Am I Right?

Skull and Steel

Excerpt from "I Have A Picture" by Cipriano Bookpuddle --

Ever notice that when we describe human loss of composure we use terms that refer to explosions and rapid rise in temperature?
“He really blew his top!” etc.
It’s an accurate description of the way Dad’s anger tended to surface. All at once and full of heat. We all show our rage in various ways, ranging anywhere from a steamy slow oozing type of thing, like porridge bubbling in a pot, to sudden unexpected geyser-like bursts that seem to come out of nowhere. Dad’s “ventings” tended towards this latter type of seismic upheaval, and were equally volcanic in their urgency. The end of the world is at hand! Why? Because there’s no salt on the table, or the drinking water’s not cold enough.
With a certain twist to it, I think I’ve inherited a bit of this hotheadedness. The “twist” is in the frequency of the eruptions. In other words, my boiling point is set quite a bit higher than Dad’s was, but like Dad, when the lid is blown, look out kids, because it’s like a pressure-cooker malfunctioning! The Chernobyl meltdown!
Dad was like Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park… you could pretty much get off the tour bus, get your camera ready, and expect geyser-like outbursts from him at regular intervals on any given day. Me, on the other hand, my outbursts are more… historic in nature. Like Mount Vesuvius and the story of Pompeii. I may only erupt once every couple hundred years, but holy cow, a whole city may be covered by the resulting lava flow.
At those moments, I say and do things that are not only irrational, but highly dangerous. I can think of one incident that illustrates Dad and I both blowing our lids simultaneously. It happened in the garden on Argyle Street…

I cannot remember why I was so mad at Donna. But oh, was I ever mad.
There we were in the garden out back… Mom, Dad, Donna, and I, like a scene from The Waltons.
But I was furious about something and, picking up a nearby rake, I flung it as hard as I could at my dear sister. Swirling horizontally, hurtling towards her head, I can see it again in my mind as though in slow motion…
Whack!
Skull and steel.
The toothy tines of the rake caught her just above the eye and knocked her flat!
Can you imagine? Can you imagine for a moment what the outcome of that action could have been? What an inch lower would have meant?
…Old Faithful did not give me much time to think about it!
Off like a shot, in a literal race against death itself I made the near fatal mistake of running INTO the house. Now how stupid is that?
Within seconds Dad had me cornered and commenced thrashing at me with the unexaggerated ferocity of three (or maybe four) rabid bears. I don’t remember much about his actual technique, except that it was grizzly indeed. And Mom could not save me, because she was busy putting Donna’s eye back in its socket. All in all, it was by far, the most memorable beating I ever received from Dad, and the best deserved!
In fact, this example is not a good one in describing irrational anger, because Dad would have been entirely justified in tearing my liver out in this particular case. But I just mention it as a way of saying that he was a force to be reckoned with. And not just because he could so easily maim you physically. He was not typically violent. He just projected an image of someone with whom you did not want to incur wrath.
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