All the while, while eating red hots (Millie gave me red hots and necco wafers, she's so fucking thoughtful) and reading, there's this occasional impulse. The pershidium converter is wondering which part of the pershidium converter the impulse comes from. It's a flyaway, wild impulse, it's the fast-beating heart of a woodpecker in distress. It's a fucked-up, worm-wood, drizzle-soaked moonrise of an impulse. It makes the inside of my chest want to fly away out of my chest, and take me, dangling from my own heart strings behind it like a hapless boy clinging to a million balloons. Does it come from the nothingness? No, but it is fueled by the nothingness as everything is. Does it come from the proto-nothingness? No, but it is resonant around the edges of the possibility of that. Does it come from the strategies, the gamification, the monetary, the clever, or the wicked? No, it is in juvenile defiance of all of that. It is tight-muscled, thin-chested, bronze-skinned and tousle-haired in the presence of all of that. It is pure defiance. It is 12 years old, and it is the boy I wanted. The impulse knows that to commemorate, you have to make deals with soccer players. The kids who can't write a story about anything except a soccer game they played and won? The boys who have no fucking idea what a story is, if it isn't a game, to be won or lost? The commemorator has to learn how to survive in the belly of the bomber with those boys, parachutes strapped on. It has to learn how to drink with those boys. It has to learn to laugh with those boys, punch and guffaw with those boys. Because in a field of flowers, wearing a flowered dress is being worse than invisible. I am going to have that third margarita after all.