the garage gospel: head is body

The creed at its most reductive and most quotable: the boy's celebrated mind is "just neural spasms," his thoughts "the sound of your head revving," and therefore "head is still just body." "Commit this to memory. Head is body." The father's materialism is total — there is no mind that is not meat — and it lands as the philosophical floor of the whole anthology's body-as-machine doctrine. The tennis academy will spend a thousand pages complicating this (it's the heads they work on, through the body), but the reduction is stated here flat, as hard news for a ten-year-old.