The New 52

I wasn't prepared for the strength of the blow dealt to me the morning I realized I now lacked a father figure.
Not that the blow itself was a particularly recent one, my father having passed some 30 years previous. But that on this epiphany I realized that I had reached the age that my father had reached before he died.


I've never really considered myself scarred or haunted by anything. A casual insult from an older dick in some tennis courts in grade school many years ago tied me to the epithet "Chunky" for the longest time. I had a dream that some red drapes from my old bedroom were sneaking up behind to bite my mom but I couldn't warn her. They turned to me in my panic and sighed: "I want to talk to her!"


I inadvertently let my son watch the original made-for-tv-movie "It" and he is still afraid of clowns and of Pennywise incarnations both old and new.


When I was a kid I saw a re-run of the old black and white 1959 Twilight Zone episode called "Time Enough At Last". Mild enough story. Still haunts me to this day and has become a source of some anxiety for me that I can't read a book or a paper without glasses now.