Foobonia and Points West.

Let's assume that in the real course of events, John does not end up getting decapitated by a falling sign because Lynn needs to make Rod suffer for stealing her money and doing to her what she did to Doug. Given that he seems to take marginally better care of himself than Elly does, we could be looking at an extended period in which he's alone in the world. Without the distraction of children and without the need to posture and hide behind tradition, he might actually have time to think about the woman he married and what she really wanted instead of screaming about what his fears made it look like she wanted.

Reflection will finally start to make him realize that she actually did feel trapped in their home and that marriage and motherhood didn't instantly make her the horror freak Suzie Homemaker the flickering blue parent promised him. It would also make him see that if her life was an exercise in frustration and unfairness that someone in her life was responsible and that someone was him and his insatiable desires. What this means is that the only thing that will make him see the anxious and messed-up woman he actually married instead of the person he thought he deserved is for her to be a small pile of ground-up combustion fragments in a ceramic box some place. It's not much but hey, at least she's finally going to get what she wants. She just can't be alive to enjoy it.

As I reminded you all yesterday, Lizzie's real problem with the education process is that she tends to conflate accountability with being cut out of the herd owing to the fact that her first grade teacher was a whooping nitwit who witlessly paraded the poor child in front of the class as a bad child and lazy child and stupid child. This turned what could have been an average student into a sullen jerk who thought that her teachers were all finks trying to get her into trouble because they hated her. The reason for this is that, as I've said before, Liz has always had a vague dread of being by herself because her earliest memories consist of no one protecting her from a looming shape of malice and entitlement.

While she was part-way salvaged by exposure to competence in a wheelchair, I'm afraid nothing could be done for the looming shape himself and nothing really can be done so long as Elly lives. Most of his behaviour is rather sadly explicable because he wants to do something that's futile, self-destructive and antisocial: trying to get the attention of a woman who can't give it and whose opinion is the most irritating kind of worthless: the self-pitying sort. We're not only dealing with someone who can't help but think that any choice he makes that doesn't mesh with her idea of the good means that he hates her and wants to destroy her, we're also dealing with a deluded zombie who can't praise him lest he be destroyed.

What I expect will happen is that after Elly finally meets her cremator, the shock and anger that no longer being able to finally get the love that was never really forthcoming will probably finally get Mike to see that the mother he wanted to have look at him wasn't actually worth the effort because she refused to be impressed by anything he did that didn't allow her to live through him. This means that we're probably in for his taking a refresher math course so he can help the kids with homework. It also means that he'll finally really get along with his fellow victims Liz and April. All that has to happen for Mike to have a happy ending and to love school is to end Elly.