Domestic violence drops in for a visit

I punched my wife for the first time today. Here's how it happened. Spoiler alert: it's not my fault. It's my uncle's, and that creep's in my bedroom. Also, Clay's and Josh's.

I had a tough night.

I was hanging out with my uncle and my aunt. We were talking about how his co-workers have no sense of humor. He plays pranks on them and they just don't appreciate it. Oh, they laugh, but the laugh doesn't reach their dead eyes. Sometimes it doesn't even reach their mouths, they just make huh huh sounds like they're trying their best but the botox is a cruel master. Also, my uncle takes them all on vacation sometimes, but they don't appreciate that either. They want to be taken to Thailand or something, but he only takes them to the cold Appalachian mountains, way up in Maine, and puts them through a grueling bootcamp. It's for their own good of course. Engineers sit more than ever these days. If they don't give their body a little shock every once in a while to remind it who works for whom, one day it's going to give them a big one. They're going to need a friend with a defibrillator to un-shock themselves.

But his co-workers? Zero appreciation. Not that my uncle needs it. He's the kind of guy who can laugh at a joke in a packed auditorium and lose zero volume when no one else laughs. Maybe he gets even louder, who knows.

I don't know my uncle very well is what I'm trying to say.

Then I realized my parents were about to come home, and I was only wearing a loin cloth. I decided I'd better go change. I ran upstairs to my room, flashing my uncle and his wife a little on the way I think, those one-size-fits-all loin cloths have a different standard for "fits."

When I got to my room, it was pitch dark. Then it was slightly less so, because there was a truck pulling into the driveway. That would be my parents. They must have bought a truck on the way home. I turned on the light, because I'd forgotten my night-vision goggles and saw a strange man standing in front of me. I didn't have time to decide whether he was a threat or not, because I punched him in the face.

I think I woke up mid-punch. I guess the shock of seeing a stranger in my room in the safest little town in the country flipped a Rambo switch I didn't know I had. But it also threw me right out of the Matrix and back into the real world, or at least one level up in the simulation. I felt my fist connect with meat and realized I had just punched my wife in the shoulder. We've only been married for a few years so we still sleep in the same bed. We even laugh at each other's jokes sometimes. Huh huh. And now I punch her sometimes, unprovoked.

In the moon's weak light, filtering through the shades alongside the rapt gazes of the sleep voyeurs across the street, I saw my wife turn her head towards me and crack her eyes open.

"What?" she said in a sleepy and indifferent voice, like I'd just gently whispered her name into her ear instead of permanently tattooing my knuckles into her deltoid.

"Nothing," I said. "I just remembered a joke."

But she was already asleep.

So the question is, in light of this new information, should I work out more or less?

Hold on. I forgot to say why it's Clay's and Josh's fault. It's not on principle. It's not because we have some kind of pact where we share the blame for everything. That would be cool, but I can probably find safer partners in that enterprise. Preferably someone in a coma. It's because we're scheduled to meet at the Brooklyn Zoo gym Tuesday night, two days from now, and I woke up at 2AM with the strongest antipathy to the idea. I reached over my wife, grabbed my phone, checked the time and made a mental note: 2AM - strong antipathy to Brooklyn Zoo. I'm a very responsible person.

Then I lay there for thirty minutes, or maybe two hours, tossing and turning and whining to myself about how I was going to have to drive for nearly two hours there, only to have to drive nearly two hours back a few hours later. I really didn't want to do it. Really really. I'm not sure I remember not wanting to do something so strongly in the recent past as I didn't want to do all that driving.

Why had I agreed to it? They're just friends, fuck 'em right? I don't need friends. Sleep is what I need. If scientists had to choose between sleep and friends, they'd pick sleep any day of the week. How long can you survive without friends? No one's successfully tested the upper limit. How long can you survive without sleep? A few days if you're not competing on an international level? QED. That is why the American Heart Association, as of the year 1776, strongly recommends that when faced with the either-or choice of friends vs sleep, you should always choose sleep.

The punching incident came soon after this. Thanks for nothing guys, and see you in Brooklyn. I'll bring the blame game.