Foobonia and Points West.

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.

As I've said a lot of times before, moral lessons fail to stick in the Foobiverse because Lynn loves telling the same stories over and over again. Elly can't learn to appreciate what she has and who she lives with because her function is to run around screaming in baffled horror when faced with trivia. Mike can't learn that other people's feelings are real even if he cannot feel them because he always has to learn that. Liz can't learn that the frown on her face is the only ugly thing about it because she needs to learn that she is supposedly loved and wanted despite our never seeing any hint that this is the case.

This lack of learning extends, of course, to John. The thing that he is constantly rediscovering is something Orwell said long ago:

The real question is whether it is still normal for a school child to live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination.

This is, of course, because he pointlessly idealizes childhood as being a sort of carefree romp wherein fear, anxiety and hatred are simply words in a dictionary. He clearly means well when he says stupid things like "It doesn't matter if you don't have many friends at school because you're part of a family" but he cannot penetrate Orwell's under-water world because he doesn't remember the past clearly. He has, as I've said before, forgotten what it's like to be a small child filled with insane fears because the memory makes him feel weak and is thus to be avoided. This makes him a less effective father than he would otherwise be owing to his belief that he is being asked to sit around weeping hours on end about something the person complaining also knows to be inconsequential owing to his not heeding Orwell's advice about how useless it is to remonstrate children about how 'they should know better' when not knowing better is kind of a kid's thing.

One of the more telling arcs coming up in the near future is the one wherein Elly tries to lecture Farley into not ripping apart garbage bags to get to the table scraps she and the other idiots don't realize they trained him to crave. What happens is that Michael comes along, suggests building a sort of box to put the garbage bags in so that the dog can't get at them only to turn around, remove them to turn the thing into a play fort and have the garbage strewn about anyway because after they were done, he and Gordon forgot to put the bags back in the thing.

The reason that I mention this is that attention must be paid to John's reaction to the affirmative public response to his craftsmanship is. A normal person would be delighted to discover that he has a lucrative sideline in the making. It should make John a lot happier that he has a profitable hobby. He isn't delighted, though. He feels as if he's been diminished somehow because he thinks that he's thought of as a backyard carpenter first and a dentist second. This is because he seems to not notice something about himself: he's Elly's kind and doesn't even realize that he too suffers from a bottomless appetite for approved-of approval and recognition. This is also possibly why in two years' time, he behaves as if Elly just yelled "HAIL HYDRA!!!!" when she suggested naming April something modern instead of something that would allow him to suck up to his relatives.

The irritating thing about the on-going battle to get Mike to muck out his bedroom is that John and Elly don't actually really enforce the punishment they imposed on him. As we saw, Michael only gets his allowance when he picks stuff up. This is a good start but, sadly, there are two flaws to their scheme. The first flaw is that they don't quite go far enough and didn't forbid him from going to the local shops even if he were to somehow earn the money to buy things. That would have been the first thing my parents did in that instance and their inability to simply bar him from buying stuff and make that stick seems like a damaging oversight.

The second is sort of wrapped up in the first and has to do with stopping him from earning money in another way. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to them that he'd try to bum money off of Lizzie because it's obvious that he thinks that the only thing stopping him from buying a Goo Bar is not having enough cash because that's the only thing stopping him from doing so. If he knew that he'd get into trouble for pawning Teddy or going to the store, he might actually pick stuff up but their penalty is weak and he learned nothing.

As we know, Lynn seems to have the need to keep certain characters apart. As an example, Connie and Elly's parents have never been in the same room that I've noticed and we never seemed to see Liz and Deanna talk to one another much without it turning into a lecture of some sort. The reason that I mention this is that I've made the following observations.

First off, when the family was lamenting Jim' stroke, John's brain was blank. April wanted her grandpa back, Elly and Phil wanted their dad back, Iris wanted her husband back and John....probably wanted to get a bite to eat but was hampered by the sad people talking about the old dude who just upped and stroked out like old people did.

We also have to remember that John fears having to contemplate his own mortality. We have a rejected strip that has him wish to ignore the problem because it's too depressing and a later strip that suggests that if Elly becomes a burden, he might simply smother her for the insurance money.

Finally, we have to remember the fact that John has never sat down and actually talked to Jim about anything that I've noticed. He might have been under his son-in-law's roof for a while but they never compared notes because John feared being told off by someone who could back up his discontent.

