legend, I’m now also figuring out how to metaphorically blow this up. I have time and I want this repeated coincidence to stop registering in my brain as relevant and worthy of my attention, and therefore I need to manufacture an explanation to fill the role of Buster the crash test dummy in an exploding car. If the mystery is destroyed, like a sedan packed with c4 to prove a point, I can go back to not being enticed by its perceived existence.

Thankfully I had a bee in my bonnet for a while about trying to figure out how to make a runic calendar for myself (failed hilariously, I just look at a moon phase app and count on my fingers now), and I knew that runes sometimes represent numbers. Four, then, in this forced experiment, is not the lackluster and utilitarian fjórir but the rune óss. My favorite rune for a vowel sound aside from ár, by the way.

The other snag here is that I actually just straight up don’t use runes in an esoteric way because I find modern runic esotericism…mechanically unsound? I guess? on a good day. I also think it’s cringe, but the cringe comes from my annoyance at the obsessiveness of treating decontextualized letters as inherently powerful, ancient symbols.

Anyway it’s also a flagrant ripoff of Kabballah, and people need to stop treating that like a communal toy. This is not even a slight exaggeration. I knew this offhand, but for the sake of being able to prove it, here. (I hate having to cite wikipedia but the book cited as a source isn’t available to me.)

So I am, at this point, resurrecting a method I otherwise refuse to use just to shut my brain up. Modern rune-as-divination systems sometimes pull from rune poems, and I certainly did back when I did runic divination because Ralph Blum annoys me and the Sunnyway site had disappeared, but everybody is hung up on the damn elder FUÞARK and ignores the younger, to which óss actually belongs. A mnemonic only shows up for it in a Swedish rune poem where the stanza translates to “a river mouth at every river.”

Well, yeah, this is tautologically necessary. Now I am thinking about Loki kinkshaming Njörðr for being a pisspig, as a poetic reference to rivers emptying into a sea or ocean, in Lokasenna.

But, but, but, my brain protests. We have not manufactured meaning from this. It will not go away until we feed it something that actually resembles an explanation, and I will not stomach it if it doesn’t feel relevant, because the whole reason I’m annoyed at seeing repeated numbers in the first place is because I have not gotten an answer to “what the fuck does this have to do with me?” I am not exactly satisfied by pissplay-as-poetry as an answer.

Eventually I decide to pretend it has something to do with rivers themselves, and the only way I can force it to even seem relevant to me is that I am trying out a name for myself, originally used for a river.

Quoth Gritty, “it me.”

Anyway, this tactic worked at resetting my perception so that I stop noticing this shit. Now I am just seeing 4:43, which is much funnier.

Two core takeaways:

If you adamantly refuse to employ Occam’s Razor and accept explanations which are actually plausible, you can come up with literally anything. Arriving at a conclusion through convoluted association doesn’t make the conclusion useful. Doesn’t mean it’s any good. That’s why it’s a bad tactic if you’re in a situation where you need information that you can actually use. If you have to force a meaning, then that’s a reliable sign the meaning does not actually exist.

If—big if, jumbo if, megapussi chip bag if—you could wrestle any kind of meaning from this, like I did For The Plot, it’s basically just this scene from Family Guy.

I guess I’m just glad clocks can’t shove six-seven in your face.