Chimes: 2018 Edition (emended Blazevox book pdf)

#47
Dad was becoming unsettled and unsettling. Frequent inexplicable rages
degenerated into depressions; fits of distemper gave way to a kind of ecstasy, selfcontained
and silent. Had I been an adult, the situation would’ve been obvious to
discern; Dad’s got a new girlfriend. Responsibilities had been put on the backburner;
two children and a wife had been secretly toppled in favor of fresh, feverish fucking.
The mood of the house became bullet-riddled; everything he did was a shot, a
substantiation of newly kindled potency. I was starting high school and do not
remember feeling sanguine. There was an excitement to Dad’s new heightened
sensibility, but it was the excitement of grasped-for risk; it had no stability in it, and as
I walked the halls of this new school I had nothing to hold onto. I tried to mirror Dad’s
excitement but my own potency felt shrunken by pain and the usual frustrations of
being a freshman.
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