Foobonia and Points West.

As I've said before, April gets her angry refusal to admit to bitterly envying someone from her parents. John isn't against music as a career because someone left him for someone with the stamina to stick with music lessons and Elly doesn't see John's staff as a harem who yearn to wreck her marriage despite both being the case. The reason that I mention this is that what Elly doesn't know doesn't sustain, delight and reassure her. Said unknown known that should be known is that it's obvious as all Hell to me that the women Elly sees as a harem follow the lead of their mother hen Jean and despise John.

After all, Jean is little more than a walking sitcom cliché in that she's a sassy annoyance who lives to berate the man who signs her pay cheques. She started out thinking that her boss was a louse who'd cheat on a woman she saw as a put-upon and mistreated figure in a heart-beat and pretty much ended that way. Since she arranged his work environment to suit herself, it's quite likely that John's staff see him in the same dim light. Thus do we have the comic irony of Elly seeing the only people on Earth as she'd like to be seen as threats who seek her ruin. Were she to become aware that his staff and her co-workers loathed John beyond mortal comprehension, she would not know whether to be thrilled to have supporters or confused that they don't do what her fears tell her they should.

The interesting thing about watching Elly make huffy comments about the scandalous outfits girls like Martha and April want to leave the house in is that she fails to learn the lesson she should from every time John tells Liz point blank "You aren't leaving the house dressed like that, young lady!!" when she wants to head out wearing the sort of abbreviated outfits that he approves of on girls he's not related to. I've told you why he's averse to remembering or considering the fact that the girls he undresses don't appreciate the favour but instead of talking about his not wanting to feel like the shameful lout he is, I'd like to talk about the blind-eyed moron she is.

This is because she talks about dangerous outfits and lacking the body and the language and simpers about boys who magically found reasons to break dates with her leaving her lost and sad and alone and heartsick and feeling as if she were never going to be married and blames all the wrong people. She blames the popular girls who didn't actually want her to die alone. She blames the mother who always lacked faith in her because she didn't praise her for every little thing she ever did. She blamed evil conflict-causing men for designing clothes that flattered everyone but her. She did not blame the one person who deserved it: Jim Richards, Over-Protective Father.

Y'see, like a lot of English Canadians, Jim had a severe authoritarian streak to his personality. People like him are why French on cereal boxes used to be seen as a Papist plot to undermine the British Empire. People like him went berserk with glee when Trudeau The Elder declared martial law during the October Crisis. Greg is a people like him and moved from his home because his little girl was dating a CREATURE OF DARKNESS and not some boring non-entity who rebelled in unison with other drones who made tame noise about sticking it to the Man because the Man wanted to sell them AC/DC LPs. This means that it's damned obvious to me that anyone with the bad luck to trigger the right-wing loon father Elly idolizes was taken aside and threatened with mayhem if he didn't step off. John passed the test by being even more boring, bland and conventional than Jim himself was. Elly knows nothing of this and never will because she doesn't understand male behaviour and never shall.

The interesting fact about real life is that back in 1991, Aaron was about to set off to university to pursue a career in the television industry. Since following his biological father's career felt like a slap in the face, Lynn chose to ignore that sad reality and awarded Michael the career she appears to have wanted him to pursue and turned him into a writer. The reason that I mention this is that we're about to see the first example of everyone being excessively impressed by very little. The mind that would come up with the phrase "And the living buried the dead" and pass that off as brilliance is about to become so impressive a letter writer that he cows Martha into silence.

This is also why he starts to turn from "sullen, ungrateful asshole who'd sooner drink gasoline than help around the house or get along with his family" into the Elly clone he eventually mutated into. It wouldn't do to depict someone who's pretty much a portrait of the artist as a young idiot with time management troubles as being a pill.

The interesting thing is that we're about two weeks away from yet another reminder that much like Mike himself, Elly can never allow herself to see Martha as a person. Mike looks at the young girl with the freckles and sees a fantasy that varies from the rustic to the pornographic. Elly looks at her and sees any number of things. She sees an object lesson about how children really don't know what love is. She sees the inevitability of having to console her son when puppy love goes sour. She sees a reminder of the pretty girls who somehow magically stole all the boys by doing odd things like 'speaking to them instead of looking at them passively while wearing an expression that suggests gastrointestinal distress instead of romantic interest', 'not shrieking in offence over every little thing', 'cluing in and realizing that Chinnuts put the run on anyone with the most tepid interest in her' and 'not chasing after people who are already spoken for'. She sees someone eager to allow herself to engage in premarital sex because 'everyone' knows that everyone is having more fun than her. What she doesn't and can't and won't see is a young girl being jerked around by the worst boyfriend ever who's finally starting to question having to waste her life on a moron who doesn't seem to see her as real.

