"I’m telling you to go ahead and try to imagine something more. Don’t make that face. God. It’s like you don’t know what I’m talking about. Fire an ember, just right there against that wall. It’s granite. You couldn’t mark it if you tried. Not yet at least. Look at you, all eager. I’m proving a point here. That’s igneous rock. Fire-born magmatic material. You are familiar with this, with what it is. But you don’t remember. You can’t remember but your body does. The body always remembers. Forget the ember. No, I’ve changed my mind, I’m telling you to forget it. I’ve already made my point clear. Walk up to the wall and feel it with your body. I want you to feel what it means to be born from the earth. To be forged in volcanic ruin. Animals are all memory. Instinct. Feel what it tells you. Trust it. The intuitive motion of ancient recall. Snakes are born knowing how to hunt. They are born to kill and they know how to do it without being taught. No one has to teach them how to sharpen the knife of predation. They just do it. It’s in their blood. Their brutal, ice cold blood. Unfeeling monsters wrought in the fleshpots of nature’s underbelly. Creatures born from evil. You haven’t seen one yet and God forbid you ever do. But you will. And you will learn then what it means to be a true terrestrial animal. But as I was saying. Beavers build dams. Bears sleep like fairy-tale dragons. Sea Turtles crawl into the ocean. Feel what lays dormant inside you. So touch the rock. Feel your ancestral muscle sing against this phanerite. Probably harvested from some subvolcanic intrusion. Hypabyssal rock. And don’t sneer. It doesn’t matter how deep they’re found. Granite is honest igneous and you will respect it. Sandpaper your thorax against that granular coarseness. What it means to touch the crystalline body of granite. Granular and crystalline. Treasure of the ground. Of rock. Earth’s recourse.

"And don’t even think about it. God. I know what you were about to do. That’s the one impulse you need to control. I’ve told you a million times to tame that itch. You’re not ready yet. Forget what I just said. That’s not what I meant by follow your instinct. Okay let’s go way back to first base — you aren’t understanding me. I’m confusing you. Yes, don't deny it, I can see it. I can see the confusion written in your undeveloped non-compound eyes. Written all over you. Freakishly human eyes. Our eyes are the same color. Imagine that. There’s nothing on you, God. It’s a figure of speech. Stop spinning — look at me. Turn around. It’s an idiom. As in it was evident from your expression. Can you even perceive emotive expression. Can you understand what it means to read facial expressions. You can can you. Can you infer my general feelings right now. It doesn’t look like I’m in any mood does it. Again a figurative expression. Right now connoting a general feeling of displeasure. Not an emotional stasis like I guess it could imply. I don't even want to get into what first base means. For a number of reasons, but know that — no nevermind forget it. It's not important.

"You could probably lift yourself a few feet in the air. Maybe even up to here. You’d like that wouldn’t you. Well don’t. You will learn to respect the ground. You will drag yourself across the earth until your immature body ascends its nymphal instar. You wouldn’t even be able to control it. You’d spiral and crash and fall. You forget I’m a geologist’s son. Understand what it means to tread. To tread earth. It’s a humbling thing. Birds don’t respect the earth and see where that gets them. Naivety is not understanding why it is that you’ve developed wings. Why your ancestors developed wings. It’s why avian life-forms take for granted what it means to suspend yourself against the pull of gravity. To endeavor skyward is arrogance. Imagine them looking down on us. Imagine what they’d see. Tiny figures, incomprehensible. Blended into landscape. That’s what they see is landscape. Background. Think what foreground must mean to an avian life-form. Something in the likeness of being near as opposite to distance. What is near to them but their own protruded mouths and empty space. Consider the Earth from way high. The planet itself. Are you listening to me — stop touching the wall and listen. God. Did you feel the hearth. Did you feel the purr of an awakened instinct in your immature larval body. When Mr. Worldwide retrieved your egg you were surrounded by lava and stone. By magmatic rock. That is your origin. You will develop wings and you will live suspended above the ground but you were conceived thousands of feet below the surface of the earth. You are primally terrestrial before you are anything else. And don’t you forget it. You will learn to respect the earth before you lift yourself one measly inch off this goddamned ground.

