{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

OK, you know my story.  I graduated from the university at the ripe old age of 35 in 2002.

Fifteen years later, after collecting many books so that I could pick up where I left off, I stopped just shy of "where I left off" in 2002, and I have been engaged in this experiment with finally studying what they were trying to teach me in 1984/85 when I was 17/18.

Where I stand:  I will be satisfied if I can learn what I was expected to be retaining in high school.  The Solution: Lowering my expectations of how "Mathematically Mature" I will become might actually be a manifestation of maturing.  Schopenhauer counsels us not to try to be something we are not as it will only cause us grief.

I do not expect to become a mathematician, but I am prepared to spend my life "tinkering with mathematics".  I'm just a tinkerer ... my plate is full.

If I were ever condemned to be held prisoner for a long period of time, I would become severely depressed unless I could continue studying in and just beyond my comfort zone.

The way the zealots bring the New Testament, copies of the Quran, and Twelve Step literature (the State religion) into prisons, I day dream of bringing Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus, and computer algebra systems into "Yard Out University".

When one is in such a place, you wish you had a double, for only a double would know what you need.  No one will go to the trouble of finding just the right book, and certainly not spend too much on a solution manual.   No, they will send cut-outs of prayers to "the Lord Jesus Christ" or some verse from the Bible.

My sister sent in a priest to talk to me, and I refused the visit.   He ended up talking to my cellmate, a hell raiser from Mexico.  Of course, the priest spoke Spanish.  No kidding.

Anyway, what was I rambling on about this time?  Oh, math.  That's right.   Math for the jailbirds!!!   Something to do in the cell ... to become a different kind of monk, a monk who does not believe in God, a monk who does not belong to any religion at all, but a monk just the same ...

I study math every day because I realize what a great joy it would be to have access to just a few of the mind-treasures I have on my shelf in the little room in my mother's domicile.  I will not call it a cell, as I can walk out the door when I choose to.

If the jail cell were to be transformed into the little room I dwell in today, I would have been filled with thankfulness.   I refuse to ruin the delight of learning by constantly biitching about how "I will never be a mathematician" or "I must have smoked too much crack and drank too much booze" or "maybe I am a little brain damaged". 

No!  Forget that bullshiit.   I still have to think very hard to figure out how to solve problems (especially involving writing a formal proof) that I am finding in these special books, "Modern Introductory Analysis" as well as "Introductory Analysis".

I wonder why this material is not covered in this manner in community college or university.   Maybe I am a rebel monk who has stumbled quite accidentally upon forbidden knowledge by stubbornly looking precisely where one would never look in a thousand years.  First of all, who is going to look in a "high school" text?   Secondly, who would think that the material would be presented in a superior manner way back in the 1970's and 1980's than it is now?

OK, so I am a little ridiculous and a bit comical, but I am going to "make believe" I am a toothless monk of an ancient cult, older than the Abrahamic triad, older than the Devil even.   To paraphrase Lovecraft, I daydream of being influenced by a qualitas occulta far older than even the aborigines of North America ... non-human ...

And I am guided by these specters ... guided to these old vintage math books which take on a glow ... saying, "When the student is ready, the Teacher appears."

This student is old.  This student is ready.  How I shun the elite academic mathematicians and just want to be left alone to tinker ... to allow myself to say, "I don't get it."

And to allow myself to be "retarded" ... and to begin to grasp something, and to make genuine breakthroughs that would seem pathetic to the snobs of academia.   

I become fixated on certain books and they become the Holy Grail to me ... in my own little world where I am this child growing to be an old man rather swiftly and almost happily.