Foobonia and Points West.

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.

About ten or so years from now, Elly uses April as a go-between to passive-aggressive John into buying her a new ride because her old beater finally gives up the ghost. While she trades up to a sports utility vehicle and John a sportier version of a station wagon, he'd floated an idea that irritated the Hell out of Elly worse than simply buying a new sports car while leaving her with said old heap: getting three cars. His idea was to get her the Mormon Assault Vehicle, himself a station wagon for hauling stuff and a sports car for when he wanted to have a bit of fun. This was a non-starter because all she saw was two adults, three cars and an open temptation for the Martian to do something stupid.

The reason that I mention this is that this is the solution to the artificial dilemma willed upon us by Lynn's having trouble dealing with great big numbers. While the Lynn of 1987 knew that she made more than Rod, she didn't know how much more so she had no idea what they could both afford; this meant that her inability to quite cope with large figures means that a stupid compromise is made in which John is stuck with a some-weather car and the certainty of conflict with Elly.

The reason that I mentioned Clark Griswold yesterday is for a very good reason; emulating him would have made for a less irritating and baffling series of strips for the summer of 1987. Instead of having Mike turn into the Monster Of The Week from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and instead of having John fish through a dumpster like the dumbest raccoon ever, we could have watched Elly make a mess of things by insisting on driving up to Phil and Georgia's wedding.

In this new scenario, we could establish the fact that Georgia simply HAD to have the wedding in her home town of Montréal and we could have Elly insist on avoiding all the fuss of flying by simply driving there. The same person who would go on to drag the kids to the damned farm over the holidays to make them love John's side of the family would see no downside to doing that and every sort of upside of avoiding taking them on a plane that would somehow be bad because she's too stupid to be able to fly with children. What we would then have is a husband who makes irritating chatter about traffic, a brother and sister-in-law who annoy her with their pointless blathering about the rehearsal she did perfectly well without and confused children who don't know what's going on because Elly blew off something necessary because she's too God-damned otherworldly to have figured out how weddings actually work.

The end result is that it's somehow going to be magically John's fault that there's road construction because otherwise, it's Elly's improvidence and fear of airports that delayed them, Georgia's insistence on making someone who isn't even getting married her boss the reason for all the craziness and tension and the children's stupidity and need to humiliate her that makes a bored, tired and cranky Elizabeth stand around crying when she doesn't know what to do or where to go. She has to blame them because it cannot be her fault....until Jim comes along and tells her it is.

The problem with basing the strip on what probably actually happened in Lynn's real life is, sadly, rather obvious: all the confusion, panic, animosity and ill-feelings would have an unapproved source. That's because the people telling Elly that she was doing something stupid for a silly reason would be proven right and she'd have to live with the knowledge that she isn't all that much smarter than John is.

As we know, one of the interesting side effects of Connie's temporary departure from the strip is that no one is nagging Elly to get off of her rump and exercise any longer. It'll take another two years before we see strips that feature Elly wheezing for breath because she has to run the impossible distance of TWO HUNDRED YARDS!!! or me wanting to haul off and punch Mike's head clean off for mocking her. What's even more interesting is who Elly blames for her letting herself get "fat" and unmotivated: Connie. It's not her own fault for not having the stamina to get out there and get fit, it's Connie's for not nagging her.

The reason that I mention this is that the reason Mike gives for putting things off to the last minute that isn't his copying Elly's own reluctance to do and thus delaying doing things that she herself hates is that Elly didn't come in to the room and nag him about things like she's supposed to. The interesting thing about that is that, as you could probably guess and as I have mentioned before, is that Elly doesn't really want to see how much she has in common with her son when that common factor is a bad habit. You see, admitting that he learned to procrastinate, be a disorganized mess and beg the question via a fall guy from her means that not only does she have to worry about following the bad example she thinks she set as a child, she has to worry about his following the bad example she actually does set in the here and now.

As I type this, I do so in the knowledge that it has been nineteen years since the oh-so-preventable death of Farley the dog. It has also been damned near seven years since Deanna added this horrifying little passage to her first post-Housnening retcon:

We've also got safety latches on the workshop and the garage, and we made very sure that the gate in the back fence is secure - we don't have a "Farley" around to rescue Robin or Merrie from the ravine.

What this means is that despite the obvious need to finally do the right thing and take child-proofing seriously, moron Elly continued to let something important slide out of what looked like sheer brainless laziness and the stupid belief that exposing her child to the lethal consequences of her parents' stupidity would teach her better than childproofing ever could. While those are good and valid reasons for Elly being a smug, inept bonehead, her brainlessness doesn't stop there. The reason I think that there's a third reason comes to us from one of those stupid podcasts Lynn has on her website. In it, she stated in all seriousness that Farley HAD to get loose and impregnate Sera because any new dog the Pattersons might end up owning must have a connection to Farley because if they just picked up a stray from Animal Control, their last connection to Thelma Baird would be gone. This is nuts because by the time April damned near got killed, Thelma Baird was long dead and all but forgotten by most of the readers and most of the cast. This tells me that one of the first things Elly commented on when she encountered a gate that prevented any old idiot from coming in and smashing up model trains or children from rushing out into traffic was how unwelcoming that looked. After all, did Deanna stop to think about how poor old Mrs Baird had arthritis and would have trouble letting herself in?

That's right. I went there and I brought stuff back. The real reason why Elly never saw fit to really latch the gate is that she's so stupid, she wanted to be a good host to a friend years after the woman's relatives made that final decision "casket or urn." The disturbing end result is that poor April got into all sorts of trouble she shouldn't have gotten into because of the sheer witless inertia of her brainless failure of a mother.