Foobonia and Points West.

Sadly, the addition of dramatic tension to the wedding ceremony by the annoying masterstroke of having John get stuck in a dumpster like an idiot because he thinks he's beating the system is well within character. After all, when confronted with the fact that he has a mental block against remembering or really valuing sentimental occasions, idiot John defends himself by talking up what a practical-minded man he is. No sir, you won't catch him getting all starry-eyed and weepy about greeting card holidays like Valentines or making a big display about anniversaries, not him. That sort of baffling display is something that silly women value because they're not rational.

Of course, the Problem with a capital P is that John is actually a clueless, physically awkward dolt with an overweening addiction to shortcuts that make his life worse. It is the English genius to be smugly proud of the sort of moronic cock-up that cannot be in his best interests that John sees as a master-stroke of practicality. There used to be a British sitcom called 'Last of the Summer Wine' that celebrated the tendency of deluded, self-important nincompoops like John to have grand visions of success that, well, fall to itty bitty bits when colliding with the laws of physics and probability.

The reason that he never learns not to do stupid things or take idiotic short-cuts comes from not only not having the sense to understand what he did wrong but also from the sort of mutton-headed pride that views having his son know that he used to be a kid like himself once as a horrible humiliation. John can't admit that he's a thumb-fingered imbecile that swamps canoes, gets stuck in dumpsters and makes windy noise about highway exits because he's too stupid to know what he's bad at because doing so would force him to realize that his self-image is wrong.

Now, to expand upon this theme, we have to start where all the tension and confusion and anger in the family begins. As a very early strip in which John's horrible mood infects the family because he let a very little thing become a great big thing because he's essentially a sulking infant who throws temper fits when things don't go his way so it's quite clear that whatever false concerns and blind spots distort his vision of reality are at the root of the chaos that we see in the strip.

To understand why it is that John, who sees himself as a bulwark against chaos, is actually the cause of it, we must first remember who he is at his core: a happy-go-lucky imbecile whose primary pursuit is to live from day to day without dealing with anything upsetting and not having much asked of him. To once again plagiarize Marvel's Kingpin, he wants to do as little as possible and he wants a big cookie for doing it and he doesn't like it when people imply that he doesn't deserve his big cookie because he hasn't actually earned it and it shouldn't come for free because he's got a penis.

This irritating tendency is what's behind his resistance to remodeling the kitchen. While he looks like a selfish jerk who not only plays with ego-gratifying toys at his family's expense, he finds their pain even sweeter, the plain truth is that what Elly is doing wrong by pointing out that the twenty-five year old crap stove is WHY his meals are dyspepsia-producing slop is challenging his right to live a life so tedious and monotonous that he won't notice it when he dies either. Anyone who wants to yank him out of his armchair, anyone who wants to make him feel emotions at all, anyone who challenges his perceptions is clearly an agent of chaos because why else would they want him to feel things or go to any sort of trouble. Don't they know he gets his big cookie without having to do stuff for it?

What makes it all the more annoying is that he thinks that everyone else should want to live a life of no jolts, no surprises, no challenges to his authority but have been twisted by hormones or bad attitudes or both because the idea of living like a wind-up toy can only appeal to a frightened little man who's scared of life is not one frightened little John can contemplate without seeing himself for the gutless sap he is.

To continue merrily on with my idea for "April: the series", it's fairly irritating to have to remember that I could probably spend all day thinking up ways to make the Patterson family into a franchise while there's a storage shed someplace in the Vancouver area loaded with all the stuff Lynn can't sell owing to her being really somewhat bad at what came so easily to her mentor. Why, I can even think up a kid's lit series based on John while she still acts as if he had no past before magically appearing in Elly's favourite spot at the library. John, I should think, is seen in the same light as the main characters in the Britcom "Last Of The Summer Wine" are seen by the ladies' tea circle: a baffling idiot who needs to be weaned away from his mother. The idea of caring about his past and his needs is quite unnecessary so we aren't allowed to know much about him.

This is because Lynn accidentally tells us certain things about John despite her obsessive need to keep him a mystifying blank that opposes Elly for no clear reason other than being male. As by way of example, we have to contend with the fact that John has a black cloud over his head during this current arc because of two reasons that, oddly enough, actually seem to be one reason. This is because while Elly loves to stroll down Memory Lane to when life seemed all brand new, John looks back on his past in regret. He doesn't like being reminded of the awkward wonk he used to be and all the times that girls didn't buy what he was selling. The embarrassment, the rejection, the lack of control of his life, all of those things are things he wants buried so he can feel like King Of Big Fucking Deal Mountain. It's just common sense to assume that someone who loves to wield authority like a bludgeon no matter what the cost is someone who feels as if he has to make up for a life where he was the victim of all victims surpassing all others because he was told to know his place.

