Foobonia and Points West.

As we know, Lynn seems to have wanted Gordon to be a Very Bad Influence Indeed on Michael because she can't quite own up to the fact that the moron doesn't need help doing stupid things that aren't in his best interests. The irritating thing is having to remember that aside from his being a mad scientist this coming week, all he really does is reveal that Elly is an ignorant and panicky idiot who doesn't like or trust children much. From assuming sight unseen that a video arcade would HAVE to be a seedy dive to caterwauling about his putting Mike up to do something she convinced herself meant his arrest by getting him to dress up like what pasty little suburban kids thought a punk rocker was, Elly clearly doesn't trust her children not to embarrass her because she cannot allow herself to live in a world where they'd choose wisely without her constant input.

The problem is that this sort of contrast can't last in a world where Mike is a too-damned-young romantic lead. It's fine for what Lynn sees as an easily-influence innocent to be led astray by a hooligan-by-definition because his dad makes less than John does. It's not fine for what she wants us to see as an in-over-his-head kid (only stunted snarker-troll fungus people see him as a repellent failure as a boyfriend) to have the old Gordon as a wingman. What she wants is a clear buffoon to contrast against Mike's confusion and earnestness. The problem is that she doesn't understand men so Gordon ends up looking like the protagonist and Mike the moron stumblebum.

The interesting thing about Elly and John's panicky bleating as regards how Michael is suddenly a hostile stranger who disrepects them and wants to usher in a world where he makes his own rules and so on and so forth is that they not only look like panicky morons pissing themselves because he's starting to think for himself, they're also obsessed with his hairstyle.

The reason that I mention this is that the extra-annoying Christmas At Exile Farm arc sort of gives the game away. We have Mike desperately trying to look like this cool dude only to have either Elly or Bev lecture him about how no one is there to impress when Bev musses his hair up like he's some little kid. If he's got his hair slicked up in order to attract girls with dangerous body language and impress his hoodlum friends, he hates the family and wants to destroy goodness and niceness. If he lets his hair get arranged in the rightful and mother-respecting Evil Linus Van Pelt look, he's Elly's baby who loves her and kindless and all the love in her great big heart. This leads us to what I'm starting to call a Foob Axiom:

Axiom 3a: John and Elly hate like fire the idea that their children have people who influence their lives that are not them. According to John and Elly, they or people they trust should be the only people on Earth their kids listen to and respect.

The interesting thing about the irritating arc that we've put behind us is having to remember that later on, Mike actually behaves as if he had been grounded when they punish him. Oh, he complains about the unfairness of the punishment imposed on him but he does accept the punishment instead of trying to duck it like he does here. Before 1988, he was so out of control that he actually was a burden to Elly. He wouldn't go next door when she wasn't home, he seemed bent on trying to chase Lizzie away and he does horrible things like climb up trees in hopes of seeing if the girl next door is wearing a bra or not. Afterward, he stopped looking like Evil Linus Van Pelt and started acting like Generic Inoffensive Clueless Dumb Guy From The Sticks Number Two. This leaves us asking what external force came and changed him from an antisocial monster into the dullard wondering why his parents want to give him a hard time by having him around to call irresponsible. I think I have the answer and she has the body and the language Elly Richards never allowed herself to have.

The reason I think that Martha did Michael the world of good is that she was the first person he seems to have met that actually seemed to want to really have him around. While he'd later go on to cast her as yet another person who only pretended to like him so she could bust his ass and mock him for thinking he deserved to belong anywhere, the plain fact is that before her, I cannot think of a cast member who was really grateful that Michael Patterson is part of their life. Elly's undiagnosed post-partum depression and hatred of conflict means that she loves her son but cannot resist telling him that she cannot like him, John is looking for instant obedience and Lizzie seems to not much care for him. What escapes Elly and the others is that the reason Mike doesn't much like the people he's with is that up until the fire messed with his brains, he saw the Pattermanse as a penitentiary filled with cruel guards that lived to treat him like a shitheel. What could they expect of him other than rebellion? Since Martha allowed him to dream of escape from the tyranny of filial piety, his behaviour improved because he felt an emotion he hadn't before: hope.

As we know, we sort of play musical friends in a week or so when Lynn wants to drop an anvil on us as concerns how shabbily adults behave and how we should grow out of petty, stupid behaviour. This is because the same Paula who's going to wave her piercings under Lizzie's nose to make her feel bad delivers a big, stupid ultimatum about how there can be only one best friend in her life. This led Lynn to change Melody from a snob to a sort of ditzy little thing who didn't realize how intimidating she was or something.

