Hampton & Rabbit - Prologue
Updated: Apr 18, 2021
Prologue
‘Recursion is the repeated application of a recursive procedure or definition. A recursion occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics and computer science, where a function being defined is applied within its own definition.’
…and I know this because I copied that and I spent the better part of the summer of nineteen demystifying the subject 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 mathematics.
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.
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 sexting, every mathematician is doing it.
It was near the end of Rabbit and my ‘Recursion’ dissertation that I received a PayPal request from my agent, holidaying like a ‘Pasta Fazool’ in Positano, also checking up on his request from weeks ago if it was ok for him to re-work my Reputation.
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 put 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 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.
Other things should be as obvious if it were not for Dean Hachamovitch, an inventor on the patent for autocorrect. He clearly owes me a summer.
Since I know I’m the smartest guy in the room, because I always tell people that, I’ll state the obvious here too, ‘Recursion’ is the iconic dragon eating its tail. It’s like mistakenly questing for meaning from a mathematical concept where the answer equates to ending where you started.
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.
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