Hampton & Rabbit: Prologue

Since being the smartest guy in the room is what I think everyone expects, I’ll state the obvious here: ‘Recursion’ is a misdirected quest for meaning in a mathematical abstract where the end point is where you began. It is the iconic dragon eating its tail.

And I know this because I spent the better part of the summer of twenty two deconstructing it for myself and ten year old son, Rabbit. He is my only entouragist who I exert mind control over and he is usually found stumbling over every movement I make. He’s definitely the one (“1”) I most fuss about. Together we’ve both started to talk and think like expert students of obscure concepts.

I was taught many times, over and over again, from elementary to grad school that I couldn’t define or explain a word by using that same word. Now I’ve learned that ‘Recursion’ is an exception to that rule. Just like Pickleball, every mathematician is doing it.

It was a summer of soulful delight reminiscent of the 1966 sport documentary feature ‘The Endless Summer’ of which a remake is now in the works, although it was also nothing like it.

It was near the end of Rabbit and my ‘Recursion’ dissertation that I received a PayPal request from my ‘rep’, holidaying like a ‘Pasta Fazool’ in Positano, also checking up on his request from weeks ago if it was ok for him to manage matters of my “Reputation”.

This too should have been so obvious if it were not for Dean Hachamovitch, an inventor on the patent for autocorrect. He clearly owes me a summer.

The ball dropped, but not for Rabbit who was returning to e-school as a ‘Recursion’ prodigy with the devotion of young love to his newfound passion project. Impressionable he is.

My devotion to anything is based on the premise that there is an infinite sized fuck-it-bucket into which my assistant is constantly on command to pick up my shit and discard it.

Rabbit and I are like a collar and cuff mismatch even more so because he thinks we’re cut from the same cloth. His mother and I did our utmost to conceive him so he may be right.

I prefer to see myself in Hampton, his older sister, a surprise that came sixteen joyful summers in the Hamptons plus, or minus, nine months ago. Naming her ‘Hampton’ was to draw attention away from the obvious by stating it, which is also a recursion. She is frivolous like litigation, energetic like a judge and counts favors like a godfather.

Re-tasking Rabbit seems impossible now, my grip on him feels like an air hug, its lost like an AirPod and his adoration for me is complicated like an evacuation.

And so it went.