On stoopid flowers and car accidents.

Every so often, we end up dealing with the unsettling realization that Michael tends to think that The World That Is is a show put on for his exclusive benefit. This is why the dumb-ass makes unsettling comments about how wartime footage of people dying should have been in colour so it could entertain him more. The notion that what he sees as the ciphers being blasted to stir his senses because that's what they're there for were people like himself seems very much to elude him because he has an extreme case of what they call the air-gap problem in that if he cannot feel someone else's pain, it is foolish (as well as a real bring-down) to state that it can exist.

This, I should think, is why his world got rocked when it was revealed to him that Anonymous Car Crash Victim (who failed of her sole purpose in life because his story got reduced to a few lines of print) turned out to have been someone he actually knew. While John tried to explain to him that no one is 'just another person' and while it sure looked like it sunk in, it really kind of did not. This is because, well, it's damned hard for Mike to come to any sort of realization that might intimate that to most of the human race, he's "Dark-haired white guy who uses too much hair gel" or "that goof who acts like the same kind of God-damned hillbilly his parents did." He can cope with the destruction of flowers in his way because there are plenty more where they came from. He cannot deal with the idea that outside the charmed circle of the Pattersons' world, he's just another guy.