This leads us to the inevitable hypothesis as regards how John sees his father-in-law's stroke: "What happened to Elly's dad is a shame but not something that should affect me as long as he has people taking care of him."

While it's tempting to come to the conclusion that if John isn't trying to game the system by taking his trash directly to the city dump, we're dealing with the fumble-fingeredness that makes him misplace car keys rake the form of forgetting that it was pick-up day, it's not really as simple as him being a nitwit who wants to stink up the car because his priorities are wrong. What's going on is that for reasons that escape him currently, no sooner does he put the trash on the curb of a morning than it is spread all over the place. Surely, he thinks, the wife will put up with a little discomfort in order to outsmart raccoons making a mess of things.

The problem with this logic is that the loutish animal that eats garbage is Farley The Canine Punching Bag. For some reason that isn't the fact that owing to Elly's angry braying making him think that a can of Alpo is a can of being hollered at at random, he prefers their food waste to the can that's a punishment because she yells at him. This necessitates his having to build a real solution to the trash problem and also to his being a surly dick about it because the Kid is smarter than he is.

The interesting thing about the Middle Years is that we're going to establish who the John of that era actually is in about six months time. Before now, he was a loutish ogre who begrudged Elly time away from her duty of being the domestic angel she couldn't be if she lived to be a million. What's starting to emerge now is the goofy man-child who loves to tear-arse around in sports cars in order to feel alive. While Elly frets about the impracticality of a vehicle that cannot ferry children and groceries, there's something far stupider that she should really be worried about.

Said really stupid thing is how it is John justifies splurging on ego-gratifying toys for himself while pleading desperately for anyone to agree with him that Elly is going to burden their grandchildren with the expense of improving their house. As I've said before, John makes two sets of financial calculations when planning for the future. When he spends money on himself, he makes as much as a dentist makes. When he spends money that will mostly benefit other people, he makes as much as his coal miner father makes. He isn't aware that he's doing it but as Neil Gallagher says, 99.9% of the people are as thick as pig-shit so there's that to consider. We are NOT dealing with a family that understands why it does what it does and it shows.

As we all know, we know next to nothing about Georgia's family. We have a vague idea that they're from Montreal, we know that she's got an uncle Bert, we know that she's got an unnamed friend who finds Lizzie to be something of a trial but other than that, she seems to have fallen out of the sky for the sole purpose of being a stand-in for a sister-in-law Lynn seems to not know very well. It occurs to me that the wedding explains why it is that her family doesn't make much of an effort to get to know the Patterson family.

This is because they have to deal with the bizarre fact that for some stupid reason, Phil's idiot brother in law seemed to be more worried about taking a load of garbage to a dump than the wedding. Not only that, the stupid fool dropped his watch in a dumpster and waded in trash to fish it out because that seemed to be more important than a silly little thing like being on time for something important to anyone else. I can see them being appalled that this fool is so impractical and so closed-off in his thinking that he couldn't wait until after the reception to take stuff to the dump. This is not a person to get to know. This is a person to whom the only correct response to is "smile politely, move away slowly and don't make eye contact." Simply put, we never get to know these people because idiot John witlessly scared them away being 'practical'.

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.

I think that the most interesting strip in this whole sequence of John taking his little trip so he can leave Elly in the lurch arrives after he gets home. As Mike tells Gordo, Darryl and Brian what happened to him, Elly tells them not to disturb John because he's bed-ridden for some reason. When Mike asks what ails him, our boy thought-bubbles that mostly, he's suffering from some sort of humiliation. A normal person would probably assume that his forgetting elementary boating safety because he and Phil succumbed to panic might be what he's feeling low about.

That does sort of make sense because he and Phil wound up looking like two dumb jerks from the city who didn't know what they were doing and feeling the burn of having the locals deride them for their epic failure. As far as I know, neither of them go back there because the idea of being laughed at for being two dumb motherhubbards who should have hired a competent guide instead of witlessly risking their lives makes returning there untenable.

This talk of 'guides' is, of course, not the only instance in which their fragile little egos make the whole thing into a humiliation they can never live down. This is because before things started, someone who wasn't supposed to know what she was talking about did while at the same time revealing that someone who was didn't. Since one of the things he wanted to get away from was Elly being right about his heading for a fall, John simply couldn't face the neighbors for weeks because he fears and hates being laughed at when he makes a fool of himself. Eventually, he finds a way of getting away from it all without going anywhere when he gets that damned train fixation. For now, though, he's going to be "Panicky Idiot Number Two."