The reason that I mention this is that it all turns out to not matter much in the end. Just as we don't get the standard moment where a Patterchild Learns Something From A Special Teacher until Elly turns into a blubbering heap when Liz chooses to talk to Miss Edwards rather than have her loving mother leap down her throat and turn everything into a referendum about herself, both Paula and Melody might as well have dropped off of the face of the Earth when May comes around thereby leaving Lizzie in the state Lynn seems to have decided was best for her: virtually friendless and confused as to why that might be. We have to wait a year or so for Lynn to realize that since Lizzie and Dawn are the same age, it makes sense that they hang out together. Before that, we had Mike in his pack and Lizzie being alone and sad and confused as to where she fit in. We also had Mike envying someone who's worse off because all he can see is the special treatment lavished on her for not fitting in well and not the not fitting in well. Doing that would possibly lead to his realizing that he's not the victim of all victims surpassing all others and that would be just awful.

As we saw, yesterday's reprint had Lizzie totally fail at pouring juice because she didn't understand the core concept. We also saw her fail at sharpening her pencil because she obsessively ground it down to a nub to get it razor sharp. This tells us that we're starting to develop the second part of her middle years identity: the little girl who's rather incompetent when asked to do things because she isn't really paying attention.

She doesn't get better with age, sadly. In a few years, we'll see her run for her life from an accidentally drenched Elly because she's tasked with washing the house and forgets to check if all the windows are closed and deal with her asking Mommy if unintentionally bursting the bag of milk because she doesn't pay attention to that either means that she has to move. We also have to see Elly stand around screaming when she forgets where she put her glasses and so on and so forth. This means that the pattern is:

1) Lizzie is asked to do something.
2) Through inattention, she makes a mess of things.
3) Elly stands around screaming about how everything bad happens to her.
4) No one explains what Lizzie did wrong so she can do better next time.
5) No one teaches Lizzie to do things the right way.
6) Things are forgotten and Lizzie learns the wrong lesson.
7) Return to Step One.

This means that Lizzie's oblivious nature is a direct side-effect of her mother being an angry idiot who loves martyrdom and pissing away teachable moments because the stupid cow thinks that's asking too much of her. Eventually, she'll be perplexed that Liz goes to a stranger for advice instead of listening to her guano.

The odd thing about Michael is that when he finally does join the Middle Years, he changes from Evil Linus Van Pelt into a stumbling fool who can always be counted on to make a mess of things owing to his being transfixed by the stupid idea that everyone he knows is lying in wait for the chance to make a big fool out of him and laugh at him for daring to want to be happy. This, of course, is what happens when the grandiose get anxious; they assume that everyone envies their greatness and yearns to destroy them to feel good about their own miserable and pointless lives. The problem is that Mike is rock freaking stupid, not aware of what's going on in the background and not especially inclined to find out what's going on.

While it's easy to pick on him for stupidly shoving Martha away because he's too dumb to know what he's doing, not realizing or caring that her idiot friends think that her wanting to have a private life somehow magically means that she thinks she's better than they are, not realizing that her parents don't like him and especially not noticing that his stupidly taking her for granted is a turn-off is too damned easy. What we need to remind ourselves is that Lawrence's outing is a direct consequence of his being a jackass.

This is because the fatuous git thought that Lawrence was pretending to be 'normal' all those years for the sole purpose of making Mike Patterson look stupid. Lawrence's justified fear of how his parents might react and his need to mitigate their insane over-reaction by waiting until it could not hurt him meant nothing to Stupidhead because he'd been lied to by a lying liar who lied and things had to be made right fast. The end result is that Connie and Greg get to parade around boasting about how great they are tolerating that miserable deviant and Mike has lost a friend due to his own stupid vanity and criminal, infantile idiocy. The other end result is that Mike thinks that he's a great friend to Lawrence who has his back because grandiose twits don't learn things.

I'd like to get back to the strip we actually have by talking about an issue dear to my heart: Lynn's default assumption that a mere woman could never really hurt a big, tough man and its pal the idea that a man who could get hurt by a woman isn't really a man at all. In the Early Years, this manifested itself in an angry Elly hurling a coffee cup at the back of John's head when he said something that displeased her. This, of course, continues on for years but is accompanied by something else as the Middle and Later Years arrive: Elizabeth firing off and punching Michael in the stomach when he won't shut his fat yap.