"Consider yourself for a moment. A paurometabolous lepidoptera. Imagine that. A Larvitar has a pupal state and you don’t. And but don’t get me started on Mr. Worldwide’s obsession with Larvitars. You know he was going to give me one. Instead of you. I'd've been standing right exactly here talking to a Larvitar. I’d be going to school in a few days with a Larvitar. Imagine that for a moment. You know what a Larvitar is you’ve seen Mr. Worldwide’s photos in the living room. His is a Pupitar now. It’s been a Pupitar for as long as I can remember. That’s what it means to undergo a jaded mockery of holometabolism. You are confused at my disdain. Every pokémon undergoes evolution. Most do. Some are born complete. They are born quote unquote perfect. But you were born incomplete. You were spawned in the abbreviated likeness of ancient lepidoptera. Lepidoptera as in an order of pterygota i.e. butterflies and moths. Winged insects that undergo complete metamorphosis. This was maybe approx. 200 million years ago. They predate you. Remember that. Metamorphosis. That is true perfection. The blueprint. They were the precursor to all standard evolution. Look at you, crawling around and moving like your life depends on it. Because it does depend on it. I’m inhaling all this gas you’re secreting you know. Like a damn chimney. Mr. Worldwide was a chainsmoker. He still is. He’s probably somewhere right now skulking around some archaeological dig lipping a fuckin’ cigarette. He keeps one tucked behind his ear you know. Like a pencil. Just there clipped between his ear and head like a goddamned pencil. Always a pack of menthols in his back-pocket. Yours is like static air to me. Doesn’t even register to my lungs. You can’t stop your body from making fuel to burn and emit heat. What do you even call that. A biological oversight. That’s what it is. You can't take in oxygen until you empty whatever gas type makeup your furnaced immature insect body creates. And it's always creating. Probably retrograde carbon. That’s what you are. Something retrograde. How do you work backward from total metamorphosis. That’s what you get for skipping a step. You don’t get to skip the pupal state. You see where that got you. It’s a miracle you somehow manage to survive sleep. You’re stuck like this for God knows how long. What is it like a lever or something. How do you even survive sleep anyway. We’re going to have to look into that sometime.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"It’s like sitting next to Mr. Worldwide. Imagine for a second you’re 8 years old maybe 9. This was back when he used to at least pretend to live here. He’d be here sometimes for full months. He’d be sitting right there on that chair beneath the umbrella. That giant fucking lawn umbrella. He had it specially made to cover the entire backyard. You’ve never seen something architecturally like it. Maybe two of them could cover an infield. See how that pole just goes up and up. It’s furled right now but it covers the whole backyard and then some. The sun is out now but it’d be like nighttime come early. He was fucking bats about the sky. He’d just smoke and smoke into the unfurled umbrella at night looking at nothing. Imagine the smoke just suspended there like smog beneath an atmospheric layer, trapped. It was suffocating. And then he’d say, ‘Why don’t you come sit here with me.’ And his Pupitar’d just be there, wholly inanimate in some gross parody of pupal metamorphic stasis — but it was awake, I’m telling you it was awake, and it didn’t ever make a sound but it was always awake I just knew it was. You know pokémon chrysalis stages are functional and sentient. This is the main differentiator. It’s freakish but a plus. Nothing retrograde like your hemimetabolism. It’s insane because it acted like it was inert. And Mr. Worldwide would just summon him to be inert, unmoving. He said that nothing good comes from keeping a pokémon in its ball. He was real anal about it. That Pupitar never spent more than a second in that ball if it didn’t need to. Mind you it’s like 200 kg. It was fucking huge. You don’t realize what kind of mass is behind 135 centimeters until it’s there in front of you, taking up space. Look there, that indent on the ground. See where the grass caves in. The grass that I have to cultivate. Don’t get near it just look from right there. Right. I forget you can’t see. Forget it. You’ll ruin the grass. It boggles the mind how biologically incongruous you are. Can you see me at least. Okay. Pay attention. So imagine I’m 9 years old and my father who’s been in and out the door since as long as I can remember says that why don’t I come and sit there with him. The umbrella blotting out the world. The sterile beige of an underside stretching as far as the eyes can see. There were no seasons under that umbrella. No night and day. Environmentally clinical. His own little world bereft of the natural passage of time. Tinted to fogging fuck by cigarette smoke like something out of the underworld. My eyes are red and I’m gurgling my throat like something infantile. You know, it’s funny what you remember. Pupitar sounding off a grunt like something gaseous being let of its pressure. Me wanting to kick it over. Mr. Worldwide reaching for the menthol cigarette behind his ear. Six flicks of an old lighter and it won’t go. Just a standard gas station lighter. And the gathered smog is just tearing me up at this point. I’m doing the thing that kids do when they don’t know it’s rude to like, pinch your nose in front of a smoker. Rude in the way of making them feel bad. He can’t get his thing to light and I hear it flick three more times and I'm pinching my nose like something fierce because I just couldn't take it. My weak, underdeveloped boy lungs. And I squeeze and squeeze until it just starts bleeding. Just bleeding for no reason. Like I pinched a vessel. At this point I'm desperate for air. I'm lightheaded and I'm bleeding from my nose. The drag of carbonized air against my bleeding nasal cavity feels like a bad mix. The spike of something foul against the tang of iron. I'm tasting it like it's on my tongue. Like something aged and industrial. It feels like I've swallowed a carburetor. It’s a weird feeling. You don’t even realize you’re bleeding until you feel the blood against your lip. Your chapped boyish lips. That lightheaded feeling of leaking blood so casually. Unceremoniously. I take the back of my finger across my nostrils and draw a line of blood all the way until the end of my arm. My dad who is never home finally for once summons the will in him to talk to me in any capacity and my nose starts fountaining blood like a popped vessel and my eyes are red from the smog and I’m scared he’s going to leave any second. Like I’ve inconvenienced him. He’s still flicking. Something about the lighter won’t go. You could see the sparks fly but nothing does it. No flame. The blood feels forever-going. I start crying. You should’ve seen me crying. Wailing, more like. Like a fucking infant. My nose is swollen and red and it’s throbbing from finger-skin friction and some of the blood is beginning to harden. And then he turns up from his old gas station lighter and looks at me. The indifferent gaze of a scientist regarding something curious. You should have seen his face. Froze me right there beneath that eclipse of an umbrella. Like something anesthetized on a table. My blood went cold. Like I was something to be regarded was the worst part. Like something he was unsure of.

"We’re going to compete and I need you to be ready. You have the capacity to be great. You will be great. I’m not asking you to believe me. You just need to do what I say. You don’t believe me but you don’t understand what it means to transform. To ascend the state of your being. I get it. Get back up against that wall. And don’t even think about it. Feel the granite against your body. Look at the earth beneath you. The ground that sustains your weight. Your being. The ground that suspends the pull of gravity, pushing upward against it. You are in the balance of a perfect equilibrium. Respect the ground that holds you. That holds everything."