This is why Lynn can never bring herself to allow Martha and her family to meet the Pattersons. It's one thing for Mike to scratch his empty head and wonder why a great gal like her came from a family that's pretty much identical to his own. It would be quite another for people to put Elly on the spot and ask her what the Hell she has against Martha in the first place and why she can never, ever allow herself to get to know her. The danger that I see is that Martha appears to be the same threat Gordon and Ted represent: the danger of getting Mike to finally realize that Elly hasn't got two clues to rub together so shouldn't really be taken seriously no matter how hard she hits. Allowing himself to be the author she didn't have the stamina or brains to be is a pathetic waste of his time so should have been rejected so girls who'd point that out stand as a symbol of something else: getting a vain twit to realize that she's just a wanna-be.

Of course, the real reason that Molly and Gayle had to not be present after 1988 has a lot to do with Lynn's decision to casually and witlessly destroy Lawrence, Connie and Greg by not coming up with a Long-Lost Uncle Aesop to be outed. What had to happen is that Connie stood around squawking hysterically about Lawrence talking crazy because she saw her future plans of grandkids and proving herself to her parents dissolving like a child's sand castle. What had to happen was Greg taking the side of the woman he married instead of the boy he barely interacted with. The reason that I mention this is that Molly and Gayle could not be present for a very simple reason.....and it's not to speak for Lawrence. Being Lawrence's advocate is the simplistic explanation for their necessary absence. They could not be there because if they did, they would speak against a succubus-wife whose Chianti-red hair came out of a bottle.

This is because it's damned obvious that Greg's rescue fantasies had overridden trivial things like his common sense and common decency. He left Thunder Bay not just to 'save' his oldest daughter from a 'disciple of darkness' who most likely grew up to stump for Premier Ford in the last provincial election but also to make Hotpants happy by allowing her more access to her friend Elly. He kicked Lawrence to the curb not because he brought shame on the family but to keep Connie from freaking out.....which explained his craven apology to the boy once she calmed the Hell down and decided to be the better person by 'enduring her perverted disappointment of a son'. Had they been there, they would have reminded Greg that Connie keeps him from thinking straight and he might have started to do the smart thing instead of the keep Connie calm thing.

As we know, John is currently in a lot of deserved-for-the-wrong-reasons trouble with Jean and pretty much half of the librarians because of his refusal to be specific about what crazy woman he was 'getting away' from and why he got an apartment. Lynn's need to (as she puts it) 'rant' about the sort of small-town gossip machines she was glad to get away from when she moved to Ontario has gotten him into a fix wherein they go from believing that his response to having to change a diaper was to run off with some hussy they're never going to meet to believing that he came crawling back to Elly because his mistress wasn't interested in being a housewife. He deserves to be treated like garbage for jerking Fiona around because she didn't wanna be Alice from Brady Bunch so I don't mind that and don't especially care if the truth ever comes out.

The problem is trying to figure out how it is Jean is connected to Elly's co-workers. Lynn never seems to have troubled herself with questions like that because the source of a story (in this case, her still resenting having her doings discussed behind her back) matters more to her than how that'd work in the setting she created. This means that we're starting to see a sort of cartoon scenario in which people magically seem to know something about the Patterson family because they act as if they know that they're the central characters. This makes little sense in the real-world setting that we were used to because the real answer to "Did you hear that Dr Patterson and his wife were separated for a month?" is "Who cares?"

As you know, I think that one of the most irritating things Michael has ever said to Liz was "absence makes the heart go wander" when she was desperate for reassurance about her long-distance pseudo-relationship with Paul. The problem is that Mike might actually know what he was talking about owing to his experiences this summer.

This is because hindsight tends to make the postal clerk who told Mike to read between the lines about how she didn't write might be on to something after all. This is because not having Mike in her face all the time might have opened Martha's eyes to all the stuff she had to give up for him: her friends, her peace of mind, her self-esteem and all of the other things that get in the way of Mike achieving the end game of seeing her naked. People tried to let him down easy by telling him that she can't find the words to express herself but it might be that what she wants to express is that she's starting to feel less like a person and more like an accessory to his ego. When even he himself starts to question an excuse that flatters him, it might be a warning sign that he's slowly being friend-zoned.

