If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything… - Thomas Pynchon

You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he'd had for some time that his father is not a god, not even a oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such father. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairly tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.

...Just be advised, boys,' she said, 'you'll want to watch your step, 'cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism — lowlifes of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it'll be them who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol' pearl herself just goes a-rollin' on.

What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.