The Hulk Beats Up A Monk

"Don't you walk away from me, John!" screamed the comically short blonde in the Raiders jersey. "John!" But John had already turned the corner and entered into the side-door of the building. He was taller than her with close cut salt and pepper hair and a slight slouch. He said nothing.

I crossed the street to be closer to them and hear the fight continue, a rubbernecker to this accident in progress. I caught snippets of the squat woman's tirade, as John emerged from the other side of the building:

"What have I ever done to you?! ... You have deceived me again! ... Get in my truck! Get in my truck and make me believe your lies!"

She mentioned something about Charlie also that I couldn't catch.

John got in the truck, in the driver's seat, surprisingly, and the woman continued yelling as she closed the cabin door, muffling her rage.

I walked past the parking lot to see a mentally disabled man on a bicycle riding away from the building, approaching the screaming truck, still in its parking space.

"Don't go near there, Timmy!" said a man dressed in blue, also coming out of the building. "Timmy! I'm watching, don't go over there!"

Quickly three other workers collected outside the building talking about what had happened inside and how Timmy had started biting his own knuckle until it bled.

Said a man with evenly buzzed graying hair that covered the back of his neck, "You mean I missed everything? Sh*t!"

"You didn't miss nothing," said the guy who had been talking to Timmy.

Curious, I told them I had heard some kind of shouting and asked them what had happened. The guy who had been talking to Timmy stiffened.

"We took care of it," he said.

"Well, that's good," I said.

"The wife of our mailroom guy has problems," said the youngest of the four men, and the only one not dressed in blue. "She's not allowed here."

"We took care of it," the first man repeated.

"Probably," said another.

"Yeah," laughed the youngest. "Probably."

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God, so many questions. Okay, here's the main one: why are they still married? In the very excellent book, "Predictably Irrational," Dan Ariely writes about the endowment effect, which basically says that once you assume possession of something, you overvalue it. I'm not saying that our spouses are our property necessarily, but we definitely claim ownership of our relationships. So we might have in this case, a ridiculous overvaluing of a terrible relationship.

In yet another excellent book, Nudge, the authors write about the power of defaults in shaping our behavior. For example, a large percentage of cellphones are still set to the default ringtone. Is this because that's the best, most sonically-pleasing ringtone? No, it's just because it takes effort to change and no effort to keep it as is. In a marriage, the default is to stay in the marriage, even when it looks like an all-around terrible idea.

What was the fight about? Whose fault was it? It's pretty easy to take John's side, mainly because he wasn't the one screaming. And it's fair to say that blondie's done this before, since she managed to get herself banned from her husband's workplace. But let's assume for a second that she's not a purely evil harpy or a crazy witch. Then she must be screaming the things she's screaming for some kind of reason.

Right away we can see that the louder Blondie gets the more John shuts down. But this spiral of doom feeds off itself. Blondie becomes explosive and John becomes inert, so Blondie gets even louder and John tries to seal himself off in his own little cone of silence. Blondie wants John to react, to acknowledge her... if John reacted like Timmy did, by biting himself until he bled, he'd at least show Blondie that he still knew she existed. This exchange has got to be the most f'd up one I've ever seen between two people (or animals, really), but we'd be missing the point if we just discounted Blondie as simply "bat sh*t crazy."

If we continue down the line of reasoning that Blondie isn't inherently psycho then it might just be that they never learned how to properly fight. I have a lot of respect for the idea of fighting cleanly. Take boxing for example. People wear gloves, you stop at 12 rounds, and don't hit each other in the junk. If you play by the rules (this isn't 'Nam, Smokey) you can come out of the whole thing not too much worse for wear and with a healthy respect for your former adversary.

But with Blondie and John, since neither of them were able to engage each other on equal terms we now have the verbal equivalent of a fight between The Hulk and a nonviolent Buddhist Monk.

Problems.

No matter what, the Hulk looks like a dick for beating up a monk (who's really easy to knock around) and the monk gets to preserve his nonviolent ideals, but dies in the process. Looks like a draw to me, which is why Blondie and John have enough rematches to get her banned from his work, their friends' houses, and all public establishments with breakable flatware.

So please, gentle readers, if you feel the need to open up a can of verbal whoopass on someone you love, make sure you both fight fair. Stick to the issue at hand, stay away from the shots to the groin, and do your best get both of you to come out cleanly. The goal isn't to kill the other person, just to end the fight in a way that both of you can still respect and love one another... without wanting to kill each other again too soon after.

And now for your main event!

In the blue corner, wearing ripped, purple shorts, and weighing in at 1,040 pounds .... the Hulk! And in the red corner, wearing a traditionally wrapped orange bedsheet, and tipping the scales at a post hunger-strike weight of 105 pounds... a monk!

Round 1... fight!