"We can't lose, because 22+78=100."

Round about the time I was in middle school and high school, when my dad was living with my grandmother, and we would visit him on weekends, he began doing a newscast. He was being watched all the time by some bad guys, but the surveillance feed was shown on TV to the masses. Some brave good guys in the TV industry had arranged for it to happen. He explained to us that we could never see it on our own cable, or the TV of any house we ever visited because the signal was always jammed. It's amazing how such a belief could persist in his mind with only negative feedback. Of course, he  claimed the evidence was all over the place. We were walking around with our eyes shut, he said. Anyway, back to the newscast. He would periodically sit in his room and do a newscast to thin air, imagining that the bugs were transmitting his signal to the world. He had handwritten headlines taped up all over his room. His comments on world affairs. I don't remember most of them, but one sticks out in my memory:

"We can't lose, because 22+78=100." 

This may seem totally random, but part of the disease was that my dad would see sinister patterns everywhere. He believed that 22 was a spook (or commie) signal. (Spooks being the name he gave the people who were surveilling and harassing our family.) Sometimes it seemed like he felt it was a code used by commies/spooks/reds (interchangeable names) to communicate with each other, while at other times he felt like it was something that the spooks were deliberately introducing into his environment to taunt him. When we passed a mall that said "22 stores" on the sign, he expostulated about how that was a signal by the mall owners that this was a communist enclave. The fact that JFK was killed on November 22 was significant in this as well. On the other hand, my dad felt like 78 was the opposite of 22. It was a signal from the good guys, and had almost magic powers. At some point it must have dawned on my dad that 22+78=100, and that this was of numerological significance. My guess is that he noticed this when paying for something at a store. I'm guessing something cost X.22 and he got 78 cents in change, and a lightbulb went off.

I'm offering this anecdote as a small window into my past.