In one of the seeming dozen novels I planned or drafted but never really finished, a self-described "alpha male" character gets his mind twisted into a pretzel by a primatologist and self-help guru who wants to steal his wife. The guru convinces the alpha that his true position in the primate social order is not as a patriarch, but as a watcher on the fringes who warns the group of danger. 

Sometimes I feel like a watcher too, though I do it with my ears. I'm always listening, and things are always too loud. Partially because of my childhood experience listening for my father to come home––particularly on the night he went nuts––I've developed an extremely thick correlation between my audio sensitivity and my inner fears. 

My psyche has built itself around a neurosis. Score: Freud 1, Wingate 0. 

The worst thing about all this is that I fear Landon has a hint of the syndrome, too. We're about to go watch the World Cup at a kid-friendly tap house, and he doesn't want to go because the shouting gets loud when somebody scores a goal or just misses one. We'll go anyway, but I'll bring along my Bose noise-reducing headphones for him just in case. Or maybe just earplugs. Yeah, less conspicuous.  

Maybe we share the same genetic predisposition for sensitivity to loud sounds, but my guess it that he learned the behavior from me. He probably remembers me covering my ears when he screamed, and has internalized the whole complex. 

Dammit. That's on me. Well, at least I already know one of the ways I messed up my child. Some dads don't figure that out for decades.