One of the more irritating things about the current arc is Lynn's choice to make Elly more readily sympathetic by making her look like someone with anterograde amnesia and behave as if her pregnancy with April is her first rodeo. The obsessive need to get things right the third first time tends to make her lose focus on something that never seemed to matter in the first place: the emotional needs of the people she lives with. As we've seen, Liz is using the new baby as an excuse to cover up the old habits of inattentiveness, lack of focus and pea-brained, importuning stupidity.

What is less focused on is the fact that John's mid-life crisis has collided with having to be a father later in life than he'd expected and made things less fun. John isn't expected to want to have fun or enjoy life to any great extent. John is expected to meekly sign on to whatever stupid thing Elly might want and stumble on in a zombie-like state until he gets to finally achieve his well-earned reward of sweet, sweet Death. John is especially not allowed to remark on the fact that all he's done in life is trade what's making him miserable. This is because he comes equipped with a receptionist who, despite being seen by Elly as a potential threat to her marriage, sees herself as Elly's agent. Her refusal to trust her employer to stay faithful means that John is about to shoot off his mouth and make Jean into Marital Fidelity Cop looking for signs that he wants to duck out of the marriage.

This is accomplished by his being one of the key players in what Roger Ebert called "an idiot plot" because he makes an ambiguous comment about being rid of a crazy woman. Since Jean has a memory, she assumes (somewhat reasonably) that John is talking about Elly herself because of all the times John has (very reasonably) questioned Elly's sanity. The reason that it's the sort of idiot every-plot that animated every He'sThree's Company ever is that, as Ebert said, the whole thing would have been resolved properly if someone had said the right thing (like "I can't believe that you did that to poor Elly!!! I thought you were a good person!!") and thus deflected blame by turning her stupidity into John's untrustworthiness. What happens is that everyone will die never knowing what each other think. The reason that this is not a bigger problem is that crap like that goes on all of the time.

One of the things that goes almost unmentioned during the current arc is John's reluctance as regards Elly's vague desire to give the new child a trendy name. John would rather give Baby Whatever something along the lines of Old Testament Name Elderly Relative Patterson because he is used to names formulated thusly and it didn't hurt him no how. What he loses sight of and would probably discount anyway is the fact that Mike doesn't actually like his first name. It irritates him no end that Mom and Dad simply decided to name him for some old guy he never met who's probably the same kind of stuffy old coot who had the ability to smile and have fun surgically removed that they are.

The reason that I mention this is that I remember a Letter From John from before Robin was born that had him chortle about how great it would be if Mike and Deanna were to name him something weird and ridiculous to make him stand out in a crowd. It might not have actually taken place but it is rather plausible given what we know of John. If his grandchildren were to be named Metric Ennui and Drone Mandible Patterson, the weird little kid in him would have an itch scratched and he would not have to answer to the parents and stuffy old relatives back in Manitoba whose judgement he fears more than life itself. Also, he could have all the fun of running around feeling wounded because CHEE!!, kids are sensitive for no reason!!

The interesting thing about next Thursday's strip is that we preface a comment about how greedy and bad children are with Mike accusing everyone left, right and center of grabbing onto a Walkman that turned out to be lost in the morass created by his belief that a floor is a large, low-hanging shelf that someone not him must sort out if that someone actually really loved him best. Mike could admit that his life would be far easier if he were to do his chores because it would be easier to find what he wants or needs but that would go against a principle he's abided by ever since he overheard Mom say that while she loves him, she doesn't like him very much: "Never admit that Elly is right about anything where she might hear it lest she win."

This is because (as I have said far too many times before) Mike wants to bogart the victim mentality in the family and if Elly can be proven right about an issue, it's not because she knows a little more or is trying to help him in her own stupid, stumbling and self-serving way, it's because she wants to punish him for being able to do things she never was able to like laugh, smile or enjoy life (and, no, she wasn't a kid once herself, Uncle Phil said she came out of the womb angry and upset all the time). What's more, he would never play the sort of cruel and self-serving mindgames on his children....which is probably why if we were to look behind the curtain of the Pattersons of the late 2010s, we'd see Meredith grousing because somehow, Dad was actually right about something in order to mess up her life.