Poultry, potties and John's ego....

We're about to see what really makes John's telling his family that they should simply let his hateful comments about them slide because it's 'foolish' to to insist that he consider their feelings before he opens his fat bazoo. This is because we're about a year or so away from his stupidly dropping a twenty-five pound turkey on his foot. We all know that if it had been Elly who'd wound up injured, his whining about having to do for himself would be interspersed with asinine jokes at her expense and about the only time he'd act like a man and sympathize would be under duress. As we're about to see, the merest suggestion that his own suffering is risible makes our hero quite angry. It also makes him act like Michael does when he cannot ride roughshod over Lizzie. As a matter of fact, Dorko spends the next two months acting like a sullen eight year old because he happens to have injured himself getting a turkey that his family is probably still eating because it was too blasted big. Reminders from patients that they hurt as well are as effective at reminding Fathead that he's not the only person who's ever suffered discomfort as Elly's reminding him that she had to carry their children with pretty much no help and absolutely zero sympathy in that they do not work. A few months later, John is forced to retrieve Richard's potty from the Nichols house because the kid has shy bladder syndrome and reacts to the idea of urinating in an unfamiliar receptacle with something approaching sheer terror. Rather than shrug off the kid's problems and the B-and-E beef that he has to tapdance his way out of, Johnny Jumpup growls about the endless horror of the forgettable incident of his explaining himself to the Metro Toronto Police Service. What we can take away from this is that John judges the rightness of a situation by how it effects him. If his feelings are not hurt, no one else should feel hurt ever and if he gets dinged in the least degree, the world just might spin off its axis. This makes him a scoundrel, an egomaniac and a child.