wasting away to the numbers
It's a good thing I studied some math today. Otherwise today would've just been Balatro from sunrise to sundown.
I need to put these numbers away and do something real, something physical.
But the allure of it all!
The allure of getting absurdly high scores in the illegal poker hands of Balatro,
the implications of "group codes" and how they represent this concept of Modern Algebra…
I hate that I've started entertaining myself with a five-dollar Discrete Math and Modern Algebra textbook from Half-Price Books.
How far have I fallen to descend past degeneracy and into insanity?
Numbers…
Those quantitative specters haunt me when I lie down for bed now.
I have to exhaust myself doing math or playing card games until I'm too tired to do literally anything else.
…
I won't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow morning in the shape of a seven.
…
And how did I get so attached to math in the first place, all those years ago?
I was thrashing about, trying to grab hold of any small fragment of reality…
and all I caught was something that's very good at describing the way reality works.
All these years later, I'm at the edge of math,
at the base of a mountain before I reach a plateau of iterations of the fundamentals.
Magmas. Groups. Rings. Tokens. Languages.
And it all bleeds out into the rest of the world.
Letters are tokens in the language of the alphabet just as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, as well as +, -, *, /, =, are tokens of typical math.
And typically you get to say stuff like 1 + 1 = 2.
But in the world of Modern Algebra, my friend,
we reinvent the wheel to fly through the sky.
0 + 0 = 0, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 0 = 1, that all makes sense.
But 1 + 1 = 0, oh, my friend, welcome to addition modulo two.
If this is far too outlandish and wacky for you, turn back now.
It only gets worse from here.
The worst part is that this crap is at the heart of math.
It's so simple and abstract.
I love it.
In fact, I think I'll…
lie down right here
in all the numbers
and make myself right at home.
Like the immutable, starry heavens above,
the absurdity and outlandishness of math
comforts me
because it doesn't make sense
why
it makes sense.