What this means is that a series based on the John of the late sixties would be a sort of Cancon Wimpy Kid that had a basically unsympathetic male leader blundering his way through life because he didn't want to understand certain things that he couldn't reasonably be expected to escape. Said knowns not wanted known are "Look here, Nitwit....I'm damned tired working in that mine all day and I can't be Robert Fricking Young so don't get your ass in an uproar if your mom takes point with the decision making", "It might not be fun but since I'm laid up, you're kind of the man of the house so quitcher bitching how life ain't fun" and "Well, it's no wonder Patsy dumped you if you spend all your time yapping about trains." This means that the same parents that he lauds as instilling good values in him would be seen as Communist Mutants From Mars for trying to get a sullen dickwad to acquaint himself with common sense.

I think you'll agree that John, he's got it pretty sweet. He's got a great job, he's got a wife willing to put up with his bullshit, he's got great kids and he's pretty much got at least two men convinced that he's the bee's knees, the ladybug's elbows and the erogenous zones of other insects. It's just too bad that he doesn't ever seem to realize this or be grateful for it. The irritating thing that endures past the Early Years is the sad fact that John lives a life most people bitterly envy but it can't fill an ill-defined void that seems to come from his hatred of being weak and defenseless. His wife has emotional needs he doesn't understand or like, his children can't ever seem to respect him enough, his patients insist on being human and no one understands how terrible it is to be him.

The end result of his being a big girl's blouse is that he needs to have something around to relieve him from the crushing burden of wealth, power and influence. Said thing is a mindlessly happy smile on Liz's face to tell him that there's hope for the future. As long as Lizzie is uncritically optimistic and sees life as a world of rainbows and unicorn farts, her daddy can have the strength to face a wife who has a baffling need for a life beyond the paradise he built to shelter her from the horrible stress he endures, patients who angrily compare him to a mechanic gapping out a spark plug and the emptiness not even his toys can fill.

I can't sympathize with him because no one should ask that of another person. It was never up to Lizzie to laugh and say that her problems were fake and she should just walk off alienation and confusion to make her asshole dad feel better. I also feel nothing but contempt for him because the only person who actually ever needed a war zone speech is the asshole giving them.

Now that it's been more or less eight years since the Fauxposal, I'd like to take a look at something else that the Pattersons aren't especially curious about: how Therese sees them as a group and why they do the irritating and hurtful things they do. As we know, she first became aware of the Patterson family when Anthony talked about his harmless meeting with an old friend. The more he tried to defend this blonde person, the more Liz looked like one of the predatory women that her dad cheated on her mom with. Imagine her horror on discovering that someone playing the part of the over-grown high school girl in order to cozen men into supporting her really was someone who was just fifteen and a bit. The obvious implication of his longing for someone who looked as if she'd gotten lost on her way to Home Room is that Anthony sort of wanted a passive doll to play house with. My guess is that by now, she's sort of figured out what made Liz that way: wanting to please her parents. I also think that she sort of pities Liz sometimes because that's a mug's game.

While she has met Elly and her mother's issues and her need to have things just so in order to prevent Marian from emerging from the grave and calling her a failure and a disappointment, it would seem that Elly is only half of the picture. Someone she's never met so far as I'm aware of would have to loom large to Therese as being the driving force behind the destruction of her marriage. From Anthony's boss singing the praises of the family that has his nuts in a vice to Liz's brother making arch comments that reveal that he's made of Mommy Issues, it occurs to her that pretty much every person who'd ever made her feel like an evil interloper who should be ashamed of herself for daring to take their teal-and-lavender utopia away is an extension of the will of Liz's manipulative jerk dad who seems to think that Milborough is Westeros. She's never met John face to face but she realizes that by now, the man clearly hates the idea that she can come in and mess up his screw-ball vision of the true and good. If she's been eating her Wheaties, she might even realize that someone who poses as a commanding figure is little more than something I grew up referring to as a great big sookie baby whining when people try to take his ba-ba away from him.

One of the most distressing strips that I can think of is the one that starts with thin-skinned dullard John not being able to handle a petty frustration with anything like grace and ends with Lizzie attacking her doll because she has no one to pass the poison down to. The distressing thing is not that John can't put on his big boy pants and not turn into a sulking buffoon who rages witlessly at the inoffensive but that said behaviour is not seen as being essentially bad. Even In the latter days, we're supposed to laugh off John being a humorless choad who reacts to frustration and mockery with a display of petty violence that he should have outgrown long ago.

The reason for us having to nod and say that we have to give Angry!Daddy a wide berth because Angry!Daddy can't possibly be told to shut his fool mouth and shove his toxic, petulant and childish rage up his nether end is, I should think, related to Lynn's disdain for Rod's constant and pointless complaining about how John is portrayed. It seems to me that when Rod said something about kindly toning down John's character traits because it has an effect Lynn didn't feel existed, she interpreted his comments to mean that he couldn't laugh at the very funny thing of a man who acts like a spoiled brat because he had no sense of humor and made up a crazy lie about how random strangers wouldn't believe that John was a cartoon no matter how sincere he was to hurt her feelings. This caused her to amplify how churlish John got to punish Rod for not knowing a great joke when he saw it. As time went on, the endgame became akin to watching some poor sap trying to pull a Chinese finger trap apart in that the more he struggled, the angrier and douchier John got.