The kid watches from the window and catches the squat’s eye and waves. A grin cuts across his djinnish face and he laughs. The great gloom of the world is for him an hysterical vaudeville. He laughs again. He laughs so hard he pisses himself, ♥♥♥♥♥ himself, his trousers are a bog teemed with alien fish and toad. He vomits from the stench. He laughs like the untold billions before him who laughed in the endless desert and from dark high places and crawling up out of seaweed water. Son of Man, child of God.

"A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object."

-How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg