Foobonia and Points West.

In about two weeks time, we're about to see a reminder of a nasty mental defect John has that hampers his life and makes him a less effective parent: his fear of his children's bad moods. For a very silly and stupid reason that has a lot to do with the crazy woman he married, he can't allow his children to be upset for any reason whatsoever because the way he behaves makes a nasty person like me assume that we're looking at a weakling who thinks that a mopey child wants to usher in an era of chaos, anarchy, ruin and also making him get out of his damned easy chair and worrying about someone else for a change.

I ascribe this appalling and stupid tendency to three irritating and pants-on-head stupid root causes. The first is his exaggerated dread of what his people back in Manitoba will think of him. As we're about to see, John lives in terror of disappointing the people back home and most likely thinks that he'll be persona non grata if his kids aren't in danger of overloading the pleasure centres of their brain. The second is, of course, his being ruined by the neurotic mess he married. She's spent most of her life blaming everything on him so he assumes that every bad mood he encounters must be directed at him.

Those pale in comparison to the stupid, stupid, STUPID logical leap that he needs to make in order to avoid a painful realization. Said brain fart is, of course, thinking "I provide this child with everything she could ever need. Why is she ungrateful and moody?" when confronted with sadness because the boomer idiot in him can't see being upset any other way than throwing a fit because Daddy isn't giving her enough. It is pointless to try to explain to him that not everything is about him because it leads to his having to admit that not only is he not the only person who matters to him, he is too vain and silly and scared to find out who these other people are. He prides himself on thinking that he knows everything and a realization that he hasn't a clue is not something he cares to face.

Every so often, I remind myself of the children's book "Farley Follows His Nose" and the vision of the family that we see. While most people would probably assume that John's at work totally unaware that Farley went walk-about or why he did so, it's rather easy to envision a world in which he's physically absent instead of just emotionally absent. For all of this talk about providing his children with his idea of what a home is, he tends to forget a key component of the sort of home he wants them to have: a father.

This is because he seems to think that his part is to provide material things and impose penalties on people who transgress against his vision of perfection by, I don't know, not finding yard work to be the pleasurable be-all and end-all of human existence or grinning mindlessly to make him feel good or stuff. He simply cannot be asked to get to know the people in his family or care about their concerns because his ability to identify with the concerns of others isn't especially flexible or extensive. He can worry about a man like himself because he can spare the mental effort to do so but he's pretty much too lazy to think about what it's like to be Elly or the kids and too envious of a fictitious advantage they have to want to.

An upcoming strip in which John only admits that restricting Elly's mobility is a serious problem because it raises the possibility that he might have to get off of his fucking ass and actually drive his kids around and even risk actually having to attend one of their events is, perhaps, one of the first reminders that John would prefer it very much if he were what he called a neutral bystander (and what decent people call a mentally absent moral bankrupt) in his children's lives. He doesn't want to know what their problems are, he doesn't want to care about their feelings but he wants them to respect his useless advice which comes from a place of self-satisfied ignorance.

The problem with this philosophy is that he's not only making an ugly and contemptible fool of himself (which is what he's really God-damned good at, by the way) when he sulks because he wants to tell himself that, say, driving April to her telethon is having his dignity subtracted and being made his child's servant, he's also making his life worse. If he'd have pulled the stick out of his fat ass and gotten to know his children as people instead of as Space Nazis trying to eat his brain or whatever, he'd have have a far happier and better life. The problem is that the big goof is blind to that because he's a moron.