When Liz starts getting mood swings, what generally happens is that Mike will be an abrasive, patronizing and belittling dick come to remind Liz that she should just stand around and let a complete plum duff be a hateful shit to her because she's his sister and thus doesn't deserve to be treated like a human being. The end result is that Dumb-ass ends up doubling over because either Lady Haymaker or the Duchess of Waling violently interface with his midsection. In the real world, his dad would standing around drooling and being spoon-fed because coffee cups are heavy and the effect of repetitive concussions is to turn the brain into a sponge. In the real world, he'd be all bruised and coughing up blood because the end result of gut punches is to turn one's insides into sausage meat. In the real world, there isn't one law of physics for big strong men and another for weak little wifeys. Then again, Lynn isn't interested in the real results of violence. We'll see that when Liz clocks Eric over the head with a frying pan and he doesn't end up with debilitating brain damage that leaves him speaking like a stroke victim.

To get back to where I was the other day, it seems that the Pattersons aren't the only people who have a sort of hand-over effect now that the Middle Years are upon us. Phil also gets to transition from one state to the next. Before this arc, he was sort of a foil for Elly in that he called into question her need to get married before she had the least idea who she actually was. The need to fix his life seems, at least to me, to be a foreshadowing of how she'd later try to steer the children to careers she wanted herself to have in order to prove to herself that she hadn't totally screwed her life up by marrying the first man who'd dated her more than twice.

He's still sort of a foil for her in that he's really starting to resent how she's hijacking decisions he and Georgia should be allowed to make on their own. My guess is that if someone with a ponytail had not reassured Georgia that Phil's concerns were all just noise because he never knew what was good for him, Phil wouldn't have made that noise about going down in flames and making a huge mistake. Every decision he made until he left town was colored by his fear that somehow, Elly would take over because, despite what their parents might think, she thinks that she gets to boss him around forever because she won't let go of the past and she won't blame her mother for the way things rolled out.

Now that we're pretty much at the home stretch of the Boobs In The Woods arc, let's remind ourselves that Lynn thinks of John's returning home as heralding in the transition from the Early to Middle Years of the strip. The problem is that we're still dealing with stuff that happened in the Early Years and will for a while yet.

While I have mentioned that we have yet to have Elly's ultimately misguided campaign to save the Old Town Hall sputter to its "Oh woe is me! My voice will NEVER be heard!" conclusion, it behooves me to remind you that we have yet to see the back end of Elly's career as a poet. What seems to happen is she rage-quits in sheer frustration because a bored and stupid Mike scribbled all over the magazine it appeared in because his hands had nothing useful to occupy them.

Also, we're still in the middle of the whole "Let's get Ted married off so that Connie can return home in triumph" thing that Lynn is using so as to scratch her inane itch to be writing a soap opera. Connie is still in Thunder Bay, Lawrence is still being a spoiled brat who hates his mother's happiness because he selfishly refuses to instantly adapt to whatever people around him do like he's some kind of damned machine, Mike is still acting like some kind of freak pining away for things to be normal and Ted is still living in a fool's paradise because he won't grow up.

What this means is that while most of the strip is in the Middle Years, the Early Years have yet to fully end. We'll see the same damned thing in the Later Years when stupid decisions the Pattersons made before the collective mental failure that resulted in April's almost drowning haunt them for years afterwards.

As we know, Lynn likes to use the camping trip as a sort of boundary between the eras of the strip. This seems rather silly owing to the fact that she still had to get the whole "Elly gets made a fool of protesting the town hall" arc out of the way first. This means that the true beginning of what Lynn is pleased to call the middle years occurs when a reluctant Phil wrings his hands about the possibility of his getting married.

As we see, most of his bleating and wailing that isn't due to his irritating habit of thinking that he's being tricked into doing something just because he feels uncomfortable and has also lost control of the situattion is due to his whining that he can't get married because he still has the ability to enjoy life and is still grateful to be alive when he gets up in the morning. Only when he's too old and miserable to actually function can he bite the bullet and get married because his life will be one of unrelieved misery anyway.

This, of course, is because he has a distorted view of what family life is because the only married couple he actually ever associated with that any of us know of are John and Elly. This means that if he'd had a wider sample base, he'd have realized that Elly is both a statistical outlier and also still the same yowling stick-in-the-mud playing the martyr card she's been since Jim and Marian had a child who they let win all the time despite what her lying eyes told her. The end result is that he wouldn't be making ignorant yappity-yap about setting down roots only after he's gone to seed because he'd have been exposed to competent, confident happy people who actually know how to live their lives.