Domestic

Charlie Sheen’s been arrested again.

Much to my disappointment, he wasn’t tased. I love it when that shit happens to people. I’m kind of low class that way.

Sheen was arrested for domestic battery, and he’s been nicked for that particular misdeed in the past as well.

Domestic battery, assault, violence, whatever you want to call it is a very sad crime to me. Taking an open hand or a closed fist or a tire-iron or a table-lamp to your mate, your spouse, your partner is such a disgusting, deplorable, denigrating act that I find it difficult to fathom how people even get up the nerve to do it in the first place. And the second. And the eighth. And the fiftieth.

It’s a pretty counterintuitive thing at best. You love someone, and then you lay some smack down on them because you found that your collar stays are missing or because they were out until 2am or because there isn’t any more microwavable bacon and Pathmark is closed. Is it really possible to smash somebody across the face and love them at the same time?

Hmm… I don’t think so.

Some people who hit their spouses like to refer to it as “a moment of weakness.” I kind of don’t think I agree with that. If you hit someone, then that’s a lifetime’s supply of weakness-- fuck the moment. If I ever hit my wife, and I never will, I hope that she would kill me because, after that, I’m just no good anymore. I wouldn’t be worth anything. Nothing. There is no way to come back from that in my view. There is no way to atone or repair or regain shattered trust. Smacking your wife across the face is no different than having an affair, in that it degrades and assaults and attacks not only the person but the sanctity of what you have entered into-- a partnership, a marriage, a union.

And yet, thousands and thousands and thousands of people smack the shit out of each other, and these unhealthy, dangerous, deadly relationships continue until progressively more regrettable things happen, or the victim grows some balls and leaves. Oh, he only hits me when he's drunk. He really loves me. It was just that one time. He didn't really mean it. I was asking for it.

Whatever.

My parents didn’t fight in front of us. We never saw it and we never heard it. They disagreed about things, and they talked their disagreements out at the dining room table or whilst my father was doing stomach-crunches on the living room floor, but there was no fighting. No raised or strained voices, no banging fists on the table and no clenched, set jaws. I know they fought, like when my father dumped all their life’s savings into his failing business in a last ditch effort to save it without telling my mother-- I have a funny feeling they fought then-- but we were spared all of that. As a result, my sisters and I were treated to an environment that was totally bereft of even the slightest hint of a threat of domestic anger or violence.

And that’s how I want my children to grow up.

My wife and I are pretty good at fighting fair. We’re able to talk most things out, and we are never, ever angry at each other for very long. I can’t have it. I’ve never gone to bed angry at her, and I hope she’s never gone to bed angry at me. Well, maybe when I’m snoring excessively, but I can’t help that short of surgery, so I think she understands. Just as I’ve often said I’d sooner dip my penis in a jar of acid than cheat on my wife, I’d rather stick both my hands into jars of hunny and then into a rabid Winnie the Pooh’s mouth before I’d ever dream of hitting her.

There could be no greater affront to the world.

Tonight, my wife and my sister-in-law and I were driving to Massachusetts to visit with friends and we were behind a RAV-4 with a portable cooler completely obstructing its license plate.

“I’ll bet, if you were a cop, you’d pull that guy over-- even on Christmas Day-- you’d love doing stuff like that,” my wife said.

And she’s right. I would. Because I’m a by-the-book, black-and-white kind of guy. But I wouldn’t love anything more than having the chance to take down some cowardly piece of shit who hurt someone he claimed to love.