Mr. Munson wrote me a great email about The Implicit, and noted echoes of Naomi Shihab Nye’s Valentine for Ernest Mann–which I think we read in his class, and which I had completely forgotten until I read the “poem like a taco” bit, but had clearly absorbed and recycled. Just illustrates the point, really.

And Holly made two cakes (they were supposed to be a four-layer cake, but they got nervous and decided to be two cakes instead), one of which had this written on the dish around it:

Eventually he finds himself writing another pubic hair story, and realises he’s bored. He’s done three zombies, twenty-six otherworldly small girls, ninety-three ninjas; fifty states, every tube stop, all two thousand UN constituent nations, cutting everything he’s ever seen into 101-word pieces. He’s sent the small girls to Ganymede to fight the ninjas (the small girls won), and then set up a rematch deep within the sun (they united against their common enemy, the masked superwhale).

“Next time,” he says, eyes narrow beneath the unruly crest of his white eyebrows, “a hundred and two.”

People read my stuff and write about it. There is no better feeling in the world.